According to this article from Environmental News Network (ENN), New York City decided to stop the recycling programs for plastic and glass, which are now to be mixed with regular trash, because it is too expensive to collect them in separate trucks.
It is not the first time I hear that only paper and metal give you enough money to pay for their collection. My friend told me that her municipality are stocking plastic and glass in big warehouses until their market price goes up.
Why isn’t recycling of plastic and glass profitable? Because it costs too much to collect them? Because it is cheaper to make containers and bottles from new material? Because landfills aren’t full enough? Or is Bloomberg just stupid?
Many industrial recycling programs are profitable. The reason is that you can easily obtain large volumes of material from a relatively small number of industrial users (that is, a small number of pickup sites) that are fairly pure and require little or no hand-separation.
Residential recycling programs lose money because the costs of picking up and separating the stuff are higher than what it can be sold for, because the cost of new material is so low. If they can’t find anyone to buy it, guess what happens? They dump it into the landfill just the same.
Aluminum is the one standout exception (in the US). Aluminum is rather unique in that most of the cost of producing it is in initial production-- after it is produced it is fairly chemically innert in typical use, and it also has a fairly low melting point for metals making reforming relatively inexpensive. - DougC
The first two answers are both correct. Plastic is cheap, and preparing plastic for recycling is very difficult and expensive. IAA Chemical Engineer, who worked an internship at a recycling outfit, so I’m fairly well versed on this issue. The problem, specifically, is that you have to separate the plastics out according to type. If you just melt down a bunch of random plastic items, you get a big vat of useless crap, good for showing to environmental activists, but not much else.
Those number-in-triangle symbols don’t get the job done, either. They need to separate out hundreds of types of plastic, not seven. You can only give people so many of those little bins before they drag you out into the street and shoot you
All kinds of separation technologies have been explored, with the idea that you could put all of the garbage on a big conveyor belt and somehow mechanically sort out the different material types. Basically, anything that works would cost a fortune, require a huge facility, and would give you an inferior product due to contamination. And then you have laminates, thermosets, glass-filled resins, and other materials that cannot be melted down and re-used even if they could be easily separated.
I don’t know much about glass, but I assume that the same kinds of issues apply.
Basically, we need major technological innovations to occur before you can recycle plastic economically.
Since most plastic from the residential sector comes from food and drink containers and plastic bags, is there a way we could make all those in the same kind of plastic? Like, with a law or something?
Absolutely. We could standardize the containers so that they could be separated by machinery.
Also, why must recycling be "profitable?’ Do we expect police and fire services to be profitable? Of course not. We recycle so that we are not eventually buried in a heap of garbage.
Also, I find it absolutely ironic that the millionaire mayor of New York City, site of the immensely wasteful Wall Street establishment, would quibble over saving perhaps five dollars per person per year.
Bloomberg; sounds like a financial newsletter or something.
“Since most plastic from the residential sector comes from food and drink containers and plastic bags, is there a way we could make all those in the same kind of plastic? Like, with a law or something?”
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That would result in a perverse incentive: the reason there are so many is that manufacturers pick the cheapest one they can find that suits their needs. If all but one were made illegal to use, as the “legal” plastic rose in price and the illegal ones became cheaper, it would become ever more profitable for manufacturers to mislabel and use the illegal plastics.
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"…Also, why must recycling be “profitable?’ Do we expect police and fire services to be profitable? Of course not. We recycle so that we are not eventually buried in a heap of garbage…”
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Firstly, it is necessary to understand the fact that stuff gets thrown away because nobody wants it. If anybody wanted it, they’d offer to pay you for it. Aluminum recycling works because aluminum recyclers do just that. ~ Secondly, residential consumer waste is something less than 5% of all waste. If you had to pay “police and fire service” fees every year, but they told you that only 5% of all police and fire emergencies would be responded to, you’d think it was a crock and you wouldn’t want to pay it. Many peole probably wouldn’t pay it, and wouldn’t bother to ever call the police or fire department.
