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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, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday June 23 2015, @11:53AM
High-termperature incineration is another option, though the cost of scrubbing the exhaust can be quite high.
They closed our local one down 30 years ago. Something to consider is it used a huge amount of natgas to keep the fire burning. If you just try to burn trash without any fuel in your backyard you'll rapidly discover a filthy smoky mess. Incinerate or landfill depends on the ratio of land cost vs natgas cost.
Ironically the incinerator was next door to the sewage plant and the plant used the process heat from the incinerator to do "something" so now instead of the incinerator burning a zillion bucks of natgas the sewage plant does something with half a zillion bucks of natgas. Probably evaporating sludge to dry it before shipping it away to a landfill? Or preventing the tanks from freezing in the winter?
Another comment in the newspaper was the incinerator had some maintenance costs because people would throw things like full propane tanks into the trash, magnesium car parts, stuff like that.
Finally even the incinerator had to dump ash somewhere, so its more like dropping the landfill requirements by a factor of 100 not eliminating entirely.
So thats the experience of a city that converted from incineration to landfill about 30 yrs ago with innumerable newspaper articles, back when people used to read newspapers.
There do exist electric powered incinerating stinky toilets at remote telecom offices. I suppose you could power a million of them off millions of solar panels in order to incinerate a city worth of trash in a green-ish manner.
I wonder if gold plated connectors and rare earth electronics could make distillation of used consumer electronics profitable, given cheap enough energy. Get oil prices high enough and vacuum distilled plastic monomers would probably be profitable for resale.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:46PM
Ironically the incinerator was next door to the sewage plant and the plant used the process heat from the incinerator to do "something" so now instead of the incinerator burning a zillion bucks of natgas the sewage plant does something with half a zillion bucks of natgas.
That's a bit surprising. Normally sewage treatment works produce a lot of methane that needs safe disposal, and the safest way of disposing of it is to burn it (ideally doing something with the generated heat). I'd have thought that the biggest reason for having the two next to each other would be that the sewage works would produce the gas that the incinerator needed.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @02:05PM
I wonder if gold plated connectors and rare earth electronics could make distillation of used consumer electronics profitable
That is mostly a chemical process. A pretty nasty one at that. NurdRage on youtube has a good series of videos on what goes into it.
Setting it on fire is not one of them :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:47PM
Oh you get things hot enough and anything distills, I assure you of that. It takes lava like heat but it'll work. That's what I'm proposing.
You are correct that the less energy intensive way to chemically refine gold at room temp has some environmental and safety issues...
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Tuesday June 23 2015, @06:31PM
Waste-to-energy [wikipedia.org] technologies allow energy to be directly recovered from waste in the incinerator plants. This is the reason Sweden is actually importing garbage [aljazeera.com].