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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: 2) by morgauxo on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:05PM
If we bury our used paper in airless landfills where it cannot rot aren't we removing carbon from the carbon cycle? I've heard of people advocating for raising and harvesting fast growing trees just to bury them, replant and repeat as a way to sequester CO2. Why would we do that while at the same time we go to great pains to recycle our paper and cardboard, also made from trees?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @03:18PM
I have occasionally read sites that advocate bamboo for sequestration, which makes amazingly good sense. Bamboo is an exceptionally versatile material, and it grows fast. You can make virtually anything out of the stuff. Some of the best flooring you can get is bamboo. You can make bikes out of it. If you rett it, you can turn it into yarn, cloth, and anything else you make with fibers; my wife is an avid knitter and bamboo yarn is the silkiest, strongest stuff. There are also many varieties of bamboo whose shoots you can eat. You can make paper from it, too.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Tuesday June 23 2015, @04:22PM
Some of the best flooring you can get is bamboo.
Really? It's better than hardwood? You do understand that bamboo is a grass and very soft. It's just as crappy as cork flooring - it wears out in a few years and then you have to replace it. On other hand, oak floors can last generations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @06:04PM
It would want to, oak trees take a fair while to grow compared to bamboo.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @06:05PM
I don't have bamboo flooring myself, but I've seen model homes built entirely out of bamboo in museums like Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. So what I wrote is based on memory of what I read there. But here's a link to a site [about.com] with more info on bamboo flooring:
Another site says this [builddirect.com]:
Maybe there are flooring experts or those who've had bamboo floors for a long time who can chime in. But what I read sounds like bamboo is pretty amazing stuff.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @06:51PM
See also: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1186476/why-hong-kong-last-frontier-bamboo-scaffolders [scmp.com]
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=340818 [skyscrapercity.com]
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday June 23 2015, @06:14PM
I believe that seamless chemical flooring is the best by most metrics. Insulative so it is not cold on your feet, elastic so dropped objects do not shatter, smooth and water proof so cleaning is easy, and relatively inexpensive.
If you want hard flooring perhaps concrete is a good alternative.
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:41PM
Sure, but bamboo or otherwise, why make an extra effort to recycle one plant material while simultaneously farming another just for the purpose of landfilling it for carbon sequestration?
If bamboo is better why not just make all our stuff out of it then landfill the stuff when we are done?