In Denver the city let us know that almost all the glass we “recycle” was used to line the city landfills. Lining the landfills with glass was apparently a good thing, bc it helps prevent toxic evil sludge from leaking into the groundwater*. But it sure isn’t the godsend we were all taught recycling would become.
The local beer company (I have lost track of their name, but people here still call it coors) uses a lot of recycled glass to make their bottles, which seems like a decent thing.
But I think one big problem is that many loud people want every behavior to be profitable. If recycling can’t “turn a profit” then it should be stopped. If the rec center costs more to keep open than the kids pay at the door, we need to increase the prices rather than use our taxes to fund the rec center. Whoever convinced the USA that everything should be profitable should be punched in the face.
*glass lined landfills apparently has not prevented Colorado toxic sludge from seeping upward, and being elected to government. cf Corey Gardner.
The myths around recycling plastic have been covered, perhaps famously in a 2004 episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit. The Internet zeitgeist latched onto that episode briefly, but we didn’t act on that information and eventually forgot about it.
There are some upsides to knowing how little actually gets recycled.
It means that lighter weight materials like tetrapaks can replace heavier materials like glass since neither will be recycled anyway. If you are going to sort your plastic bags into the grocery store bin, you shouldn’t choose paper bags just because they seem recycly.
It might help people to avoid putting things in the recycling barrel that do not belong, like plastic wrap. I am still working on some eco conscious people who think it is better to put mixed products (eg paper plastic and/or metal) into the recycle just in case it might be recycled.
It might save water used for rinsing recyclables; I no longer rinse food off glass before putting it in the bin since it won’t pay off.
There are real advantages just to having landfills be sorted. If you know you have a load of aluminum or glass which will not seep into the groundwater, you can do things you would not be able to do with a load that might contain household hazardous materials that will poison us.
Right, but what if the “recycling” isn’t profitable because the amount of energy it takes to “recycle” something is more than the energy (and CO2) you dump into the air making it from scratch. Recycling only makes any sense when don’t put more in than you get out. Often times recycling becomes uneconomical because you have to put more in than you get out, and that’s with the state taking on the burden and cost of collecting all of that trash together in one spot.
If even after you collect all of the trash and hand it to someone, if that literally free material still isn’t worth recycling, it’s almost certainly because it isn’t worth recycling from a thermodynamics point of view, and you have to put more energy and material in than you get out the other end. It’s like spending a barrel of oil to make 3/4 of a barrel of oil. In the case of plastic which comes from fossil fuels, that analogy almost isn’t an analogy.
The local waste and recycling company here in the midwest are a bunch of tightwads, and I mean that as a complement. They do a mixed recycling collection. Because the biggest cost to recycling is transportation, they weren’t shipping to China. They found local customers for each recycling stream and are still making money from it.
On the flip side, one of the apartments I rented years ago in Binhai, China, had a thick stack of import documents left behind by the previous tenant. At least a thousand pages. Every couple pages described an import of paper for recycling. 5 tons here, 40 tons there, etc. All that paper for recycling … except for that abandoned stack.
You have a stack of stuff in front of you, which contains a lot of carbon. You can either burn it, releasing that carbon into the atmosphere, or you can bury it.
Now, assume that you live in a world where very soon, we are going to have to start building a lot of zero-carbon power sources to pull carbon from the air to sequester it and bury it.
Seems like burying the waste is a whole lot better than burning it…
(In order to get out of this CO2 mess, the planet is going to have to put down a bunch of carbon into geologically stable forms, like it did the last time, which is where all that coal and oil came from. It will happen, regardless of what we do. Don’t worry, the planet will be fine; and life on the planet will continue.
Humanity, on the other hand, has a choice: be a part of the solution, or be eliminated. We have got to start getting carbon back into the ground, as quickly as possible. We can do this by sucking the CO2 out of the air and sequestering it back into the ground; we can plant biomass specifically to bury the sequestered carbon, we can trap it in building materials and make durable goods out of carbon (which are reused/recyled/buried when done). These are good places to start. Or perhaps, an even better place to start is not taking any carbon out of the earth anymore!)
This is part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in, because we’ve confused making money with doing the right thing. Even if we shift how we package everything to be more sustainable, we STILL need to deal with the plastic in our environment right now. This is something that we have to deal with, because it’s having a detrimental impact on our environment. Same with other kinds of pollution.
Not everything worth doing makes a profit. Until we understand that, we’re fucked.
A weird note about Amazon’s small package envelopes: the plastic ones have a recycling icon that specifies “Store drop off” and a how2recycle.com link. Follow that trail long enough, and you’ll find that it needs to be dropped off at a specific drop box for plastic film, just like your one-use grocery bags.
But their padded paper ones are all paper, with a puffy glue inside, that they say is completely ok to recycle with paper.
Right, but the point is that recycling isn’t dealing with plastic in our environment. In fact, recycling was definitely making it worse when we were shipping it to China to have them bury it in a bad landfill or dump it into the ocean. That “recycling” would have been better in an American landfill, rather than floating in the Pacific ocean.
It isn’t about profit, it’s about it literally not helping the environment, no matter how much money you are willing to waste.
I agree that you do need to look at the total life cycle of something, and decide IF it is reusable or recyclable - based on environment and energy use, but not based Purely on profit motive.
Exactly because it’s not profitable is the reason why. If we (not us as individuals, but as a society) cared about more than profits, we’d have figured this out.
