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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: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:29PM (5 children)
If you can build a hut out of hay bails then why not bails of plastic bottles? If you can make insulation out of cellulose and shredded textiles, then why not recycled paper? Give it some anti-microbial and flame-retardant treatment and call it good.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:33PM (1 child)
Do you want to live in a hut made out of old newspapers and used toilet paper? No? Then it is racist for you to suggest that underprivileged African Americans should be forced to do so.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Monday March 11 2019, @12:29AM
Not sure if sarcasm... I didn't say anything about underprivileged being forced to anything. I would consider living in a hut made out of garbage (I prefer the term "sustainable materials") if the property taxes were low enough.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday March 11 2019, @12:55AM (2 children)
Don't know if you meant to abort the mission (bail) so early, or if you wanted to empty the incoming water out of a boat (bail), or were just using a handle on a bucket (bail), or getting someone out of jail (bail), but hay usually comes in Bales, as do compressed packages of other things, like cotton (bales) or Christian (Bales).
Alright, pendant mode off for today, but has it really come to this? Is it time to reign in the precedential declaration of Native Emergences? Then is better then than, you know. Low-hanging fruit.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @03:33AM
It's a good thing you didn't pick up on his homophone switcheroo or you'd be pulling your pud to pedantic ecstatic extremes to marvel us with your superior whatchamajigger.
Oh ... too late.
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Monday March 11 2019, @05:02AM
There's a hell of a lot of Spelling Mavens on this sight. But you're the Champeon. Great job! 🏆
I have two "rules" about spelling. That have served me very well -- very well. If you can't spell it, don't right it. And if you can reed it, don't worry about spelling!!!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 11 2019, @01:21AM (2 children)
I'm a DIY kind of guy. I also really hate taking the trash out because I live in a third-floor walkup. So I'm always on the lookout for new ways to reduce, eliminate, or recycle waste.
We've got paper waste pretty well figured out. Everything gets shredded, then used as bedding for the guinea pig, then composted for the plants; alternatively it gets shredded, blended with water and the pulp spread onto a screen to become craft paper for the kids.
Vegetable scraps get fed to the guinea pig, and what comes out afterward and anything that doesn't get fed to the guinea pig are composted and used for the plants.
Plastic is the next frontier. I've been watching YouTube videos from the Precious Plastic channel [youtube.com]. They have a lot of practical, usable ideas for processing the various types into new items.
I'd like to tackle glass and metal also, but producing the energies to accomplish that feels like sort of a no-no in an apartment building.
In our neighborhood we also have another easy way to recycle items we don't have a use for, or room for, anymore: put them out on the stoop in a box. They never last more than a couple hours before somebody else picks them up. We've done the same in the other direction--all told we've really never spent more than $500 combined on toys for our son and daughter.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Monday March 11 2019, @11:29AM (1 child)
In the UK (maybe in US as well) there is a great source of "charity shops", which are essentially junk shops for old books, games, dvds, clothes. Give a donation to charity, take away something second hand, donate your stuff and they sell it to the next person. Freecycle [freecycle.org] is also a thing.
We also don't spend much on kids toys - they are quite fine with one "new thing" at christmas/birthday and then a whole pile of second hand stuff, they usually prefer the second hand stuff!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 11 2019, @01:40PM
Kids don't mind getting toys second-hand if there's no social judgement attached to it. We armored them against that by instilling a sense of, "woo-hoo i got this for FREE!"
Washington DC delenda est.
(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.
Relationship status: Available for curbside pickup.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @02:13AM (1 child)
I mean, the sun is going to consume the earth a few billions years from now. What's the big deal? I doubt the universe is going to care. All the plastic came from earth, which came out of cosmic dust, anyway.
Everything is recycled, there is no "end". It is a circle.
But if you're gonna burn your shit, make sure you're downwind, you bastard!
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday March 11 2019, @06:48PM
b-b-b-but what about the gas molecules we lose forever??? [earthsky.org]
*grin*
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 11 2019, @04:10AM (1 child)
Has no one tacked a plastic bag to the side of a shed, to see how long it lasts? Oh, I miss frojack. Classic SoylentNews.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Monday March 11 2019, @10:28AM
You won't miss microplastics.
Also things tend to last longer when not exposed to the sun or much oxygen.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 11 2019, @05:53AM (2 children)
Although this could go seriously wrong if mismanaged, I do recall reading about bacteria that are able to degrade some polymers back into their constituent monomers, or at least shorter-chain monomers that can be reused as feedstock.
What I'm envisioning here is some sort of bioreactor facility full of digesters with a diverse bacterial population that can "eat" these things and spit out, for example, pure ethane, propane, terephthalic acid, vinyl chloride, and so forth. These can then be collected and fractionally-distilled off (of course powered by solar or wind) and the purified feedstocks shipped out to manufacturers.
Of course, if the little buggies spread out, we may end up in the worst case being forced off plastics entirely as the whole planet gets covered in things that go om-nom-nom whenever they see a polyalkyl bond...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Monday March 11 2019, @12:19PM (1 child)
Sounds like a good problem to have...
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 11 2019, @07:10PM
Think about that from the perspective of a healthcare worker, please...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Weasley on Monday March 11 2019, @02:44PM (1 child)
Well, it's not like they were actually recycling the stuff. They were just dumping it all in the Pacific.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday March 11 2019, @03:59PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by boltronics on Monday March 11 2019, @09:23PM
What about Japan? They are extremely strict when it comes to recycling. Take a look at this video, for example:
TL;DR - How To Recycle in Japan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9H--PolzH8 [youtube.com]
Do they recycle everything locally, or do they ship the bulk of it off to China too? In which case, are they facing the same problem, and how are they handling it?
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
(Score: 2) by pinchy on Monday March 11 2019, @11:44PM (1 child)
The entire world should implement a one child per couple policy till the population necks off to a 10th of current.
Forbid new development of land areas.
As generations die off, put the land they used into the "reserved for wildlife areas"
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:47PM
How would you enforce that? What would you do in the case of someone who had twins or triplets? How do you make sure there does not become a perverse incentive for adoption, for example?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...