It doesn’t cover anything about the efficiency of recycling - it’s great that we can make insulation from paper, but at what cost?
Paper and lumber companies are the only group planting new trees on a massive scale, and then properly maintaining those forests. Landfill operators are the only companies committed to producing green space on a large scale.
With the exception of aluminum recycling, I have seen nothing that indicates that recycling is cost-effective, even when the marginal costs are considered. I do not recycle, since I feel it is an empty gesture that exists only to make the average person feel good. That’s fine, but that “feeling good” also costs me money and resources that we do not get back.
The condo building I lived in (in Toronto) had two trash chutes (garbage and mixed recyclables). They made it extremely clear that they would be fined by the city if there was too much garbage in the recycling (or vice versa) and that they would have to pass the costs on to the unit owners.
I can’t speak for everyone else, but the idea of being fined seemed like good motivation to me.
We have mandatory recycling AND people have jobs of picking through the trash before it is burned at a power plant. I feel very sorry for the time I threw away a dead rabbit in my trash because I didn’t have time to bury it.
What you’re asking I think isn’t why we recycle at all but why don’t we all toss our trash in one bag and then have someone sort it later? I don’t know. Maybe not many places have thought of it. It would create jobs.
First, labour costs are the highest cost in the first world. So hiring people, even if it’s 1 Euro jobs (or the equivalent) to sort manually, is the most expensive way.
Secondly, long-term it’s a very bad strategy to consider your population too dumb/ lazy and invest money in assisting that attitude instead of educating your population.
Education + incentives (as others have already said, make people pay for trash but not for recycables) + deposit systems (for re-usable bottles etc.) + better design (punishing the companies for the amount of trash they produce with a volume tax should prove effective)
What? Why do you have two systems? Do you know how many things can be recycled? I’m sorry to hear that you live in such an underdeveloped country, but in a civilised place with an infrastructure, we have the following:
a (brown) organic can - this is for composting. Obviously can be skipped for all garden users who put up their own compost heap.
a blue paper can - all paper that can be recycled
a black waste can - everything that doesn’t belong elsewhere
at each house. Emptied in a regular cycle, depending on how quickly they fill up. If your can is full every week you pay more than if they only have to come every 4 weeks.
In regular intervals around the city are recycling islands, which have
one can for clear glass - excluding re-usable bottles for beer, milk, mineral water, which have a deposit on them
one can for brown/green glass
one can for aluminium/ tin - all the aluminium foil and baked bean cans
Each store has
one bin for paper - outer wrappings that people get rid off in the shop before taking stuff home in their cloth bags
one bin for plastic - dito
If the store sells
batteries
energy-saving lamps
electronic devices
, they are required by law to collect the old damaged / empty ones and hand them over to proper recycling.
Then there are several Wertstoffhöfe (Literally: resource yard) run by the city, where you go and get rid of the rest:
metal
electronics you can’t give back to the shop
ah, it’s a whole list of stuff that goes there.
Plus, there’s Hall 2, as it’s called, where all the good stuff culled from the other resource yards is presented and can be bought second hand, from books to furniture and sporting equipment.
Plus the third-world groups that collect old reading glasses, the handicapped groups that collect wax leftovers (for new candles) and old wine corks (to make floor coverings) and used stamps and old bicycles (to repair) and a project for long-time unemployed that takes apart the electronics from the resource yards, repairs them if possible and re-sells them.
And, as has been said, better than recycling is avoidance and re-use. So bringing your own cloth bag is better than re-using the paper bag as lunch bag. But recycling the paper for a new newspaper is better than throwing it away or burning it.
That’s because you teach people to not care, that there is enough place and only money matters.
Over here, we teach people to help save the enviroment and that it’s far smarter to bring your own box than use aluminium foil, but recycling aluminium is far better than gouging holes in mountains to make new.
Or cell phones - they use a very rare metal, where 80% of the worldwide placement of this metal is in an African country currently at civil war. Because the prices for this metal have sky-rocketed, the war has increased, because both fractions want control of that area to sell the metal to buy more weapons. So children are drafted as soldiers, and villagers are exploited as almost-slaves to mine the metal - all so you can buy a new cell phone every year and throw the old in the trash, instead of sending it off to a proper recycling facility. They estimate that 80% of cell phones end up in household trash and are burned, the metal dispersed and unrecoverable forever.
But since in the case of conflict diamonds, education made a difference in buying habits, hopefully we can educate people about this problem and change their behaviour, too.
