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posted by martyb on Sunday March 10 2019, @08:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-Says:-Reduce,-Reuse,-and-THEN-Recycle dept.

Is This the End of Recycling?

For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.

Most are choosing the latter. "We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can't afford it," said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire. Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklin's residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn't want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned. Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there's not much she can do. "Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for," she said.

The same thing is happening across the country. Broadway, Virginia, had a recycling program for 22 years, but recently suspended it after Waste Management told the town that prices would increase by 63 percent, and then stopped offering recycling pickup as a service. "It almost feels illegal, to throw plastic bottles away," the town manager, Kyle O'Brien, told me.

Without a market for mixed paper, bales of the stuff started to pile up in Blaine County, Idaho; the county eventually stopped collecting it and took the 35 bales it had hoped to recycle to a landfill. The town of Fort Edward, New York, suspended its recycling program in July and admitted it had actually been taking recycling to an incinerator for months. Determined to hold out until the market turns around, the nonprofit Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful has collected 400,000 tons of plastic. But for now, it is piling the bales behind the facility where it collects plastic.


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Sunday March 10 2019, @09:43PM (9 children)

    by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 10 2019, @09:43PM (#812426) Journal

    We've been seeing bits and pieces of improvement over the years but cost always wins and cheap plastics are really hard to beat if you ignore externalities. This is why we still have that damnable clamshell packaging.

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  • (Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:21PM (8 children)

    by Tokolosh (585) on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:21PM (#812464)

    Please elaborate on the externalities you blithely mention.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:38PM (7 children)

      by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:38PM (#812469)

      The major externality is, of course the cost of disposal of all that plastic.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Monday March 11 2019, @12:13AM (2 children)

        by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 11 2019, @12:13AM (#812480) Journal

        Well, disposing of it acceptably :-P
        .
        .
        But yeah - I mean it's not nuclear waste, but just tossing it back into the environment does have ramifications from the great pacific garbage patch to dead birds and wildlife to air pollution (from burning) to groundwater contamination.
        .
        Costs for these are not borne by the product but are externalized to the rest of society. Since the true costs are not reflected in the product, the market doesn't work to resolve the issue.
        .
        This is one of the areas where, if government and society was of sound mind, it would be appropriate to make adjustments so that products reflected their true costs.

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        • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 11 2019, @12:26AM (1 child)

          by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Monday March 11 2019, @12:26AM (#812484)

          Well, disposing of it acceptably

          Yes. My local city council has had to have this discussion, as China will not take our rubbish any more either, which I can understand.

          Of course it turns out they were never recycling it in the first place, but at least we all got to feel better by sorting the glass and plastic.

          If the disposal cost of the plastic packing were to be included in the price of the product, the packaging would disappear really quickly. Also sushi bars would all shut down. ;-)

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Monday March 11 2019, @05:08PM

            by urza9814 (3954) on Monday March 11 2019, @05:08PM (#812765) Journal

            If the disposal cost of the plastic packing were to be included in the price of the product, the packaging would disappear really quickly. Also sushi bars would all shut down. ;-)

            Yeah, I was thinking to suggest that as the solution actually. Would anyone even NOTICE? Costs an extra $57 per TON to recycle vs incineration. The mass of an empty 16oz water bottle is around 13 grams -- that's according to some random post on answers.com, but it sounds reasonable. So assuming not all bottles are that small, and assuming that answer might not be entirely accurate, I'll go with 100 grams. That gives slightly "OVER NINE THOUSAND!" (sorry) of these overestimated bottles per ton, which based on $57/ton works out to about half a cent. So, round up to a one cent disposal tax to all products with disposable packaging and we should be good here.

            Could make the tax per gram/pound of product produced, but that would just further encourage switching from glass to plastic, which isn't necessarily the right way to go...maybe make certain compostable packaging exempt to encourage some innovation in that sector, and also potentially exempt anything that still has a positive recycling value. Although if we're not just talking curbside recycling items you would potentially need SOME scaling for size -- five or ten cents for that package from Amazon.com with a freakin' pound of styrofoam.

            Many states in the US already have a five cent deposit paid on all bottles, which many people never bother to collect, so switch that to a non-refundable one cent disposal tax and it's a win for everyone (except, perhaps, for the homeless guy picking up bottles off the street...) Although I guess they must currently use all of those uncollected deposits for something too...either way, people don't flip out about an extra five cents per bottle, so one cent shouldn't be an issue.

            Paper products are probably the hardest to deal with, as they would seem to be fairly cheap for their mass...but those would also seem to be least concerning if they're just going to the landfill. Hell, I've seen newspapers thrown in the street break down in days. But screw it, I'd approve of applying the tax to paper products anyway just to slightly discourage needless printing.

      • (Score: 2) by Tokolosh on Monday March 11 2019, @03:47PM (3 children)

        by Tokolosh (585) on Monday March 11 2019, @03:47PM (#812725)

        The cost of a well-managed landfill is very low. If the price is much higher than the cost where you live, then there are other, more stupid and emotive externalities at play.

        • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:19AM (2 children)

          by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:19AM (#812994) Journal

          Which is perfectly acceptable. Be weird and sad if our ancestors wind up mining our old landfills for plastic someday. Presumably this won't be required assuming dramatically increased availability of energy.

          I'm still gonna actively avoid clamshell packaging when reasonably convenient to do so.

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          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:01AM

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:01AM (#813075) Journal

            Be weird and sad if our ancestors wind up mining our old landfills for plastic someday.

            What's supposed to be weird and sad about that? I think it would be weird and sad, if humanity didn't mine old landfills when they had the technology to do so.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Tokolosh on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:07PM

            by Tokolosh (585) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:07PM (#813494)

            "The stone age did not end because we ran out of stones." -- Sheik Ahmed Yamani

            The hydrocarbon age will not end because we ran out of hydrocarbons.