I had the opportunity to watch recycling in San Jose at work, the bins are dumped onto a assembly line, and workers- with gloves, asks, etc, quickly sort them out, and those items are recycled. So, I have watched it being done.
Interesting note. Red cross and similar disaster blankets are made from recycled fabric.
I remember that glass recycling would be profitable if only clear glass was recycled however that would be too hard to understand so all glass was accepted which made it basically worthless. That was decades ago, but it seems like the idea of recycling is overstripping the reality of it.
We have three cans - trash, recyclables and a green can for yard waste and food scraps. I know the last one gets recycled since we can pick up two bags of compost made from it every spring. We compost vegetable peelings and coffee grounds in our compost bin, so that gets recycled also.
The city claims that the waste stream to landfill has been reduced a lot since they started recycling, and they issue advice on how not to screw up the stream (no shredded paper in your recycling, for instance) so I can only believe it is mostly happening.
No longer true, in fact slag glass is worth while for countertops, bottles and decorative rocks.
Plastic is the current issue. Aluminum is easy to recycle, and so is glass- but dont send in broken glass or window glass, please.
It depends on where you are. Any recyclables have a value at some end-user point. If the closest point to you is far enough away that freight eats up all the intrinsic value of the material and so much more besides that landfilling is cheaper, in the ground it goes.
In general, metals are almost always economically recyclable almost anywhere. Cardboard is recyclable most of the time, in most places. Paper not as consistently, but at present is probably being recycled most places.
Plastics have seen a drastic change. Odds are, you have seen or will soon see something from your municipality saying only plastics with a ”1” “2” or “5” ( or just one or 2 of these) symbol on them are to be recycled. Most likely, after a transition phase, your municipality will be charged a penalty if compliance ( not including other plastics) is not sufficient (very, very high).
Glass depends on location. For many places, recycling only really works economically if the various types of glass are separated. Typically that means recycling at a drop-off location rather than curbside.
At present, if you have one bin for all recyclables, my bet would be that there is cursory separation (alum etc). and landfilling of much of what you put in there. Note that this was not so even a couple years ago, and may be again not so in a few years.
I am not an expert on this subject but I had a recent briefing/discussion with a representative of a national waste hauler and processor. The company works with recycling facilities wherever they are and owns and operates garbage pickups and landfills nationwide.
The answer is simple: it depends.
Recycling waste costs money. The end user pays the waste collector a fee to collect and haul off material to a recycling facility. The two questions that matter are whether the fee covers the cost of recycling the material and whether the contract allows the waste collector to opt out of recycling the material if the recycling cost is higher than the fees collected. Your town could read the fine print on their contract to see what the answer to the second question is. But they are unlikely to get right back to you as the point of recycling is to make the end user feel better and when possible actually recycle material. If they come back and say the contract allows for the material to be dumped in a landfill when the fees aren’t sufficient, then popular support for the program will go down. And if the net recycling cost ever drops below the fees collected and recycling becomes possible, there will be less popular support and less material being recycled. Better for everyone to continue as if recycling actually works so that participation remains high. After all, if everyone stopped recycling because it was all going to the landfill-then it would all go to the landfill. As others have pointed out, recycling does not pay for itself and hasn’t for decades (obviously this varied a lot by date and material but in general recycling has been uneconomic for a long time). China subsidized the industry for a while, but they got tired (it became uneconomic) of processing other peoples garbage.
Oh, and by the way, the town is very unlikely to be able to find out if the waste is actually being recycled regardless of who they ask. It is in no one’s interest to accurately answer the question. Their waste hauler has a contract with the recycling facility to accept (for a fee) the waste. But I do not think any recycling facility is obligated to recycle the material they receive. The hauler may “recycle” the material because they deliver it to the facility and pay the fee. Whether the material is actually recycled or simply routed to the landfill by the facility as unprocessable waste is a day by day by load decision.
I dont see how putting things into a landfill itself isnt a form of “recycling”.
