
Recycling in America - edward
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/04/recycling-america?fsrc=scn%2Ftw%2Fte%2Fbl%2Fed%2Finthebin
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matdrewin
How about making products that actually last?

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fencepost
Planet Money had the reverse side of this less than a month ago - a recycler
barely making it by IIRC.
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/27/395815221/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/03/27/395815221/episode-613-trash)

This is also heavily influenced by oil prices - if oil is cheaper then
plastics made from it are cheaper but the collection / cleaning / processing
costs for recycled materials aren't nearly as volatile. I'm pretty sure
recycled metals don't have the same issues.

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grecy
Of course everyone should remember Recycling is the last thing you _should_ be
doing.

1\. Reduce

I visited friends outside LA last year and was downright dumbfounded by the
size of the two trash cans at their house. Both were 50% bigger than the one I
get here in Canada for curbside trash. Talk about consumption.

2\. Reuse

Living in Latin America it was awesome to see the deposit on a bottle was more
than the liquid in the bottle. It was unheard of to throw out or recycle
bottles.

3\. Recycle

Bottom of the list!

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lfowles
Title feels pretty clickbaity/inflammatory, but the article title is merely
"In The Bin".

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FredDollen
The container deposit laws pervert the recycling process by taking the only
things worth recycling (aluminum cans) out of the single recycle stream.

I have to pay extra for recycling in my town. However, if there wasn't a
bottle bill, it would likely be free, as the recycling companies would gladly
take all recyclables in exchange for the aluminum cans.

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sandstrom
Sweden is a pretty interesting case. Only 1-2% of trash ends up in landfills.
Much is recycled [reused], and the rest is burned for energy (heating and
electricity).

An interesting tidbit is that recycling [reuse] rates has increased such that
there isn't enough trash to burn (and burning is still much better than
landfills). So Sweden now import trash from neighbouring countries.

Two light-weight articles:

\- [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2012/10/28/163823839/swe...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2012/10/28/163823839/sweden-wants-your-trash)

\- [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/sweden-imports-
tras...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/sweden-imports-
trash_n_1876746.html)

More in-depth, from the organization running Swedens recycling:

\-
[http://www.avfallsverige.se/fileadmin/uploads/forbranning_en...](http://www.avfallsverige.se/fileadmin/uploads/forbranning_eng.pdf)

------
ars
America doesn't recycle more because it just isn't worth it to recycle things
(except for metal). (And if you notice, this article, like most of them, talks
about how it's worth it to recycling aluminum, and doesn't mention anything
else.)

You can tell that metal is worth recycling because you have people driving
around looking for metal scrap and taking it. No one takes plastic.

Cleaning, and sorting, plastic and paper takes more energy and water than
using virgin.

Especially water, America does not have extra of, to spend on washing things.

It works in Europe because they make the consumers do all the sorting and
washing, so recycling companies don't notice the extra expense. In particular
the water, but also the use of time.

That has its own expense - you need like 10 different bins, and the consumers
have to transport the garbage to the neighborhood recycling hall. That's fine
if you are in a small dense city, not so simple in the US.

If you wanted to re-capture the energy in paper and plastic burn them for
energy. Ignore glass, the crust of the planet is made of glass, there is
absolutely no reason to recycle it.

~~~
youngtaff
Recycled glass can be added to tarmac to make it more hardwearing

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rrggrr
This article is insane.

The cost of recyclables is so closely correlated to variable costs (like
energy prices) that efforts to mandate or close loop recycling always fail
over a long enough timeframe.

Also I suspect Walmart has no idea the extent to which recyclables are used in
their products since about 70% of Walmart's products are produced in China,
and China consumes the majority of US (and European) recyclables.

Want to increase recycling rates? Ban the use of alternative fuels and watch
recyclable recovery rates skyrocket. This is an instance where the free market
knows better than policy makers.

~~~
cleverjake
> Also I suspect Walmart has no idea the extent to which recyclables are used
> in their products since about 70% of Walmart's products are produced in
> China

You'd be 100% wrong. Walmart investigates the crap out of most if not all of
their supply chain.

