Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday March 11 2019, @06:28PM (7 children)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Monday March 11 2019, @06:28PM (#812827) Journal

    No, I explained exactly how you can live in a way that I would not be justified making you pay for a single damn thing -- go build your bubble. Until then, you can pay for your own externalities instead of forcing other people to pay for you against their will.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 12 2019, @03:40AM (5 children)

    I'm not forcing anyone to do anything. They're the ones demanding something be done their way and that I pay for it to be so. Be it from the top down or the bottom up, that, my friend, is some grade-a oppressive bullshit.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:26AM (4 children)

      by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:26AM (#813178) Journal

      No, you are demanding it be done your way, on MY property. Keep you shit on your own land and we don't have a problem -- build your bubble and there's no issue -- but when it starts to waft or seep into mine, then you're forcing me to handle it.

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:33PM (3 children)

        Your logic is not like our Earth logic. Nobody has said "let's all dump our shit on uzra9814's lawn" and you don't own any portion of a landfill that I'm aware of.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 12 2019, @01:21PM (2 children)

          by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @01:21PM (#813224) Journal

          My logic is still better than your reading comprehension. Just because you aren't dumping it on my property doesn't mean it isn't getting there anyway. As I said, water and air FUCKING MOVE. You pollute the air or the water on your property, that pollution is going to end up on mine. Unless you live in a giant bubble. Then you can go ahead and pollute that bubble as much as you want. Until then, if your pollution moves through my property, you should pay for it.

          • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 12 2019, @01:46PM (1 child)

            And what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? We're talking recycling vs. throwing away here. Unless they're dumping what would otherwise be recycled on your property, it's never going to end up there barring some extremely odd circumstances.

            --
            My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 12 2019, @02:11PM

              by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @02:11PM (#813254) Journal

              First of all, go read the shit you posted which I was replying to and stop moving the goalposts. Here, I'll help you out with a quote:

              Second, your analogy is shit. We're talking about people shitting in their own yard and breaking their own windows. You don't own the entire planet, you just think you do.

              But OK, fuck it, I'll take the new goalposts too: if you're incinerating the trash, the pollution from that will tend to cover a fairly wide area. Not exactly impossible for people to already live inside that area. If the volume of trash increases, you might need to build new incinerators, polluting new areas. If the trash is ending up in the ocean, getting eaten by fish, it's gonna fuck with everyone who eats fish or who goes fishing. And yeah, if you wanna dump in the public landfill, you still gotta pay to use that land -- enough so that the landfill can be properly managed so that it isn't leeching chemicals into the nearby water supply or producing harmful gasses that blow into town. You can't just dump shit wherever you want, however you want, and say fuck you to everyone affected by it.

  • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday March 16 2019, @10:16PM

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Saturday March 16 2019, @10:16PM (#815593) Homepage Journal

    Sloppy Steve Bannon was in charge of a bubble. When he was C.E.O. of Biosphere 2. Closest he ever came to succeeding at something. And that one failed horribly!!