I’ve been to the local landfill. Trucks come in and garbage is dumped then smashed around and spread out. Bulldozers and such create mounds of it. Over time as the mounds get large enough soil is put on top and grass planted. So over time you create new land. Now granted the soil isnt stable or strong enough to support building houses on but it becomes nice parkland.
And really be honest. Everything eventually ends in a landfill. Oh you can reuse a water bottle a hundred times but eventually it gets worn out and you have to throw it away. Yes, you can turn plastics into something else but again, that eventually gets thrown away.
Most products come from the ground anyways. Even plastics and wood.
So hasnt it in a way been “recycled”?
I guess it’s my time and energy on the front end, rinsing out, removing paper labels, etc. Why go through all that if it doesn’t matter on the back end?
Removing labels? If I had to do that I wouldn’t recycle anything.
Unless you are landfilling bodies of water you are not adding any acreage to the existing amount of land on this planet by landfilling. You could say you are raising the elevation of existing land.
Do we recycle to save energy? If so, has anyone worked out the energy equations? What I mean is… fossil fuels are burned in the truck that picks up the recyclable goods, and then more fossil fuels are burned sorting it, processing it, more transportation, etc. Could it possible the energy expended to transport and process the stuff is actually greater greater than the energy saved at the end?
Unless you are moving truly extreme distances, for sure not the case on metals.
I just read an account somewhere about plastics being burned illegally in Malaysia, IIRC. They take in recycles from other countries and burn them rather than actually recycling.
Japan tacks a recycle charge onto certain products for disposing of things such as cars, air conditioners and TVs. It seems like a logical step.
The environmentalists are losing their credibility on this big time. Thirty years ago when I was a kid we were all told that we HAD to recycle because it saved the earth and would save money on garbage bills and that the landfills were filling up fast!
Now we have recycling surcharges and it seems that most of it is going into the landfill anyways. It indeed seems that we were scammed.
About 7 years ago I was working maintenance on a facility where we had these trash/recycleables containers which were labeled like “trash”, “paper”, “plastics”. But the truth is we tossed all into the same dumpsters.
Crafterman above mentioned energy cost is right on. For example the cost to recycle paper requires lots of energy and chemicals.
Now I do think we ought to consider burning more, especially paper and cardboard. I mean its wood isnt it? These incinerators can also be made to create energy. So trash to electricity seems to be a better idea than trying to recycle.
That is true. You are basically creating new hills.
I dont know where to find the information but you would be amazed at the amount of waste that a landfill can take. It’s somewhere along the lines of 10 acres can take 50 years of waste from something like 100,000 residents or something. So like 100 acres can take the waste of like a million people.
Well to be honest, recycling is more of a hands on/ feel good type of thing. But your right in that we should be more honest with kids and tell them the truth that for example, while at school they are separating waste, it really goes back into the same landfill. You can compost food waste but then, unless you have a garden, what do you do with it?
Now we can do things like eating off of plates that are washed as opposed to paper or plastic disposable ones.
I have no idea whether your trash hauler is recycling. I think the answer is “maybe”.
My town dump separates everything, and does a lot of recycling. They also publish the numbers in detail. As of recently:
[ul]
[li]They make money on aluminum and steel[/li][li]They used to have a buyer for the color-separated glass, but now they sell it for a very low price to a company that uses it as a filler in concrete. But that’s still a small income, not a disposal cost.[/li][li]They sell the kind of plastic milk cartons are made of for a small profit.[/li](And they’ve increased its value by describing the look of the plastic and what sorts of containers it will be, rather than relying on people reading the numbers.)
[li]They dispose of scrap paper for less than the cost of landfilling trash.[/li][li]They dispose of other plastics for hmm, I don’t remember, probably about the same cost as landfill.[/li][/ul]
No, it’s not. Got a cite? Some is, when it cant be recycled, and in some places they have a crappy system, but I watched them do it, and a lot is recycled. Plastic can be made into sweaters quite nicely.
This article shows that a lot is still being recycled, even tho some have been hit by the change from China:
I have two pairs of Rothy flats, made from recycled water bottles. They are a bit pricey so I got them for Christmas.