American Thinker:
Anyone who has ever been to a recycling plant is invariably surprised at how dirty and nasty America’s favorite green activity really is. Trucks dump the material on a long conveyor belt, where a few dozen people pick through by hand what is supposed to be recyclable material but more and more often is just plain old dirty trash.
The recyclables used to be worth something more than bragging rights about liberal moral superiority. Plastic bottles, newspapers, and cardboard were just a few of the favorites you could ship to China by the ton and make a few bucks along the way. No more: Last year, the Chinese were happy to pay us $100 a ton for newsprint. Today, $5 a ton is the going rate.
Even that is disappearing: too many people are putting too much bad stuff in their green bins. Result: The pizza box stewing in a half-full can of cat food is now considered contaminated, and the Chinese do not want it at any price. more here
The only thing worth recycling is metal, be it copper, brass, aluminum or steel.
Unfortunately, we’ve moved to an economy of cheap shit, so there’s hardly anything worth recycling anymore.
Not only that, but it’s already been made out of recycled material already!
I actually have Chinese electronic splitters that when you peel back the tin shield you can see they are from tin cans that held food products!
We had a neighborhood here that lost it’s recycling. The people were using the bin for garbage. Food waste, dirty diapers etc.
The way things are going, one day we will be buying their “recyclables.”
Some of my neighbors actually pay extra to the refuse company to have the little blue recycle box to sit at the curb next to their regular pick-up bin on garbage day.
What I don’t understand is if we are capable of melting down steel products without polluting the air (scrubbers) why the hell are we building garbage dumps that ooze methane?
The EPA and ATF have been after me for years for some reason I can’t figure….
Check out the film “Idiocracy” for prescient images of mountains of unrecyclable garbage filling the planet.
PJ, I have a friend in the landfill business. They capture methane and burn it to generate electricity for their site. The stuff that smells the worst from the site is the compost wind rows. They run 3 trucks through a neighborhood, one for garbage, one for recycling and one for yard waste. Garbage gets buried, recycling gets sorted and yard waste turns into mulch/top soil.
@ old oaks, I understand that process.
I just hate to see and smell the landfills. I believe a clean burn would result in much less land fill.
Check out the huge park near Three Floyds on the main drag…much of the time, nasty smell.
Residential recycling has been a scam all along. Even aluminum, because you used to be able to save up your empties and actually get a few bucks by taking them to a recycling place yourself. But once the mandated home recycling arrived, those places were closed. Individuals did a pretty good job of sorting, delivering only aluminum generally when running other errands so the energy/pollution costs were much lower than large, heavy specialized recycling trash trucks.
Related topic: One of the things you hear the eco-nuts whine about to support recycling is “but all our landfills will be full within 20 years!” Crap-ola: Landfills are almost always licensed for 20 years, so by bureaucratic fiat it is always true that all currently active landfills will be closed withing 20 years.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/06/Save-the-oceans.pdf
PJ this is a great article and talks a lot about incineration: from the author:
Incineration plants are required to have very low emissions levels, and as a result inciner- ation is healthier and more environmentally friendly than any of the waste management op- tions supported by green ideologues.26 The whole Swedish incinerator network (32 plants in 2009) emitted only about half a gram of dioxin in 2009, which is 200 times less than in 1985.27 One deep landfill fire of the kind that was seen across Campania can emit almost as much dioxin as the Swedish incinerator fleet produces in a year.
I should have said ^^^ I believe a clean burn would result in much less land fill. The land fills contaminate the area surrounding it for how many hundreds of years. Well water HAS to be contaminated from the land fills nearby.
@ Frank
Thanks for the article.
I just think fire has always been the way to go. I’ve seen the air purification results of putting a good filter system on steel production and it makes sense to do the same to garbage.
I may be naive and simplistic, but it seems like common sense.
Please try to remember there are humans involved with sorting the recyclables, so please consider them as you place items into recycling
– I place newspapers into paper grocery bags then tape them up so they don’t break apart midstream
– I rinse out steel food cans
– I rinse aluminum foil and place all foil into an aluminum foil bag like a potato chip bag
^^^^^
I sew and very frequently have needles that go into he garbage. I save a bunch of sharps in a container and tape it securely shut and mark it “Sharps” Don’t know what the word is in Spanish or Somalian though.
I’ll be damned if I’m gunna take time to sort and clean garbage (aka recyclables) just for some disposal company attempting to make money off me. Tin, aluminum, paper, plastics – We are practically buried in the stuff it is so abundant. Gold, platinum, and palladium (and maybe silver) are the only real “common” materials worth recycling, but the “common” person doesn’t possess these materials in any significant quantities. Therefore, the “common” person need not bother themselves with recycling.
Well back over a decade ago P&T,did an episode of BS that dealt with waste & stupidity of recycling. Basically it’s just a bunch of beurocrats creating make work jobs that actually do more harm than good to the environment,but allow these schmucks to pat themeselves on the back.
Sorting that waste should be easy to automate. There’s a lot of value to the E Waste in particular. Why are we sending those precious metals to China? I don’t get it.
