I work for a waste collection company. We collect and SELL over a THOUSAND tonnes of paper products every month.

Things might be different in your area but here our multi-million company is quiet profitable from it.

Paper/Cardboard is like any other commodity. the price fluctuates.

Not revenue from the fine -- revenue from selling the recyclables.

If a chip show a recyclable cart hasn't been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables.

They do spend money (not theirs, taxpayers') to make it look they do care for the environment, which brings votes. They don't give a flying damn about doing something that actually works.

Well, in other news, it is illegal to collect your own rainwater in Washington state. You MUST pay for city water. Dunno about digging a well. It all has to do with "disrupting" the watershed."

Of course, lots of resources on the web about this as well as "garbage recycling deniers" but a good summary page is here: http://www.uos.harvard.edu/fmo/recycling/myths.shtml [harvard.edu]

Recycling, in limited forms, is reasonable. But for the most part it is a PR game and has no real impact on anything.

Post-consumer materials, like plastic, is almost never recycled because of the contamination issues. A water bottle can be recycled but if one neck ring from a cap gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. As of yet, this level of sorting and handling removing neck rings and caps can only be done by hand - at union wages for the most part. This eliminates any reason for recycling water bottles or milk containers - it costs maybe 100x what the recycled materials would be worth to sort them to that level.

Paper is one of those iffy items. If you have a source of clean paper and can sort out coated papers from uncoated (magazines from newspapers, for example) recycling it makes sense and the pulp from processing uncoated paper can be used in a large variety of materials. Unfortunately, getting coated paper into the mix changes things enough that it can only be used in a few applications. So we are back to a very complicated sorting scheme if it is post-consumer. Another problem with post-consumer is "dirty" paper. Food waste mixed in or other contaminates again seriously limits the utility of recycled materials, so much so that it is almost always just dumped.

So anyone talking about post-consumer paper recycing is almost always dealing with clean products like newspapers that can be sorted or office materials that often do not need to be. They aren't talking about taking a mix of papers from curbside recycling efforts because the costs to process that are large and the markets for the output very restricted.

Metals, especially aluminum, have been profitable for quite a while. So much so that there are machines that can sort out the metal containers - by type - quickly. Glass containers can be cleaned and sorted but the value is far less there because of different types of glass being mixed in and the general impracticality of sorting it.

So what happens to curbside recycling materials? I seriously doubt anyone is hand-sorting and dealing with contamination issues like neck rings. A sorting machine to pick out the metal bits is easy and should be a part of any recycling effort. Glass is probably a big question mark. Paper? Almost certainly it is dumped.

When people had to sort their own stuff it gave the impression of it being more valuable, but the contamination issues were still there preventing most of the stuff from being used.

While Penn and Teller's presentation on this may be a bit dated, from everything I see they are still mostly right. It is a feel-good program for both people recycling and for municipalities. The limited amount of materials that are recovered from the recycling stream do earn enough to make it almost - but not quite - worth doing. But the PR value is priceless.

The Constitution does not "guarantee" what you and I may do. It only restricts what the government may do. Do you understand that?

The 10th Amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Therefore, I have the power and the right to create unrestricted anonymous waste disposal. It's a guaranteed right of mine and I may provide that service.

The Constitution does not have to give me that power. I have it.

Colorado's water laws are probably similar.

It isn't so you "have to purchase city water", it has to do with how water rights work. Because Colorado supplies water to something like 18 states, often the water that fills our rivers is already owned by someone who lives in Kansas, Arizona, or wherever. Water rights are based on age, the oldest rights are the best rights. When someone with water rights needs water, they make a call for that water and it gets released from a reservoir. If people collect their own rainwater, they are reducing the supply available to those who already own water rights.

I don't necessarily agree with this concept, but that's how it works. Out of all the things I would do if I could travel back in time, the first thing I would do is buy as many water rights in Colorado as I possibly could.

We have recycling and easy access landfills(Ontario, not Toronto). Over half of what people recycle, ends up in our landfills anyway because it's cheaper to dump it, than it is to recycle it.

I think you mean the 9th Amendment...

The 9th Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Myth: Someone goes through the trash and pulls out the recyclables before it goes to the landfill. Anything thrown into the trash will end up in the landfill. The labor required to sort through trash after it has already been mixed is prohibitive and almost never happens.

...and yet here we have a story about them doing just that and more.. Fining you if you don't do it.

You've missed the point entirely. The quoted myth is arguing that most or all trash gets sorted anyway. This is not remotely true. The Cleveland authorities look through some people's trash to see whether it contains recyclable materials, not to actually perform the separation for them.

Excuse: Recycling is a burden on families.
Recycling is so popular because the American public wants to do it.

If it were popular the article wouldn't be about people being fined for not doing it.

Another non sequitur. If 40% of the population is doing something, I'd say it's pretty popular, wouldn't you? But that's not even a majority.

According to engadget [engadget.com] it's going to cost 2.5 million. At $26 per ton that's 96,153 tons of recyclables before the new bins are paid off.

According to the article they picked up 5,800 tons of recyclables last year. Assuming that's the average for the recycling to pay off the new bins it's going to take 16 years.

"burglarized" = "burgled"

Stop inventing words.

There are also alternatives to recycling like the plasma trash incineration, which is able to generate electricity and reduce landfill volume even with traditionally non-recyclable materials.

That's why we have reservoirs.

I don't know if I would call it "pretty messed up", Colorado's water laws are the way they are for a reason. This system has been in place since the 1800's and in pretty unlikely to change. And other than flash floods in the mountains, we don't often see flood stage water levels.

Though, if we receive a much higher than normal snowfall over the winter, and unseasonably warm weather very early, we could run into some flood danger when "mud season" begins (that's what we call the season between Winter and Summer, Spring is a myth).

Yes, because there was no violence before guns.....*rolls eyes*

People have always killed each other and needed to defend themselves. If you ban firearms, they'll use knives, if you ban knives, they'll use blunt objects, if you ban blunt objects, they'll use their fists.

Don't believe me? Look at the UK - they banned guns and then the crimes committed using knives skyrocketed.

Homicide rate in US (guns allowed) 5.4/100k

Homicide rate in Canada (guns not allowed) 1.83/100k

Homicide rate in UK(guns not allowed) 1.49/100k

Don't spew that bullshit that the US is safer because people can carry guns. Canada's would be lower still since the gun crimes that do happen are from those smuggled in illegally from the US.

Just please don't follow the CA scheme. In NY, where I lived before Los Angeles, every grocery store had a few machines and you could bring down the bag of bottles you had whenever you wanted to. There was never a line, and everything just worked.

In CA, it's horrible. First, a lot more stuff has deposits on it. