Turns out it's a bigger scam than I realized.
* "At no additional charge in addition to your substantial taxes." Nothing is free.
Recycling Deceptions
Our county has "staffed recycling centers" where you can bring your trash for free,* provided that you have separated the recycling. Recycling has to be separated into aluminum/steel cans and plastic bottles. I've always suspected this was a scam of some sort -- aluminum is the only thing that is really cost-effective to recycle, but it's easily separated from the steel with electromagnets.
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4 comments:
It's neither a complete scam not is it all roses & rainbows.
Post-consumer plastic waste, glass in its various colors, paper, card, steel and aluminum are all commodities that have prices, even if the prices for most are most often negative.
If a particular class is going to landfill, that is because right now this week the price including transport to landfill it is cheaper than the price to recycle it. If next week there's a recycler that will take it for less, the town will still need to pay, but that cost might be lower than the landfill cost.
I've heard also that with 12% of US municipal solid waste going to waste-to-energy generation plants, the combustion-technicians like to have the plastics separate as it gives them a high-BTU easy-burning input that can be mixed-in as needed given the moisture-content and burn-ability of the rest of the current input waste as it changes. (12% of US municipal waste creates 0.1% of US electricity)
I've now lived in a couple of places where I've seen angry letters to the local paper about the green bins being dumped into the same truck as the garbage, but have observed myself that the trucks are dumping the recycling bins into a hopper/compactor section that is different from the hopper/compactor section the normal waste is put into. The location of the dump mechanism is fixed on the truck, but chutes move.
There are certainly mandates, regulations, and policies in this area that have turned out to come with perverse consequences.
There's also the matter that, as The Hill also reported, albeit buried at the bottom of its article, that Chemistry and Plastics representatives said that the study was based on outdated materials.
There's no less reason to believe the those folks' claims than there is the activist's claims.
Eric Hines
Recycling is mostly a symbolic religious exercise, not of full and conscious Gaia worship (that would require self-honesty and observation) but its milquetoast cousins.
No recycling here, which suits me, but I was pleased recently to find a local source for untreated wood shavings from a cabinet shop. I've already had almost 80 bags, each about oil-barrel-sized, delivered to my place. They're easy to spread and make great soil amendments.
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