Is this fake recycling happening on any kind of scale?
This seems like something which could be pretty easily mitigated against by citizens following up with their local cities to verify that things are actually ending up at recycling plants. I'd be furious, considering what I pay for these services if I were to find out they aren't actually recycling. I guess I'll have to look into my local situation. This is a frustrating realization.
It's becoming exhausting that it seems like more and more we can't trust companies to do what they imply.
Recycling / waste management companies have a lot to ask for; they're being paid by local governments (and people) with the idea that they will handle the waste properly and safely - as opposed to dumping it in the river - and they just export it and turn it into someone else's problem?
I've lived in a bunch of apartment complexes that have a huge shared dumpster for recycling, right next to the one for trash. Sometimes they have separate recycling dumpsters for paper/plastic/whatever. Sometimes it's just one for all recycling.
I have NEVER seen the recycling dumpster contain only correct recyclable items. And when the trash dumpster gets full (which happens very frequently some places), the shit really hits the fan and people just blatantly dump regular trash into the recycling.
I always wondered how any of this mixed trash and recycling could ever be efficiently processed.
I've literally been in the local facility that sorts recycling, they do a good job of sorting clean stuff by type and throw everything else away, into the landfill where it is located. Should I not believe my lying eyes?
So someone pays to haul stuff away on trucks and I'm supposed to believe that they are dumping that stuff in the ocean for some reason. Or shipping it to China and then dumping it in the ocean.
So my question is, how much of the material they are taking is getting to recyclers? None of the articles linked within the original give a number. They do highlight that curbside pickup of recyclables is pretty much a dead end but that has been suspected for a long time.
when the public is rewarded for returning a usable product, usable in the sense it is worth more to recyclers, they apparently do it quite often. the reward is instant or tangible whereas curb side is mostly forget about it which in turns leads to it not being valuable down stream. being instant furthers participation. it is a good lesson to take to other states looking on how to implement a winning system.
so curbside, sounds good, feels good, doesn't really amount to something.
personal drop off with instant judgment and payout works better
My town recently moved from public waste management to a private waste management company and they have so many restrictions that people are just not recycling here anymore. Compared to before, this new company (which isn't even headquartered in this state, so the money is leaving the state) takes only a tiny fraction of recyclable materials.
They also manage to miserably fail at regular trash pickup. Skipping houses, ignoring calls for large items for weeks at a time, just generally terrible at their jobs to the detriment of the culture of recycling we once had here.
Are there any cases of this actually happening? There was a NPR story a few years ago about how counties/cities started landfilling recycling because it became too expensive, but I haven't heard of the opposite (eg. cities paying recyclers money for the sake of recycling).
> Is this fake recycling happening on any kind of scale?
Guess who will be the lowest bidder?
Even if there is some actual recycling and the trash can be sold for a positive value, chances are that someone who only picks the easiest valuables and then illegally dumps the rest will be able to outbid a more responsible competitor. It's just the natural outcome of a disposal market and it is incredibly difficult to regulate away from that outcome.
I always wonder about the places that pay for scrap light metals, open to the public. This seems like an industry that has to deal with a lot of sketchier people, that drive up in a pickup full of materials whose provenance is impossible to determine. I'm certain that recycling is legal, I just wonder how much the recyclers have to ignore from their suppliers.
When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades long contracts with municipalities.
Wonder if this is connected to China ceasing to accept trash/recycling from the US.
I really hate that recycling became essentially a for-profit shell game of shipping it somewhere else to be a problem rather than dealing with building the domestic infrastructure needed to correctly handle it (including not overselling recycling so we could get waste-to-energy plants as part of the mix).
In Switzerland they have a “simple” solution to this problem. The onus is on the consumer to make sure all recyclables are washed and split appropriately. There are different bins for metals, paper, compost, and the different kinds of plastic. The municipality randomly checks your bags and fines you if you don’t do this right. Regular trash has to go in specific bags that are much more expensive.
Basically the incentives are setup such that everyone takes the 10 extra minutes to do it right. People are annoyed but once you have a system down it’s not really hard to do.
I think this is the way to go. Everyone pitches in to make recycling work. In the long run it may even incentivize sellers to make their products easy to recycle, as buyers are forced to care.
Note I may have some details wrong as this is based on what I remember from living there 10 years ago.
Michigan - All soft drinks (and similar beverages) carry a $0.10 fee a the point of sale that you recoup when you recycle them. A few states seem to do $0.05, but at $0.10 people seem to start to care a lot more. Growing up there, almost everyone kept a pile of cans in their garage that they would take in to recycle. Almost all supermarkets had machines that you can deposit your cans/bottles in to get refunds. After parties in college, students are meticulous to recycle the cans because it would mean 10% off the price of the next party.
Cambridge, MA - Single stream recycling. Just throw everything in to the same recycling bin and the city sorts it. Makes it much easier to recycle but I'm sure this is expensive.
Egypt - When I was there, a coca cola from a corner shop came in a glass bottle and cost about $0.25 (USD). But you had to drink it there so they could recycle the bottle. If you wanted to take it with you, you'd pay twice as much. Personally, I loved drinking it out of the glass bottles, which are also very easy to clean, sterilize and reuse.
Miami, FL - Basically no one recycles. I've been in vegan cafes (not to stereotype, but the sorts of places you'd expect to see eco-consciousness) that don't have bottle recycling bins. My apartment building doesn't provide a means to recycle bottles, so if I wanted to do so, I'd need to drop them off somewhere (which I'm pretty sure isn't close by). As a result, I don't recycle plastic.
Interestingly, more and more buildings in Miami are recycling boxes. What I recently learned is that because of online delivery, cardboard boxes have proliferated causing a whole industry of recycling companies for these. People will actually pay you (I think about $100/pallet) for used boxes, so all of the apartment/condo buildings are getting in on the action.
In any case, I wish we would address the root cause of the problem, which is too much packaging. I've had Amazon packages with boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes. Every time I buy cereal, I'm buying a thick bag inside of a box. Our culture has too much packaging.
Is there anyway to get transparency on what individual communities are actually doing? At our last county fair, the recycling department had a game set up to help people understand what should go into trash versus recycling. I was asking the manager about the specifics and he said that the recycling was taken to a local facility where local people were paid to sort through it on a conveyor belt to pull out stuff that should've gone into the trash. It sounded feasible at the time, but reading through these comments I wonder if the recycling was actually being shipped to China (this was before the whole thing about China refusing recyclables started). We are on the west coast by a large port, so I would think it would easier for us to have been shipping recyclable to China that people farther inland.
I am yet to be convinced that domestic recycling is the way to go, as opposed to putting all the trash to one huge landfill and subsequently unleashing mining robots on it.
It seems to me that sorting stuff (recycling) at home is prone to errors to such a high degree that it is just a feel-good thing, as opposed to something useful for the environment.
And yet, if you force those same companies to pay for whatever they choose to do, but otherwise give them a free hand, they'll choose recycling, because it's the cheapest option.
This seems like something which could be pretty easily mitigated against by citizens following up with their local cities to verify that things are actually ending up at recycling plants. I'd be furious, considering what I pay for these services if I were to find out they aren't actually recycling. I guess I'll have to look into my local situation. This is a frustrating realization.
It's becoming exhausting that it seems like more and more we can't trust companies to do what they imply.
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