Even if its true, it ignores the larger point that it isn’t free or even cheap to drive around and collect & sort the recycling before it gets to that point. Clearly it isn’t profitable to recycle most things except metals or they would get picked up for free, or people would even be competing for them and stealing for it like they do with cans and scrap metal. If it really is more energy efficient to recycle glass, plastic, and paper/cardboard why doesn’t that show up via market forces with a payment for those items (even if the “payment” ends up going to the company that picks up the recycling for “free”). That is to say, if all the energy inputs for recycling including the costs to pick it up or for you to drive and drop it off are really less than the total energy input for virgin materials, why isn’t the difference in energy reflected in money that can go to either the companies picking up the recycling or the end user ?
I get recycling anything metal. The energy cost of mining, refining, and processing new metal is huge, and the cost of recycling it is tiny, even when you factor in driving around picking it up (and realistically, in Vancouver at least, a huge number of cans are collected by the homeless and carried in on a shopping cart, so the fuel cost is zero). But you hit the nail on the head for the rest of it. There’s no way that recycling glass and plastic can use significantly less energy overall than just making new stuff. I don’t know enough about paper recycling to make a call on that, though.
That sounds like a viable solution to me. 
I too find that hard to believe. It takes a lot of heat to melt glass.
I think you’re probably wrong on glass - it takes a lot of energy to manufacture, so even a small percentage saving there has the potential to offset a lot of fuel/energy expended in collecting and transporting the cullet.
And for the other things - recycling may not generate a net profit, but neither does digging a hole and burying it - The cost of recycling vs the cost of landfilling would be a better comparison metric.
Sorting pays off for us; we repurpose and recycle like mad and it’s reflected in our checking account first and foremost. We get paid for our metal trash and don’t buy new what we can reuse to the nth degree.
Ditto. Follow the money I always say.
And my christmas lights twinkle while the polar icecaps melt…
I use my plastic grocery bags to pick up my puppy’s poop. Does that count?
They started single-sort in my county, and at my university. It’s a life-saver. I know they sort trash based on weight; I feel like they could do a similar thing with recycling - shred it and then sort by weight. That’ll also allow them to use ‘contaminated’ recycling (if someone accidentally put in a bottle with some Coke left in it or what-have-you).
Check… check… we may be related. Although our curbside is one bin, I’ve still got everything separated out. Second nature really, no pun intended.
Sounds about right to me. A hundred watt bulb is too hot to touch. Shove 4 hours worth of that heat into pne glass bottle all at once I am pretty sure it will get to a few thousand degrees.
Sorry, are you agreeing with me or the quote?
I can feel this OP. I’m a do-gooder California hippie like everyone else, but I was eating some place last week and there were what seemed like thirty different bins for every item. Was I supposed to separate my napkin from the plastic fork I ate the burrito with from the foil from the little salsa packets? I said, “Fuck this” and just threw everything in the trash. I don’t have time for this shit, so I just left. Sorry, Earth, but I guess this means you have to die now.
I am saying 400 watt hours (100 watts for 4 hours) sounds to me like it would melt a glass bottle.
The problem is a lack of utility in recycled glass. It isn’t transparent, mixed types don’t produce quality glass, and there isn’t that much demand for glass since most bottles are now made of plastic. Even re-used glass bottles aren’t worth the money anymore, they’re almost all single use now.
I think we’d be better off just burning everything but glass and metal.
What about the liquor industry? Most alcohol comes in glass bottles or cans. Actually it occurs to me that they could be returned to the manufacturer, sterilized, and reused, which would have significantly more energy savings. Does anyone know if this is done? I think I’ll ask at the counter the next time I bring my beer bottles back to the liquor store.
That’s what I was calling re-used. They don’t find it economical. There’s a limited life to the reusable bottles, plus the cost of sorting, washing, and sterilizing, plus the pick-up transportation costs and all the labor involved. And glass is pretty cheap. The disposable bottles use thinner glass than reusables, further reducing the cost. I wouldn’t be surprised if a brown glass disposable beer bottle cost less than a clear plastic soda bottles of the same size.
I agree with it. As I’ve said before, I have to haul my trash to the WM “Disposal Site”. For a while, I dealt with it, Plastic, Glass, Cans, and everything else. Then they went to “Separated Glass”, then the plastics had to be organized by type, ditto the cans… Then they decided the glass wasn’t worth it anyway, and said to just bin it with the regular trash.
Now I just toss everything (except aluminum cans, they go to the animal shelter) in one bag and send it to the landfill. Hey, look at it this way, with the much touted uncontrollable Global Warming, and the inevitable raising of the sea level, by binning everything, I’m contributing to making new land!