The enviromental impact of aluminium goes beyond only the electricity costs, however - huge amounts of earth have to be moved to be smelted to get aluminium from the bauxite.
Wrong. In most cases, it at least saves energy and clean water during the production process compared to starting anew.
The question isn’t whether the consumer or the city can get money for it, the question is whether it’s good for the enviroment.
The best use of glass is of course for re-usable bottles with a deposit system. I take it that you still haven’t implemented that? A glass bottle can be re-used (washed and refilled) up to 50 times. Only if the transport distance is over 100 km is it ineffecient because then the weight of the bottle is higher compared to a plastic one. But in our country, where breweries, milkeries and mineral water wells are all spread out, things can be done locally.
As for plastic, burning plastic has the danger of dioxin and releases CO2. I don’t know what you mean with “processed” as opposed to recycling. Simply burying plastic in a landfill is a waste of the hydrocarbons (from oil, mostly) that made the plastic in the first place, considering that the plastic can either be melted into a new shape (down-cycling) or, the new method, shredded, melted and spun into fibres to make pullovers or similar.
The producing industry is researching how to design products for easy seperation at the end of their lifecycle, to aid recycling. They are looking at thermo-plastics, where plastic take a different shape when heated, which would help not only with car repairs after accidents, but also with dismantling. The more seperated and thus, homogenous, your materials are, the easier recycling is.
Which is of course why re-using comes before recycling - writing on the back of paper before chucking them into the paper bin.
I’ve never heard of this, but aluminium cans are not the alternative to clear plastic bottles! The alternative are deposit systems. All reports I hear are about the plastic bottles being shredded and spun into plastic fabric in China.
Aluminium is a very wasteful - both in terms of land and electricity - material and should not be thrown away carelessly.
Are Chicagoans that illiterate? Or do apartment-dwellers have that much money that can afford to be lazy? What kind of question is that?
In my city (Munich) there are high apt. houses, too. The city provides three kinds of bins, brown for organic, blue for paper, black for the rest, and the tenants are expected to seperate the trash. Plus, glass into the recycling islands that are on the streets everywhere.
Just recently, I got another letter from the company administering (and partly owning) my apt. house - they own the whole row, so altogether, it’s probably also 40 apt.s - reminding people once again that the less trash there is in the black bin, the less often the garbage truck has to come, which means less money we, the tenants, have to pay in the yearly bill. (The side costs, like janitor, trash, cable TV, are divided up among all tenants and charged once a year). Of course, I already do my best. If the other tenants are too lazy to walk a few 100 m to get rid of their glass, then they have to pay the higher price.
I badger my beer-loving uncle to recycle all his glass bottles but he says it’s all separated from regular trash after being picked up by the city. He lives in St. Petersburg, FL - is this true? I’ve looked online but can’t find a definitive answer either way. I’d love to throw some facts at him - he’s one of those that see recycling as a waste of time, no matter how much easy I try to make it.
You do know that the materials on Earth are limited, yes? That eventually, we will run out of oil and metals and so on?
So on the basic level, it makes sense to recycle materials instead of using up limited supplies.
Also, even with supplies that grow back - like wood for paper - there’s the time factor. If everybody needs paper suddenly, the trees won’t grow quick enough to supply everybody.
Plus, the numbers obviously show that you need less energy and less clean water (which is a resource, too, and a limited one currently) to make paper from old paper than from wood.
And to help the enviroment - agains the climate change, or simply for a nicer landscape - it’s better to let real forests grow than chop down all the time simply to get paper.
I don’t know where you heard your facts, but over here, there’s no doubt about it that recycling saves money and resources. Nobody thinks it’s only “feel-good”. It’s hard for me to understand the prevailing attitude here in 2010 still debating on whether it’s “worth” it, while resources are shrinking faster than ever because of growing and careless consumption.
The only way I might explain your attitude is if you disbelieve all studies from nature groups on the basis that tree-huggers are biased (in my country, the BUND has scientists who do their studies, plus institutes with highly respected scientists like the Wuppertal Institute, plus University departments), and then listen to skewed-facts from the other side. You don’t listen to Fox news, do you??
Each PET bottle that’s recycled into fiberfill or a polyester suit means less oil that’s used for this. So you need less oil for plastic, which means either more gasoline for your car, or less to be brought up from the ground in the first place.
And that
is already true for Europe - Urban mining, that is, looking for things we threw away 30 years ago, but can re-use now cheaper than digging up in remote places - is the new industry branch emerging here.
Why don’t you call the waste resource center of his city? They would know first-hand either to confirm or deny.
