Bikes, Bowling Balls, and the Delicate Balancing Act That Is Modern Recycling
1st May 2019
Recycled materials are only valuable if they’re pure—a collection of a single type of metal or plastic that can serve as a feedstock for manufacturing or other industrial processes. The economics of recycling would actually be spectacular if you could get people to separate out a dozen individual classes of recyclables and then deliver them to a recycling center.
May 2nd, 2019 at 12:59
I’ve worked around this for years. Worked on a really neat recycling sorting system near Pittsburgh (it would actually sort garbage so you didn’t have to have separate pickups). Unfortunately, it was killed by NIMBYs and the nut-less wonders in the state Dept. of Environmental Resources. Styrofoam is routinely recycled in Styrofoam plants and paper is routinely recycled in paper mills. However, Styrofoam is strictly banned from paper mills as even a small piece can ruin miles of paper.
New York tried to recycle milk jugs for new milk, but no woman would buy her kids milk in a used jug. So they tried using them to make park benches, until that market was overwhelmed. Today, people have to sort them into a bin that’s picked up by a special truck, hauled to the recycle yard, piled up, and then compressed and sent to landfills (along with the garbage that didn’t require sorting.) A power company proposed to burn them (in order to lower sulfur emissions), but that was rejected as incineration, and, well, the ‘public’ doesn’t want that.
When you look at gov’t programs that waste resources, look no further than the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Originally intended to encourage recycling and re-use, it instead makes it nearly impossible to do that. It’s loaded with petty political additions designed to punish companies that dared to piss off a Congress-slug.
Recycling – like everything else – depends on economics. The only econ the gov’t understands is “how much money can be funneled into my pocket”.