Recycling industry needs some help

[Joey_P]

@DrDeth

It’s not a problem at all, which is why they tell you NOT to rinse your cans.

The big issue is greasy cardboard from pizza boxes.

That’s likely different from place to place. I know for my city, it says to rinse them out. I looked at the requirements for San Jose (your city, I assume) it’s not mentioned.

@steronz

Capitalism isn’t doing a particularly great job of handling the issue of waste, and it doesn’t seem right to blame the “recycling industry.” As an industry, things are only going to get recycled if there’s economic value. However, as we can clearly see, there’s demand from citizens that things be recycled regardless of the economic incentive. That is to say, clearly we all feel guilty about using a plastic cup for 5 minutes that’s then going to exist for thousands of years in a landfill (at best), and would very much like someone to assuage our guilt by reusing the plastic in that cup. But that’s just not going to happen right now, based on economics.

Why, then, isn’t everyone involved in producing and selling that plastic cup on the hook for the costs of recycling it? Why does, say, Solo get to make money selling frappucino cups to Starbucks, and Starbucks get to make money selling frappucinos in single use plastic cups, and then we blame the recycling industry for not having enough money or interest or technology to deal with the refuse? It’s not like they asked for all of these frappucino cups to exist.

I can’t imagine it would go over too well if you implemented some type of tax, at least at the consumer level, for that. In my city, recycling is included in my taxes. I wouldn’t want to get taxed by starbucks for buying something in a plastic cup and then pay tax to have it taken away. Granted, they could just call it something else or charge it higher up in the supply chain, but it’s the same thing.
ISTM, things have to flip around to create a demand for recycled materials. Perhaps giving businesses a tax credit based on how many of their supply purchases come from recycled materials. If Starbucks moves to cups that are made from recycled plastic and enough other big businesses do, there’s going to be a demand for plastic scrap. Look at the copper industry. There’s so much demand for copper scrap that the price is kept high enough that people routinely risk their lives and/or freedom to steal copper.

[davidm]

I’ve wondered about the environmental impact (mostly carbon emissions) of shipping all of this waste to China. Is it more or less than the impact of not recycling? It would be difficult to calculate since there are different impacts.