Can you write to your representative about introducing a deposit system on the glass bottles, like we have in Germany?
All beer bottles are brown and 0,33 l, all mineral water bottles are clear and 0,7 l (with a specific pattern of pearls), and all milk bottles are 1 l (some brown, some clear), each with a specific shape, and all have a deposit of 0,15 Euros added by the store when sold. When you bring them back, the store gives you your deposit back, and sells it back to the companies - either directly to the brewery/ milkery/ mineral water well, or to handling company that collects, cleans and distributes the bottles.
So a beer drinker knows that the bottles lying around are worth money!
But, I see nothing in there about the marginal cost of recycling - the cost to run a different fleet of garbage trucks, labor costs, the sorting costs, the costs of educating about and enforcing recycling, etc. That may be a group of “facts”, but it’s missing a whole lot of other facts - so the full cost isn’t told.
And, because this is done at a municipal level, that means that there are less resources available for other municipal duties.
I note that you are in Europe - please also understand that the USA has much less population density, and much more open land, so recycling in the USA has reached a point where it is necessary.
why is there need for justification or proof? it seems to me that the idea stands for itself. if you keep on harvesting non-renewable resources and produce trash that is not going to go away; it’s only logical that somewhere down the line, the shit is going to hit the fan. if your viewpoint is that it’s not going to happen to you in your lifetime, then…
But, if recycling is not cost-effective, then it wastes resources. Most obvious of these are labor costs and municipal funds, which are always in short supply.
If recycling is supposed to be about not wasting things, then isn’t an inefficient recycling program just as bad as wasting non-renewable resources?
It’s actually true that a lot of resources are wasted mindlessly 'recycling." This does not detract from the value of sensible recycling, but on some visceral level there is a tendency to think that keeping material out of landfills is always for the best, when it clearly isn’t.
Glass recycling is probably the most egregious example of this - glass accounts for a large volume of urban recycling programs, increasing the overall cost of programs and the energy consumption and waste/pollution associated with them. In reality, most glass collected for recycling is warehoused (at further cost) rather than actually being recycled, because there is very little incentive to recycle it. Little or no energy savings, there isn’t really much in the way of a materials conservation issue, and the environmental impact of glass in a landfill is negligible. Although it feels better to put a glass bottle in the blue bin, when you look at the net effect there isn’t really a tangible benefit to it.
This only touches the “feel good” harm from programs as they are actually designed – there is a lot more harm than good from recycling zealots that insist on putting everything in the blue bin, because the size of their weekly trash output has become an inverse dick-measuring contest. I had one roommate that infuriated me with this - she ignored the clear instructions we had from the city and just put anything in there she felt ought to be recyclable - styrofoam, all plastic (not just the types actually used by the program,) laminate paper, cloth, poly bags, wood, EVERYTHING. She could not get it through her head that it was actually better for this stuff to go directly to the landfill instead of being mixed in with the recycling, sorted out at public expense, and then going to the landfill. “Maybe if the receive enough of it they will try to find a way to reclaim it.” Never mind that this sort of attitude actually increases waste – she felt better about it.
Just north of Toronto we have collection once a week with a green bin for compostables (and you can buy compost at the recylcing centre for a reasonable rate), blue bin for paper, glass and plastic, and your garbage. We’re limited to 2 free bags of garbage a week, but now that the kids are gone we usually only have a bag every other week.
When we first got the green bin I was a little concerned but it really doesn’t take long to get into the habit, and with the indoor and outdoor versions there isn’t a smell issue either. Biggest problem we’ve had is that the racoons have learned how to open the outdoor bin if they can tip it over so I have to remember to bungy cord it to the railing.
You keep going back to the standard and wrong argument. It’s not about how much land you have to bury things. It’s about how much energy and clean water you use to get the raw materials out of the ground, if you make things new each time instead of recycling.
As for sorting and municipial resources - well, seems you have a longer way to go in educating your population, but that’s necessary on several levels.
Warehousing glass is NOT recycling. I don’t know why it’s not melted down, maybe your energy costs are still too low - but cheap energy isn’t around for ever, even in the US. Get in the habit now, and you won’t be hurt so much when the prices rise. (The opposite track to people who buy a Hummer first and then complain that gasoline prices go up).
That person is an idiot that needs better education, but not typical for recycling movement. Actually, it’s an indication why you need better critical thinking skills in the education program.
And it also means more involvment of the citizens - if she knows that her tax money is spent sorting things out, or if she gets an opportunity for input, that might help. Otherwise, a fine.
