My town only recycles metal/aluminum. There is a private business that handles metal but no city recycling. The closest place that recycles all material is one or one and one half hours away. The town that is one and half hours away is a little bit of a better option because it is a little bit bigger city and has more stores and other resources/activities. (Albany GA, population 76,185 vs Columbus GA, population 292,795 people. The town I live in is Americus GA, about 30,000 people). I have a SUV (the car was given to me, I can’t afford to buy a car) so I can easily take a lot of materials if I do make the long trip to the next town.
If I don’t make that long trip, what can I do with the plastic, paper and cardboard? If I make a trip once a month and only have room in the SUV for half the materials, which ones are the most crucial to recycle, for the sake of the environment?
I’d like to set up collection bins at the local Wal-Mart, the one place everyone in town is definitely going to go to. Then once a week or once a month someone could take all of those materials to the town that recycles everything. But, would it cost me more in gas to drive than I would get from the recycling center? Can you trade in all recyclables for cash like you can with cans and bottles? I’d really like to get a recycling program started in this city but that seems like a long term project.
If you’re making the trip expressly to bring the cardboard/paper/plastics/whatever to the recycling center, I doubt the energy expended in the journey (gasoline, etc.) is offset by the benefit of recycling those goods. But if you were already traveling to the town with the recycling center and brought the goods along, it might make sense.
Glass and aluminum seem to be the only materials that can get a non-trivial amount of money for. Everything else gets you only pennies, if anything, if they’ll even take it. So if you recycle other stuff, you’re only doing it to save the earth, and not to pay for your gas let alone make a profit.
If you’ve ever noticed homeless people digging through dumpsters for recyclable stuff, they only take aluminum cans and glass. For purposes of getting some money, everything else is worthless.
Like you suggest, when I lived way out in the boondocks, I let it all pile up and then took it all in a big batch when I was going into town anyway.
But for glass, isn’t that only in states that have a bottle bill? That is, a state-mandated deposit on beverage containers. Since the OP can’t recycle them in his hometown, I expect Georgia doesn’t have that.
My understanding is that recycling glass does not save very much energy. Especially if the glass has to be sorted for color. It takes about as much energy to melt glass as it does to melt sand.
In the old days (up until around 1970), glass bottles could be returned for deposit without a bottle bill. But in those days, the bottles were not melted down, but rather just washed and reused. They don’t do that any more.
ISTM that glass bottles get a reasonable (for fairly small values of “reasonable”) amount of money, even without any bottle deposit to be returned.
Plastic seems to be different. Without a bottle deposit, you get very very little back for plastic. In California, some plastic bottles (but only some!) require a deposit that you can theoretically get back, which is typically 5 or 10 cents, and you could never get anything like that back if it weren’t for the deposit.
Energy usage is only one component of whether something is sustainable. Sand mining is not without its own environmental impact - quite a lot of sand is mined in ecologically-sensitive areas - beaches, sandbars, back-dunes, dredged from the seabed… Minimizing that impact by recycling is itself a worthy goal even if the energy costs were higher for recycling (which they’re not)
The scrap prices for properly sorted and pelleted glass are higher. But this type of high-quality glass is almost impossible to get from post-consumer recycling.
Profitability doesn’t really equate to sustainability.
And they can be highly variable depending on where and how the glass is recycled. Most glass at my local recycler, for instance, is sorted (initially by hand!) before being melted down, and the price fetched by brown and especially clear glass makes this profitable, even though green is marginal and the mixed unsortables are at a loss, apparently.
Robert, if you wish to make the effort, that is wonderful. But consider your effort may be better spent continuing to get the town or even a bunch of people or perhaps a community business such as the mentioned Walmart to assist in some way. Your single effort is in general inefficient and energy intensive. But your efforts also may make a statement with others, which may help turn public opinion.
My own opinion is trust that we are moving in that direction, as that is evident, but that also takes time. Trying to do it too soon is a lot of effort to get to where we would have gotten to anyway.
Also consider the effectiveness of early recycling and think of the balance that must be between humanity and mother earth. For it to be successful, which includes high natural compliance, it really must fit in to human society. Having multiple bins stacked in houses and outside and days to pick up certain items which must be remembered and referenced just is not a very workable solution for humanity. It may work for some, but not for all and never will.
Something like single stream recycling, and hopefully eventually single source for everything, is ultimately more in balance with humanity and mother earth where people will naturally recycle plus better recovery rates of reusable materials. These are the trends of recycling we should strive towards, not based on guilt, and not based on fear of fines, but based on humanity has to live in harmony with mother earth with each one being who they are.
Thank You. Islder gave me a link to a place in town but I think it maybe only collects trash and scrap. If it doesn’t take recycling I was planning on doing it as you said, as a group project…