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Plastic Recycling Is a Dead-End Street
Many cities have mandated recycling. Recycling doesn’t save money, it costs money. If it saved money, a mandate wouldn’t be necessary. The recycled material is sold on the market, but certainly income from such sales doesn’t cover expenses. The reason for recycling is about “saving the planet.” Probably most of those cities mandating recycling include plastics.
Remember hearing in the news a few years ago that China, which recycled most of the world’s plastic, wasn’t going to do it anymore? What is happening to all that garbage material collected? It turns out that plastics can’t be recycled, at least in a manner that makes any sense, economic or otherwise. We would be better off landfilling or incinerating it. What earth-hating environment-raping nutjob is spewing this nonsense?
You’ll never guess. Greenpeace.
Published in Environment
Link to story here.
Thanks. Fixed it.
I found the story on Pipeline, a site which Steven Hayward and John O’Sullivan write for. That article is worth reading, too.
Hm. Unless the individual customers get a check in the mail or something that more than covers their bother, it doesn’t “pay for itself” as far as the real customers are concerned.
Keeping the plastics out of the oceans. Most plastic in the oceans comes from Asia and South America (anyone remember the garbage in the harbor of Rio De Janiero). None of those places recycles anything , do they? More suckers, we.
Flash graphene is the answer.
https://news.rice.edu/news/2020/rice-lab-turns-trash-valuable-graphene-flash
They also recommend an international treaty that would have us using more glass and less plastic, to pick just one item I read at random in that paper.
My next NR column is about this very subject, and the fact that the faithful will continue to recycle plastic despite the authoritative word of bloody GREENPEACE. They’ll make the Japanese soldiers who hid in the jungle for years after the war look like faithless quitters.
Not just the faithful. There is an entire industry built up around recycling which will resist. And the NGO-bureaucracy complex. In the big cities we’re talking union jobs. So, no. Yours is a good analogy.
I think it has become abundantly clear that the “business model” for government programs is:
The MAGA platform should include an audit of all government programs with virtuous intent.
5. Expand the power of the state at the expense of the liberty of the people.
The Greenpeace report appears to advocate the virtual banning of plastics.
Mike, it’s good to see you again!
Correct. Recycling metal is economically viable. Industry has been melting down and recycling metal since long before there were any government mandates because it’s cheaper to do than refining it out of ore. It costs more to make paper from recycled paper than from trees.
Having said that, it is not my position that recycling plastic or other things will never be worth doing. Just as fracking has made oil fields profitable that were thought to be played out decades ago, new technology may come along that brings the cost way down for recycling some things. So let’s just do what makes economic sense, and if something comes along that makes even more sense, we can switch.
So what happens to all the stuff thrown in the recycling bin?
I like recycling in my city because it is free and plastic and aluminum and cardboard go away. All the same stuff in two bins. Two bins a week! It would be horrible to lose that, especially the broken down boxes. It is bad enough that glass does not go out anymore.
(free) Recycling today, (free) Recycling tomorrow, (free) Recycling forever.
Or, as Homer Simpson said “Can’t somebody else do it?”
That is a good question to ask your local recycling agency. And your question prompts me to ask. I will email the local agency the Greenpeace article and ask them what they are doing with the plastic, and report back any response. (I will be shocked if I get one, but that is another post.) I suggest readers do the same. I will also ask the local taxpayer association which I help support financially.
Further response in a later comment.
But, Greenpeace wants you to just consume less stuff and use glass and wood materials.
Speaking of plastic, why is that nobody has ever released a photograph of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Because it is a hoax!
I live by a simple motto: everything comes from the earth, everything goes back to the earth.
“free”
Back in the 90s and 00s I worked in paper recycling. It was known then that the entire industry was mostly a scam. The amount of energy and cost to recycle were prohibitive and would only work with government support and forced legal restrictions. The recycle paper mills only existed because under Clinton the government and whoever they could force had to buy paper with a certain percentage of recycle. Even then the chemicals and energy to create it was prohibitive, expensive and extremely dangerous. Example one of the chemicals we used for whitening of the paper was in powder form. It would cake in the auger and if heated at a relatively low level turned into a gas that would kill you fairly quickly. It almost killed me one day I was on the floor. We regularly used acids that were fairly strong. Lost more than one pair of shoes / boots to them over those years as they would come apart while you were walking a bit later.
Metal is a bit more viable but not by much. Plastics were almost impossible. It was understood that all this was government supported scams and frankly everybody that ran the industry were a bit shady. Ended up in court a couple of times as some of these were jailed. One of the reasons I have very little respect for the government.
I don’t really care if the plastic is all shipped to a landfill in China. I recycle because I know that once my city’s current landfill reaches capacity it will be next to impossible to expand it or to get a new landfill or incinerator approved.
Are such bleaching agents and acids not required when making paper from wood pulp?
My favourite post-Fleming James Bond novel is Carte Blanche. The villain is a recycling tycoon.
Yabbut, often at different depths.
Except when they don’t.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=greenpeace+protest+timber+logging+industry
I don’t understand being against lumber industry. Trees are a renewable resource.
Short answer: they’re Luddites.
In my city we also have curbside composting pick-up.
In theory this should be the most profitable of the “waste diversion” programs, because the composting can be done locally and the product can be sold locally.
Instead, the city pays a company to do the composting, and the company then gets to sell the product.
So, it’s incredibly profitable for the company, but not so much for the city.
Could the city do it profitably if they had to hire city-union workers etc?
Worse than Luddites.
The Luddites had a point. They did lose jobs.