SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the Betteridge-Says:-Reduce,-Reuse,-and-THEN-Recycle dept.
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.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday March 11 2019, @01:27AM (1 child)
Back in the 60s they built houses and apartments in the canyons we played in. 10-12 y/o me and a friend spent an hour or so after school scouring the construction sites for bottles, which we then took to the closest grocery store for $$$ (a nickle each). Back in 71/72 California decided to recycle aluminum cans, but didn't charge a deposit. We spent a week finding those cans, culminating in a strip mall with a vending machine and tons of cans in the dumpster every day. Covered with ants, and we had to crush the cans ourselves, but we could take them to the local grocery store for money. The money was shit, 30 minutes of washing off ants and crushing cans turned into 1-2 bottles worth of nickles. No cleaning or crushing required for the bottles, not to mention a day's load of aluminum cans (1-2 bottles worth) were as bulky as a day's load of bottles ($3-$4/load). Soon as we discovered that strip mall we quit collecting aluminum cans.
Fast forward to the 90s. I was president of our HOA, and we had issues with getting our newspaper recycling picked up in a timely manner. Turned out it cost more to recycle the newspapers that to make new newsprint, nobody wanted to deal with it. We were stuck. Residents expected a newspaper recycling bin, but we couldn't find anyone who wanted it. We ended up paying the trash company to "recycle" the newspapers, where "recycle" meant "throw them in with the rest of the trash".
Now? Just try to return a bottle/can to the store you bought it from. They look at you like you're crazy. You have to find a recycling center, nowhere near where you live, and haul them there. You can either do this weekly, where you spend 30 minutes plus gas to get maybe $1, or hold them for 6 months where you can get maybe $6 for them.
Me? I live in an apartment, I can see the dumpsters from my window. I save my recyclables until a dumpster diver shows up, then take them out to them. Sound like I'm accumulating trash in my kitchen? Not at all, I see 4-5 dumpster divers per day.
Don't even get me started on plastic. You can recycle this, it goes into bin A. Yeah, that one too but it goes into bin B. Nope, not that one. Fuck that shit, into the dumpster it goes.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @02:25AM
Sounds like you live in a "low regulation state"? Here in NY State, stores that sell deposit bottles are required to take them back (for a nickel).
Our local trash collection recently revised the recyclables list to include:
Plastic types 1 & 2 (no higher numbers)
Glass - clear only, no colored glass
Paper - all you've got, good market for this. Remove plastic and other contaminants first. I've been tearing the plastic windows out of business envelopes and recycling the paper portion. I won't be buying any more plastic-window business envelopes for my small company.
Metals - no problem, plenty of market for these.
This will probably change our weekly trash balance so there will be about equal amounts of landfill and recycling. When China (etc) would take more variety we typically had more in the recycling bin. Note that kitchen vege trash goes into compost, in the back yard, never in the trash.