My friend said that supposedly New York City is going to stop recycling because it is “not cost effective”. This sounds absolutely ludicrous to me. Is there any claim to her story?
They have already limited recycling. Only metal and paper can be recycled; glass and plastic go in the regular garbage.
Yup, that’s exactly what mayor Bloomberg has decreed. The only recycling that’s going on now is paper and metal. Plastic and glass recycling havev stopped in the city.
Supposedly this is a temporary measure, until they can work out better ways to market the gathered glass and plastic materials to the people who recycle these. My guess is that there will be no effort to change until some of the states taking New York’s landfill waste start charging more for the pleasure.
mischievous
Apparently there’s virtually no local market either for recycled glass or plastic, so recycling those wasn’t cost-effective. And it’s not at all clear that recycling paper and metal is all that helpful, either - recycling means more garbage trucks (theoretically this woudl be avoidable, but the reality is otherwise) and they’re pretty bad polluters themselves, nevermind the energy and labor costs.
I was pretty religious about separating my trash, but as John Tierney pointed out in the Times Magazine a few years ago, civic religion is about all recycling’s good for: it makes you feel like you’re doing something, even if it may be mostly counterproductive.
The previous posters hinted at the issue, but I’ll come right out and tell you the “dirty little secret” of NYC recycling: most, if not all, of the sorted plastic and glass went right in the landfill with the other trash. Saying that plastic and glass recycling “isn’t cost-effective” sort of implies that we shipped the stuff to the recycling plants at a break-even cost or at a loss. Nuh-uh. It went right in the trash pile along with the coffee grounds and the stained M.C. Hammer pants.
Won’t Touch Those.