The real problem with having a sham mixed in with non-shams is that I've seen folks develop the attitude of "all recycling is a sham!".
For those not aware, recycling aluminum is absolutely not a sham. It takes about 2x the energy to make new steel than to melt down old steel. For aluminum, that energy difference is 20x!!!
This is why people will actually pay you to recycle aluminum, because running electrolysis through bauxite ore to make new aluminum is incredibly energy expensive.
I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't. The cost of recycling something is probably mostly energy (i.e. carbon emissions) as is the cost of manufacturing a replacemement (even the materials cost itself is probably largely a function of energy spent to dig them up and get them to you) so if they pay you, it is saving carbon emissions and if not it isn't. You can get paid for dropping many metals off somewhere, you have to have your city pay to do anything with the plastic. I realize there are other factors but if one needs a quick guess that would be a good way.
If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant, then the carbon emissions should clearly determine what one recycles.
From the first link, it seems like the slightly to moderately higher cancer risks (correlational) of living near a dump are due to socio-economic factors (smoking).
Quotes:
A proximity analysis, which modeled how many cancer cases could be explained by distance to Fresh Kills, found that none of the five cancer types had elevated rates closer to Fresh Kills between 1995 and 2004, although it did find that some thyroid and bladder cancer rates were higher near the former landfill site between 2005 and 2015. But the researchers still saw little evidence of a link to the landfill because they could not find any reasonable explanations for how residents would have come into contact with materials in the landfill that were known or suspected to cause bladder or thyroid cancers, especially since Fresh Kills closed.
“More plausible” explanations, the authors wrote, were higher screening rates for thyroid cancer and Staten Islanders’ higher smoking rates. Smoking is a known risk factor for bladder cancer.
The link between landfills and cancers is kind of iffy. Some research shows higher rates of cancers, others don't. My guess is that it depends a lot on what's been buried and how. What seems more certain is that you can run into other health problems like heart/respiratory issues and then there's the stench which I wouldn't want to live near even if there were no health issues.
> ...and then there's the stench which I wouldn't want to live near...
For active landfills, yeah.
For decommissioned and capped-off landfills, nah, not if they've done it right. (And given that this is a regulated industry, it's very likely that they've done it right.)
In my experience in the American Southeast, Academy of Model Aeronautics airfields are often built on top of decommissioned landfills [0]... so I have spent a lot of time standing on and around these things. I've never noticed any odor, soft spots in the terrain [1] that is the cap, or any of most of the other weird things one might think of when one thinks "site of a former landfill".
[0] Why? Because the land is quite cheap, and a ~100 foot strip of tarmac, a few little structures (sun shelters and the like) and parking for a couple dozen cars isn't all that much weight.
[1] To be fair, the runway did have to be worked on every three, five years as the terrain under it settled. But bear in mind that we're talking about bumps in a runway for model aircraft, so the amount of settling was actually not very large.
Meh, none of this is at all convincing and I’d expect to see these things, based entirely on fear, even if landfills were completely benign.
But even if true, this is just making the argument that we should probably try to put them further away from people’s houses, which sure. I don’t want to live next to one even if there’s no risk at all so I agree.
> I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't.
I sort of am being paid to put my plastic in my recycling bin. My garbage company charges $47/quarter for a 35 gallon regular bin, and $22/quarter for a 64 gallon recycling bin.
It would require two regular bins to handle everything, which would be $94/quarter, which is more than the $69/quarter that one regular bin plus one recycling bin costs.
Unfortunately, how much you pay to recycle is hidden, in your taxes. You kinda need to know how much your cities pays for the recycling, vs trash, for each kind of material. Probably possible, but not easy. (But we know you can get paid for metals.)
In this case, it sounds like GP is using a private garbage collection service because their municipality does not provide garbage collection services (as is common in rural areas).
One would expect that the costs in that situation are likely to be more representative of the actual cost to dispose of the material, as the company can't obscure its economic reality with taxes.
