There is hardly a recycling business anymore. We used to export our sorted garbage to China, but they no longer want it.
The recycling scam used to be an easy trade. China shipped its cheap products made from recycled American junk and scrap here. The empty vessels used to dump Chinese junk products on America were then filled up with tons of recycling for the return trip back to China at minimal cost.
We sent them junk, they sent us junk. As the trade deficit grew, recycling was one of its many parasites.
But China is out of the recycling dump business. And the recycling business depended on it. No other market pays what it did. And no other country has the industrial scale to handle this much recycled trash. The American market is flooded with recycling that no one wants and trash prices have imploded.
And that’s having an immediate impact on the progressive recycling programs in the United States.
California’s trash is going right back to landfills. 62% of exported materials used to go to China. But no more. California’s Department of Resources Recycling sent a letter cautioning that the “economics of recycling” had become “unfavorable” thus “challenging what recycling means to Californians.”
It also warned recycling facilities that, “public health and safety should be their number one priority”.
In Massachusetts, mountains of trash recycling are piling up and there’s talk that trucks may stop picking it up. In Pennsylvania, a “recycling crisis created by China” was blamed for a refusal to accept paper. In Seattle and Phoenix, recycling is going into landfills. Fees are going up in Portland. In Pasco, recycling was abandoned before its start. In a Kansas City plant, one out of four items is going into a landfill. In Sacramento, where all of California’s recycling rules are made, most recyclables no longer are.
Fort Worth’s recycling brought in nearly a million last year. Now, it’s expected to cost $1.6 million.
Recology used to be the epitome of the reinvented garbage hauler, merging San Francisco urban politics with progressive PR about ending waste. But zero landfill talk has given way to a blunter reality, “There’s no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill.”
ht/ lurker
No. It’s a scam. Most of it ends up in the dump anyway and always has.
No, and NO!
Trump’s fault.
If by sorting and recycling you mean a catch all for storing junk in my garage, then yes I’m doing my part.
Yeah Grool you’re right. Waste Management hauls for our county’s transfer stations and it all goes into a lined landfill which BTW, smells awesome in this S. Carolina heat.
Absolutely not! Progressives are always full of crappy ideas that end up in landfills.
Nope. Got rid of the “green can” because we burn it during the rainy season. I’m thinking about getting rid of the “blue” can, that’s for bottles, plastic, etc. I pay extra for that. So, I think I’ll just get a bigger gray can and call it good. Just got my garbage bill and it went up $10! Screw that, one can, they can sort it all out (which they do anyways).
If I’m ordered to “CLEAN” the garbage on only 55 gals of water per day I will find a way to make everything NON RECYCLABLE.
Where we live “garbage” is picked up every two weeks. We have a compost bin for food waste — but we cannot use reinforced bags with biodegradable plastic because it takes too long to decompose, but we can put bones in it. We have a bin for plastic and paper — cardboard has to be separated and compacted or they don’t take it. We just got a bin for recyclable glass which does not include beverage containers because we bring them to a recycling center to get our deposits back (although I think there is also a charge we pay besides the deposit — which we don’t get back). By the time they are finished we will need an acre just to put out all of the bins. Don’t forget how they are protecting the environment by sending out a truck to pick up the different bins (although the glass bin may go into the same recycling truck).
I don’t think environmentalism has anything to do with it. It all has to do with government seeing how high they can make us jump. In case you were wondering, garbage companies here can be fined if the bring in “too much” garbage because that means people aren’t recycling the way government thinks they should.
If you are ever at a food court in a mall here you need a doctorate to figure out what you are supposed to do with your waste. I just leave it on the table and let them deal with it.
No. Never have, never will.
When I was a kid and new to the south marsh, there was a “fabled” glass bridge.
When you were 7, 2 miles on a bike is pretty far.
We went to see it, the bridge spanned a tidal creek and was indeed made of glass, as the aggregate in a cast concrete bridge.
The salt water had eroded the cement, exposing the multicolored glass to the sun.
It was kind of pretty.
That’s recycling !
I would hazard that bridge is in a bunch of photographs, it’s long gone.
Actually absolutely everything is recycled. Mother Nature does it for free and she doesn’t need it sorted. She doesn’t work on a human timetable but that’s not a big concern for her.
When I moved to MI from MN last year, I was surprised to find that we don’t have recycling. We have a deposit on pop cans/bottles that we get back when turning them in, but gone are the separate bins for recycling.
Took me a bit to get used to throwing paper, plastic and glass in the garbage. But now; not a problem!
Ever try recycling a blue recycle bin? ♻️
It’s plastic. I haven’t but it would be fun to try.
Briefly dated my ex wife. Recycling just doesn’t work. Trust me.
When I lived in a relatively peaceful suburb that was suddenly beautified with 96 gallon garbage totes, I used to recycle.
There they would pickup garbage tote every week and the recycling tote every 2 weeks. It was useful to separate recyclables because then I could load more garbage.
In the country now. I burn tires at night so people don’t see the smoke. All garbage and anything recyclable goes in the garbage. Here, they charge you extra to recycle. I currently pay $216/year to throw stuff out.
Do plastic explosives go in the blue bin?
I remember the good old days in Fairbanks, Alaska. Take your garbage to the dump in the bed of your pickup truck. But don’t leave it in the back of your truck for too long because the crows would start to re-cycle after they opened the plastic bags. (what a mess). Especially at 40 – 60 degrees below zero. And they would do the same at the garbage dump. Toughest birds I have ever seen.
@Tony T. Our main dump has dozens of buzzards. Or are they vultures? Creepy.
But Facebook told the wife that leaving your name and or address on junk mail and cardboard could be used for some kind of fraud like in The Jerk or something. Other than that no big deal for me, glass denamed paperand plastic except 6 in the bag for recycling the rest in the trash.
i recycle because i’m in a semi rural area and there’s a township recycling center 5 minutes from my house. by recycling and composting, i don’t have to pay the $10/week that the trash company charges. about every 2 months, i fill a trash bag with non recyclables, and drop it off at someone else’s house for trash pickup.
I recycle our soda cans and buy lottery tickets. Compost what I can. Throw the rest away
Just cardboard, because it doesn’t fit in the trash bags. They have a special dumpster for it.
Everything else in the compactor.
Seattle has garbage cops (not many, I understand) looking to see if you properly sorted. A warning the first time, a fine thereafter.
Besides the Chinese discovered the pet food they were making from our junk was killing our pets. So, they no longer want our trash.