SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Aaron C. Davis writes in the Washington Post that recycling, "once a profitable business for cities and private employers alike," has become a "money-sucking enterprise." Almost every recycling facility in the country is running in the red and recyclers say that more than 2,000 municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around. "If people feel that recycling is important — and I think they do, increasingly — then we are talking about a nationwide crisis," says David Steiner, chief executive of Waste Management, the nation's largest recycler.
The problem with recycling is that a storm of falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a weakened economy in China have sent prices for American recyclables plummeting worldwide. Trying to encourage conservation, progressive lawmakers and environmentalists have made matters worse. By pushing to increase recycling rates with bigger and bigger bins — while demanding almost no sorting by consumers — the recycling stream has become increasingly polluted and less valuable, imperilling the economics of the whole system. "We kind of got everyone thinking that recycling was free," says Bill Moore. "It's never really been free, and in fact, it's getting more expensive."
One big problem is that China doesn't want to buy our garbage any more. In the past China had sent so many consumer goods to the United States that all the shipping containers were coming back empty. So US companies began stuffing the return-trip containers with recycled cardboard boxes, waste paper and other scrap. China could, in turn, harvest the raw materials. Everyone won. But China has launched "Operation Green Fence" — a policy to prohibit the import of unwashed post-consumer plastics and other "contaminated" waste shipments. In China, containerboard, a common packaging product from recycled American paper, is trading at just over $400 a metric ton, down from nearly $1,000 in 2010. China also needs less recycled newsprint; the last paper mill in Shanghai closed this year. "If the materials we are exporting are so contaminated that they are being rejected by those we sell to," says Valerie Androutsopoulos, "maybe it's time to take another look at dual stream recycling."
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday June 23 2015, @11:03AM
Trouble with re-use is that it opens the company up to liability or expenses. Say you sell beer in glass bottles. One of the bottles gets a tiny chip or crack before being returned. Maybe the crack will mean that the bottle will explode during the re-filling stage, screwing up your assembly line. Maybe it falls apart during delivery or on the supermarket shelf. Maybe a customer cuts their lip on the chipped glass and sues you.
To avoid these problems, every bottle has to be rigorously examined and tested before it can be re-used, and for that kind of money you might just as well buy new.
Never mind evil customers deliberately fucking with your bottles for the lulz / blackmail. I'm sure somebody could come up with a poison or something that could be put on a bottle and that would survive the washing process.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:53PM
Not all of the bottles get completely cleaned either. I lived in a country for a while that reused glass soda bottles. It was common to see stuff in the bottles that shouldn't have been there. I'm attributing it to not thoroughly cleaning the bottles anyways. I'm certain some of those bottles had a short life as a spittoon or something before being recycled. Not a pleasant thought!
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:42PM
I'll steal a link from sudo rm -rf's post below [soylentnews.org]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislation#Canada [wikipedia.org].
I believe it's illegal to throw your beer/wine bottles in the recycling bin in Ontario. I don't do it, but I think I tried it once or twice when I first moved back here and my recycling wasn't picked up. When I lived in town, if you left your beer/wine bottles and any cans worth anything, someone would come by before the recycling truck and pick them up for the deposit. The same thing happened when I used to live in California.
While the problem may be cost and liability, that's just an indication of the bigger problem which is the litigious nature of the society in which it sounds like you live. If the bottling companies have to inspect/clean the bottles, they will pass the cost on to the consumer, who in the end should be paying the cost for their waste.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday June 24 2015, @02:37AM
There is not that much energy waste involved to completely remanufacture the bottle, given a clean feed. Nor is it that much of a problem to literally steam-clean all the incoming glass. The problem is it has to be the correct glass. Glass has different constituents just like anything else, and the manufacturing process is tuned to a certain mix of glass.
What this means is manufacturers must get together and agree on ONE formulation for all "consumable" glasses.
Same with plastics. Either its the clear stuff which will be made into other clear stuff, or its the opaque stuff which can only be used for things where color is not all that important ( Think plastic foundation timber for outdoor construction, possibly layered with a color coat for uniform external appearance. ). I have already seen some rather impressive plastic timber at Home Depot. Recycled plastic. Foamed, Molded into timber shapes. Sawable, drillable, nailable, screwable. Use it for stuff like deck foundations and patio covers which have always been a pain in the arse to keep termites at bay.
Recycling WILL work. However to make it practical, stuff must be designed with its end-of-life recycling in mind from the start. It snapped together; it must also decompose back into its components when its purpose is done, whether by disassembly or simple crush then sort the pieces.
Very little stuff I see today was designed with recycling in mind. Especially plastics. We have got to get our act together and settle on a "one size fits all" kind of stuff for consumables. Leave the specialty plastics for special industrial usage. There may be no way to economically recycle unique plastics with thermal decomposition or filler being the only viable method left to dispose of it.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday June 24 2015, @12:36PM
Solved long ago. Design bottles so that they don't explode when slightly chipped, and use machine inspection to look for other defects (takes a second with laser scanning, fully automated).
Poisoning isn't a big concern because the washing process is pretty damn good. So far no-one has found a way to do it, so it seems more like a movie plot threat at this point.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)