My city charges extra if I don’t recycle. But, I know from the data they publish that they are simply paying to recycle everything and the rate is higher than the rate at which they dispose of garbage. So I’m still paying for it, it is not paying me.
I think you’re right in general but in Australia and I think some other places as well we have a 10c refund on plastic bottles made out of PET
(Also glass and aluminium)
Most of our PET bottles, for stuff like soft drinks is now also made partially out of recycled plastic, many are made out of 100% recycled PET
If I understand correctly this is only economical because there is this whole system where all plastic soft drink bottles are made of PET, and so easily identifiable as PET and to get the refund you have to take it to a collection point where the only plastic entering the system are these bottles.
When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades long contracts with municipalities.
This is the opposite of my experience. When I was a kid (80s and 90s) every place I lived made you separate your recyclables. It's only been relatively recently (maybe 10ish years or so?) that I've seen single-stream recycling become the norm. I'd also point out that a ton of plastics recycling and e-waste was never really recycled - we just shipped it to China to sort-of-recycle it, but they stopped being the world's dumping ground a few years ago.
I think its less anti-competitive corporations and more that recycling most things just isnt cost effective. I find it hard to believe someone in the supply chain is making a killing by amassing large quantities of cheap plastic or lithium batteries.
It's because they saw short term gains. Corruption, maybe, but not that I'm aware of.
The big haulers here were all established parties that got to bid on these contracts and they played a very smart game but given the various downsides for society and the municipalities themselves in the longer term I can't rule it out either. It certainly doesn't make a whole pile of sense. One day glass was a valuable resource, the next you had to pay someone to get rid of it. Likewise for paper, compostables etc. This all happened in the 80's or so and recycling was the nominal driver. It outright ignored that we were already recycling. The big killer was to package everything in plastic and with plastic liners, even things that look like paper are often coated with plastic on the inside. So now we have two problems: the valuables are recycled and create a profit twice for the haulers and they charge real money for the ever increasing mountain of plastic.
People harp a lot on the straw ban, I get it, it is symbolic. But I would have gone much further: anything perishable that can be packaged in paper should be packaged in paper, and the paper industry should be incentivized to recycle as much as possible with the least energy as possible. Because right now recycling paper often gets skipped on account of the energy requirements (because we like our paper to be white). Instead it gets lumped in with the compostables or biomass and burned for electricity.
There is a ton of information on all this and it is obviously very variable from one locality to another but in the end resource extraction, energy use and leftover waste are the killers, those need to be curbed and far more drastically than we are doing right now. So much stuff is single use it is just terrible, and there are no real alternatives either. If you shop at a normal supermarket for a family of four at the end of the week you'll have a small mountain of packaging.
I've often wondered how different things would be if producers and manufacturers were required to pay for any waste they generated from their products, at no additional cost to the consumer.
Individually wrapped candies in a plastic sleeve? Landfills will send you a invoice based on the volume that enters their site.
Phones designed to be replaced every two-years? You might be able to save money by making the original container a prepaid shipping box to cut back on sending out new ones for proper disposal.
Fruits and vegetables? That's bio-degradable and people will pay to have it in their soil. Make a deal with some local group to set up compost bins charging $1/scoop, and its like a built-in subsidy for farmers.
Have a novel solution that's 100% re-useable/recyclable? Enjoy the good times while entrepreneurs offer to pick that up for you to sell back to recyclers themselves.
EPA discovers that by "recycle" you meant "throw it in the ocean when no one's looking"? If you can't pivot quickly enough to cover both the new disposal fees and clean-up fines you'll be a good case-study for others who want to take shortcuts.
Sure, companies would absolutely pass the cost straight into the purchase price, but a company that wraps your sandwich in plastic and adds a $5 disposal markup won't last long when someone starts wrapping theirs in paper and only charging $1 more.
I know it's not that simple, but a man can dream, eh?