As for “buried in a heap of garbage”, it isn’t going to happen anytime soon, the actual volume of trash simply is not that great and the places to put it are vast. The problem is artificial, manufactured by environmental groups who would complain if you started dumping trash on the moon. It is easier to open a topless bar in most places in the US that it is to open a landfill. - DougC
The main “reason” for recycling plastic is that it’s not biodegradable.
But nothing that goes into a landfill is biodegradable. Newspapers have lasted for centuries in landfills.
The carpet industry in Georgia has been lobbying to get a bottle deposit law enacted. Not enough of those liter pop bottles are being recycled and they could use more, a lot more, to make carpet for less money. I.e., recycling means profits. (The carpet makers are all switching over to zero waste manufacturing. Why pay the garbagemen $ to haul off stuff they already paid just to get? Several industries have caught on to this but most haven’t. Enron/World Com-type execs hardly care about saving money and cutting costs.) And Georgia is way behind in environmental laws. The government isn’t into it. They are also looking into reclaiming old carpeting.
The price of waste newspaper has recently shot up. Chinese companies have come in and bought it all up. US companies that use it to make cardboard have suddenly found themselves without raw materials and are hurting. That’s right folks, it’s economical to ship last week’s NY Times to China.
Aluminum, as mentioned is also a classic recycling winner.
Most other common goods are region dependent: Glass, steel, etc. If there is good recycling going on and a nearby industry that needs it, it works. (E.g., the carpet makers in N. Georgia and Atlanta pop bottles.)
In order for it to work better takes a large, reliable stream of stuff. A small town in West Nevada can’t do it. A very large city needs to work at it for a while before the industry to buy it gets established. You have to have a decades mentality but the US is stuck in 3 month planning mindset.
I have heard that there are landscape timbers made from old plastic. I would love to buy them but the local home megastores don’t stock them. They last forever and don’t contain arsenic. Great idea but it’s not there yet. Maybe in the next century…
Industrial waste reduction is the big win for now. (Don’t call it recycling!) Next will come reduced packaging. Then consumer recycling.
“I have heard that there are landscape timbers made from old plastic. I would love to buy them but the local home megastores don’t stock them. They last forever and don’t contain arsenic. Great idea but it’s not there yet.”
I have seen both “street furniture” (park and street benches) and railway ties made from plastic “lumber”. Not experimental models, but in regular purchased-off-the-shelf use.
At least some of the above sites had plastic lumber actually for sale, so just because Home Despot isn’t selling plastic lumber to the public doesn’t mean nobody is.
I’ve seen the recycled plastic lumber for sale in Cleveland, but it comes with a few pages of warnings. “Do not allow contact with skin”, and that sort of stuff. The problem is that it’s made from garbage, and who knows what anything was in contact with before it was recycled, so it could be contaminated with all sorts of toxins or germs.
I don’t know how significant the threat is, but someone sure thinks it’s significant, to be slapping on so many warnings.
…but a few years back I heard that NYC residents were paying extra taxes so their trash haulers would seperate the newspapers, glass bottles, plastics for recycling. It turned out that the (Mob owned) trash haulers were just dumping the stuff with the unrecycled waste!
At this stage of the game, recycling plastics is not economical, for reasons cited earlier. It would actually be better to invent plastics that would decay naturally. With glass, it is different-glass can be crushed and used as a cement filler, or remelted and recast.
In the North of Western Australia is a town where the folk decided to recycle their glass even though it would not be profitable to do so and the depot was in Perth a 1000 kms South. So they collected a couple of tonnes of glass and sent it South. The depot threw it away. The reason ? A single broken teacup was ground up with the glass. That was enough contamination to make it unusable. Moving on to landfill - under much of Australia is something called the Great Artesian Basin. You don’t want your toxic plastics leaching down into that, now, do you ? All paths clearly, are fraught with difficulty.
