I see that the original article is from 1995, but is the update very recent? In general is the situation similar today? Is this true in most countries/cities?
I don’t know how it works in other areas, but in Montreal people tend to put nearly anything plastic into their recycling bins (and often not well rinsed). All of this gets dumped into a big truck. So even if an individual is good about including only the acceptable plastic, overall, the truck will still be a mess of stuff that is (according to the article) mostly non-recyclable. I assume therefore that there are human sorters regardless, and that their job is pretty hefty?
A lot can happen on the recycling front in 12 years. I wonder, did the process referred to in the letter to Cecil at the bottom of that column ever catch on?
I gave up on recycling pop bottles. I saved up six large lawn bags full of 1- and 2-liter Mountain Dew bottles and took them down to the local recycling center. Got paid $2.34.
OK, so this thread reminded me of a question that I wanted to ask for a while, regarding recycling:
While my community recycles paper and plastics/cans/glass, it collects both in what is essentially a double (side-by-side) compacting-type garbage truck. The paper goes into the truck on one (the larger) side and everything else goes into the other side.
So what I’m wondering is: If they’re crushing everything before it even gets to the recycling plant, how can they tell what type of plastic it is? The town’s guidelines on its website state that they only take types 1 & 2, but I suspect that most people don’t know this (I didn’t realize it until today while searching for their website).
And regardless of codes or not, wouldn’t crushing everything together make it even more difficult to separate?
I can see why the plastics industry didn’t like the idea of a square symbol. Some molders use a square to denote polycarbonate plastic (Lexan®, for example.) It keeps workers (most of the time) from throwing Lexan in the acrylic regrinder.)
There have been a number of changes in plastics recycling since 1995. The main one is that market values for baled truckload quantities of #1 (PET) and #2 (HDPE) plastics are, in general, MUCH higher than steel. Plastic bottles and jugs are now the main money-makers for recycling programs - although since they are so light, it takes a lot of them to make a load (hence the need for baling them.) Unless there is a deposit, I haven’t heard of recycling centers paying for those like they do for aluminum cans.
Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) are the usual place that recyclables get sorted. Newer, high-tech MRFs can separate materials very efficiently and effectively through automated processes. As these MRFs become more common, more communities are switching from asking residents to sort materials (dual-stream, usually paper and everything else) to collecting everything in one container (single-stream). Although there are some issues with single stream - the main one being glass, which is often still collected separately if it is collected at all - recycling programs report higher participation and higher recovery rates from this method. Less high-tech MRFs do still rely on some human sorting.
Some communities are also collecting all plastic containers through the recycling program, sorting out the ones they have markets for and tossing the rest. The reasoning in doing this is that they get more of the plastics they do want if residents don’t have to decide if it is recyclable or not, and they can respond to fluctuating markets for different types of plastic without making big changes in the program.
The important thing, as Cecil says, is to find out the rules of the recycling program you use and follow them.
Isn’t burying a plastic bottle just carbon sequestering and fights global warming? And how much polution is involved in recycling that bottle vs making a new one from crude oil?
There’s a considerable energy saving in grinding up the old bottle vs. making new plastic. These are two complicated questions, though. To recycle a used bottle, here are the steps. The bottle is ground up. Sometimes, the regrind is directly used, and sometimes it’s melted and re-pelletized. Next, the material is dried before being molded into a new bottle. The pollution comes mostly from the generation of electricity for the first two steps, but there’s some from trucking the bottles from place to place.
That’s the end of my knowledge on your questions. Somebody else can take it from here.