I agree with you on a lot of this, but I don't think it matters if we get better at recycling paper because paper is renewable and the more paper we need, the more trees are farmed, that wouldn't be farmed otherwise. It seems like people believe that paper comes from unspoiled ancient rainforests, when really it comes from rotated tree farms in Canada as far as I know. If we recycled paper so well that our demand halved, a lot of those tree farms wouldn't be planted anymore. It seems to me like if paper is dumped in the landfill the carbon those trees capture gets buried underground. Big win.
Also, I'm maybe a monster environmentally thinks utility needs to factor in. Straws are made of plastic because straws are useful and because plastic makes a very good straw. Paper makes a useless one, so they're pointless to even make. So many things use a lot more plastic than straws do, so I sincerely think straws should be the last to go after we've ended plastic water bottles, takeout clamshells, milk cartons, etc. Put all that crap in reusable glass or recyclable aluminum.
The problem with reusable glass is that it's heavy and transporting it back to the factory to be washed and refilled takes a lot of effort and energy on it's own.
I think this problem mostly exists in places where people have a single recycling bin. If each type of material is collected separately, it's easy to establish when recycling makes sense. And then you can also create incentives for using packaging materials that can be recycled.
Agreed, the single stream is the biggest joke ever. Like, what kind of recycling can you really do with paper covered in food drippings from yogurt containers, food and beverage cans, etc. And what's the exact process for washing those plastic containers just caked in food? And given that they're commingled on the scale of entire buildings or residential blocks, do people really believe that 100% of such large numbers of people meticulously wash their garbage? Personally I would just recycle aluminum and that's it. Everything else is just a roundabout trip to the landfill in the current setup.
How exactly does multi-stream recycling solve any of the problems you've mentioned?
It's pretty easy for recycling centers to sort out most of the glass and metal from that stream and then as technology improves they can sort and recycle even more of the plastic.
As for the food waste, I just assumed it was mostly destroyed by the recycling process. The high temperatures for metal and glass recycling make that seem easy to me. Plastic would be harder, but I think that's also part of the reason plastic can only be recycled a couple of times (it's not "pure" after it's recycled.)
There isn't and won't be a technology that is going to ever economically recycle (closed loop, meaning used for a similar purpose over and over) most of the plastic containers in the trash, especially when it's 40 different types of plastic all mixed together (with generous amounts of contaminants mixed in). Sure, it can sometimes be downcycled once, like shredded into some kind of filament and used to stuff a low-quality cushion or something. That's about it.
If it were economic to really recycle it, China wouldn't have stopped taking ours. And most of the rest of Asia followed suit, which is why municipalities are sheepishly hoarding it in warehouses now without a plan, or just admitting to themselves (if not their citizens) it's a sham and diverting most of those plastics we put in the blue bins straight to the landfill.
One more thing: You're right that multi-stream recycling wouldn't fix the problem for the plastics, though just collecting metal and glass and letting the plastic take a more direct route to the landfill would be more efficient and would have a chance of getting people to understand that the blue bin doesn't redeem any of their sins when it comes to plastic.
It goes through a process. It doesn't make metal or glass useless.
Biological Treatment: Organic waste, including food waste, is often separated either at the beginning of the process through manual sorting or through processes like anaerobic digestion. In some facilities, organic waste is processed separately to produce compost or biogas.
I don't know about glass, but any junk in molten metal just burns up and the ashes can be skimmed off the top. It's not really the metal I'm talking about, it's the plastic and paper which are pointless to even have in the system.
In my locale, throwing aluminum cans in the recycle bin earns me a disparagement from my garbage/recycling company and maybe even threats to cancel my service. The only thing accepted in the bin is relatively clean paper materials.
I have to take the cans down to the recycling center and throw them one by one into some machine and maybe they'll get recycled. Any compensation I might get is from the state, which is basically a dime for a can.
At that point I'm just going to throw them all in the trash, not worth my time nor fuel to drive down.
Can and bottle deposits are older than the general recycling push, at least where I live. It was more about keeping trash off the road sides than re-use.
In my locale the waste management company encourages us to toss aluminum cans in the bin with everything else except for glass and paper. They use powerful magnets and eddy current sorters to separate them from the rest of the stream.