Yesterday I hauled two TVs to the recyclers. One of them a huge older TV. Heavy and awkward to grab. The wife asks the fat attendant if he could help. He was smoking a cigarette and managed one of the dirtiest looks I’ve ever seen back at her as he calmly just stood there finishing his cigarette. I grabbed the heavy TV and yanked it out of the truck and let it land on the ground. Now he runs over to help. So he grabs one end and we start into the metal container they haul this stuff off in. We had to throw it up on top and he was really struggling to get his end up. I wait for the perfect time and hip checked his ass hard into the side of the container. Made it seem like I lost balance. It was so much fun I was waiting for another opportunity.
In Oregon, they just raised the deposit on bottles and cans (soda and beer) from 5 cents to 10 cents. Not only does this mean a 100% pay raise for homeless people, but the beverage industry revenue from the program also doubled, because a large percentage of the bottles and cans are never redeemed, so the companies pocket the leftover change. Pretty slick, huh?
http://www.wweek.com/news/state/2017/02/01/corporate-lobbyists-turned-oregons-iconic-bottle-bill-into-a-sweet-payday-for-their-clients/
This inventor converts plastic back into oil. He’s on to something:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGGabrorRS8
About 5 minutes long
I remember back in the ’60’s when my grandmother had a burn pit behind her house. In Towson, Maryland, near a beautiful golf course. We’d visit her for Christmas, and we couldn’t wait to burn all the wrapping paper and cardboard after we opened our presents. Good, times, good times.
Now you’ve done it!
LONG
DIATRIBE TO FOLLOW…
old_oaks JULY 15, 2018 AT 11:40 AM
That’s what we’ve got here and being an idiot or trying to be a nice guy I used to drag the three containers A WAYS DOWN to where it was easier for the garbage guys to get them with some other neighbors in one group. Then they started in with the three trucks at different times of the day so you could leave your containers there all day or make three trips. Screw it! It all fits in the one regular garbage container and the yard waste I can mulch. No more recycling. And yes starting out they would reject your stuff and leave it at the curb if it wasn’t presorted and clean. Now most of what people put out there is unclean/garbage, which is why they have the sorting centers.
When the “Old Man” was alive he insisted that we save the aluminum and recycle it for about twenty to thirty bucks when we’d make the trip after crushing the cans, etc. Not long after he died the bottom dropped out not worth the gas to drive to the place, let alone crushing the cans to fit into manageable bags worth taking in.
Again, going back some years, can you remember when there was a “Cash For Gold” in every vacant gas station or store front (Mid West)? Partner and I made it more of a concerted effort at his brick and mortar family owned jewelry store. Mind you it was just a small place, stand alone, not a strip mall and we took in over one million in scrap metals the first nine months. We paid TWO TO THREE times in cash money (as in green stuff) what the other shysters were paying and still made money. I’m not saying we made or lost a dime, but for about five to six years that deal was better than sex. I provided the extra security and deterrence value from the thugs that would case us for robbery and he provided the location. Worked quite well and we never got hit as some of those around us did. I could go on, but the comment about precious metals is what works if it’s not the primary or only function of the location. Majority of those who came in had no clue of what they had or what they should have received. Jewelers from as far away as a hundred and thirty miles away brought in what they took in also, because we paid cash. The stories…
This is the edited version as I tend to be verbose…
Goldenfox that video is a scam.
And you can convert the plastic into gasoline as he points to a piss colored container LOL
Damn. Everyone’s already bored everyone else with stories about recycling.
OK, here’s the deal. The writer of this piece is a dumfuk. He knows nothing about recycling. I do. Why? Because I founded a recycling company in 1992 that’s still operating today.
The entire point of it was to SAVE money, not MAKE money. Observe.
Let’s say it’s 100 bucks to have a truck pick up a dumpster. Your company has 10 dumpsters. Recycling reduced the number of dumpster pickups by 1/3 so suddenly your company has more money.
It was never about the fucking environment. It’s about reducing overhead.
The fug is this kid going on about cat litter and pizza boxes for? Is he high? He sounds high. I bet he’s high.
Stupid high kids writing about recycling…get off my lawn!
Machines can do the work but they are expensive…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaOEiBA-Z1A
I’d like to know how many roaches are brought into stores when people recycle bottles and cans.
When I was a kid, we had a store that sold soda in bottles, of course. Bottle deposit was 2 cents. As soon as the customer left after returning empty bottles, we immediately hauled the bottles out to the soda delivery shed. After battling roaches once, we learned our lesson.
i recently read that most recycling is so worthless, its just thrown in with the trash at the recycling center
PJ is dead on. I manage a municipal WTE plant – one of only 85 in the US. Not only do we reduce the volume of the city’s household waste by 88%, we treat it to make sure it is chemically inert and contaminants/heavy metals won’t leach into the ground water (TCLP tests quarterly). The residue ash is “clean” enough to use as sanitary daily top cover for the landfill’s working face as well.
Still, we don’t want glass or aluminum. Glass melts and latches on to all the trash around it in the furnace and makes a giant booger (called a clinker) and aluminium melts and drips between he sliding floor of the boiler – where it resolidifies and screws up the moving parts. Plastic burns great and the acid gases are sequestered by lime slurry.
The steam we produce goes to a dedicated source, but we could just as easily make electricity.
I only found out about the recycling “scam” a couple years ago on a tour of the local recycler’s facility. The guide absentmindedly mentioned they finally got a buyer for their glass. “Finally? I’ve been recycling for years. Where did you used to take it?” The landfill – of course they never told anyone that.