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CPLX
On a side note, I am consistently reminded of the extraordinary skill level
the staff of The Economist employs when writing photo captions and article
headlines.

~~~
ianmcgowan
Perhaps it's the most fun part when writing about somewhat dry topics? "Dutch
asylum policy - Bed, bath, and begone"

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ChuckMcM
This is the money quote: _Coca-Cola committed to using at least 25% recycled
plastic in its containers by 2015, but revised this downwards owing to scarce
supply and high costs._

There is no financial incentive to use recycled goods. They cost more than
'fresh' goods, they require additional processing, they add risk from material
contamination (not biologic, structural and chemical). There are a dozen
different reasons for this but much of the blame can be laid at the feet of
the amazingly interlinked municipal waste management structure.

Here is a situation where you could hire _anyone_ from students, to sex-
offender ex-Cons, to the mentally impaired to work at a recycling plant pre-
processing material for effective recycling, thus providing jobs for anyone
willing to work. They get paid and perhaps feel good about helping the
environment, and the supply of recycled material goes up and helps push the
price down on the spot market.

Financially you are going to lose taxpayer money running those plants because
it is cheaper to make this stuff fresh, but its perhaps a better investment
than other assistance programs.

[1]
[http://www.sec.gov/news/headlines/wastemgmt6.htm](http://www.sec.gov/news/headlines/wastemgmt6.htm)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/us/mayor-and-trash-
hauling...](http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/22/us/mayor-and-trash-hauling-
operators-indicted-in-bribery-case.html)

[3] "Landfill company sued over bribery case"
[http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/2014/08/29/14405720/](http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/2014/08/29/14405720/)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Most of the sorting of recycling these days is done by an array of very clever
machines, that use e.g. computer vision and blasts of air, or various physical
properties to separate out materials.

There are humans involved in various stages, but it's technology that will
lead to higher quality, lower price recycled goods particularly as machine
sorting makes it easier for consumers to contribute their waste into the
system.

~~~
happyscrappy
That sounds interesting, any links?

~~~
wlesieutre
High speed video of plastic sorting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVZdqWjp7xI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVZdqWjp7xI)

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philfrasty
Will never forget how I (German) walked into a Safeway in San Francisco with
my bag full of bottles and asked the cashier where the deposit-machine is. She
had absolutely no clue what I was talking about.

~~~
acomjean
New York has those bottle in/ cash out machines. If you have a bottle that the
store doesn't sell it would reject it.

Recycling is very regional. Some states don't have bottle deposits.

Where I live now, they gave up on the rules that nobody followed (plastic #
types in particular) and have "single stream" where everything that might be
recyclable goes to one plant and is sorted by machines/people.

I remember having to buy my bag in germany because I didn't have one. Ikea did
the same thing here for a while (no bags), but they have plastic ones now.

~~~
mlwarren
The majority of states lack bottle deposits, unfortunately. If more states
added bottle deposit rates of 5 or 10 cents then their recycling rates would
increase[1].

[1]
[http://www.bottlebill.org/about/benefits/waste.htm](http://www.bottlebill.org/about/benefits/waste.htm)

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jobu
_" Most recycled materials should be cheaper than virgin commodities"_

Surprisingly this just isn't true. It takes a lot of work and chemicals to
clean inks and glues out of paper for recycling.

Penn & Teller looked into this in an episode of Bullshit! a while back -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4)

Aluminum and clear glass are very efficient to recycle, plastics and colored
glass depend on commodity prices, and paper is just a terrible idea to
recycle. It's much better for the environment to farm trees for making paper,
then put that paper in landfills and harvest the methane gas the paper emits
when it decomposes.

~~~
fragmede
That episode of Bullshit kinda missed the point, IIRC.

Energy consumption is an important thing to pay attention to, but the point of
recycling is about _not taking more stuff out of the ground_.

~~~
balabaster
But putting paper product back into the ground is the cycle of life...
accelerated. Instead of waiting for the tree to die and fall and rot and
return nutrients to the soil it gets chopped down, pulped up, made into paper,
turned into a magazine, gets purchased and read one time, shredded and returns
to the ground to rot at an increased rate than the original tree would have
rotted.

...the only difference is that when the original tree rotted, it didn't leach
chemicals into the soil from the inks, bleaches and other chemicals used in
the production of the magazine.

So contaminants aside, composting paper instead of recycling it is actually
better for the environment - assuming renewable tree harvesting practices are
followed.

Of course, you can't actually put the contaminants aside nor assume that
renewable harvesting practices are being used, so even this argument is
flawed. At some point, the only way to affect the environment positively is to
stop buying as many of the paper products as you can reasonably avoid buying.

------
Errorcod3
America is way behind from living overseas for 3 years.

I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct.

Should be more like some areas in Germany where you pay for the amount of
trash you have(weight), the more you throw away the more you pay -> encourages
recycling!

I also work for a brewery and it is sad that none will re-use bottles in the
united states, all beer goes into brand new bottles :(

~~~
JonnieCache
_> I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct._

what.

Who's charging you? Local government?

~~~
ptnapoleon
In many municipalities, they contract trash and recycling collection out to
private companies. Many times those companies charge separately for recycling
collection.

~~~
JonnieCache
They do that here (UK) too. It's still the local govt that's paying the bill
though. I guess that's why we have seemingly high municipal taxes, they're
'all inclusive.'

It's funny, the waste management people in our town are still unionised out
the wazoo, and they're in deep with the labor party so they keep going on
strike to put pressure on the incumbent greens. It's really not a good
advertisement for the labor movement.