The rotor contains powerful magnets and when it spins quickly it induces a magnetic field in nonferrous metals like aluminum, repelling them from the rotor so that they overshoot the "other waste" bin.
A dime a can is more than they’re worth. Of course, you already paid that dime when you bought em, but it’s not as if scrap value instead of deposit would make your payout go up.
The liners are so they don't corrode because of the acidic contents (not necessarily scary. Acidic doesn't mean deadly but it's not good for cans.
But anyway, what I've been told is that any kind of adulterants on metals aren't even a big deal because that will easily burn off when they melt them. Think about the Terminator in Terminator II. The leather jacket, and indeed The Chip were not a problem when he was lowered into the steel. :'(
There is. A quick Google search found several companies near me who will by scrap metal off of me.
The problem is that a pound of aluminum goes for about $0.45.
That does not come close for paying for a weekly curbside pickup service, which is what most individuals use for recycling.
Heck, they probably wouldn't even take an unsorted collection of "recyclables". The company I am looking at drops the price for unspecified "dirty" aluminum to $0.25 per pound.
Because plastic isn't very recyclable, recycling is therefore a government scam to control the masses, according to John Stossel https://youtu.be/NLkfpjJoNkA?si=C-PEyGnk4M109WuP&t=333 . He clowns the idea of reusing a plastic container as making people "do things they don't want to do"? What??
The whole segment is so pro Capitalism that it is anti caring about the Earth at all. The message could have more easily been "We were fooled by Big Plastic for corporate profits".
I dont know what all he says, but recycling plastic absolutely is not cost effective and it cant be reused for most purposes. And to top it off, we’re now finding all sorts of bad news about microplastics which are exacerbated by recycling them (heating, shredding, etc.)
Free market is not capitalism. You can have capitalism without free markets (in fact, capitalism exist outside of free market most of the time). The origin idea of libertarianism, probably the most pro free-market ideology, is anti-capitalist, and hate the idea of LLC, which is anti free-market, and pro-capitalism.
Can you go into more detail here? My understanding is that a free market requires capitalism (privately owned wealth) to function. And capitalism needs free-ish markets to actually use the wealth.
I'm also unsure how libertarianism is anti-capitalist.
Capitalism is about who own and decide what will be produced: the capital owners (it can be the State, like in China). In a free market, the market itself decide what will be produced, as all agents have full, unaltered information.
US libertarians came from individualist anarchists, who basically thought that under capitalism, volontary exchange could not exist, as wage workers could be forced to work by power imbalance created by capitalism.
Even some neo classical liberals (liberalism is the ideology promoting free market) have played with the idea of natural monopolies created by land use. Hence you will see a lot of georgists amongst liberals who really thought about a perfect free market capitalism.
Finally, a good critique of free-market socialism (where every company is employee-owned, with real liability) is that interest groups will still form and lobby the government for advantages, distorting the free market, like the asset owners do currently (hence it cannot work in a representative democracy).
Capitalism is a system composed of many agents with conflicting wants.
A lot of the capital owning capitalists would prefer the markets to be less free in many ways. If I own a toll road, I really don't want a parallel toll road. This sounds like a ridiculous allowance in a capitalist system but look up the Ambassador Bridge. It is very much in that owner's interest for the market to not be free at all.
If you look at lobbying, many capitalists advocate for less free markets all the time. I'm not just talking about the capital owners either. Labor advocates push for less freedom in the markets consistently through wage floors and legal restrictions on employers.
It seems like there is an equilibrium point where a completely free (meaning every person for himself) devolves to the point where the lack of trust becomes too high of a transactional cost. Both food producers and food consumers benefit from regulations that don't allow you to sell sawdust disguised as flour just because you are able to convince someone that it will work the same.
For those not aware, recycling aluminum is absolutely not a sham. It takes about 2x the energy to make new steel than to melt down old steel. For aluminum, that energy difference is 20x!!!
This is why people will actually pay you to recycle aluminum, because running electrolysis through bauxite ore to make new aluminum is incredibly energy expensive.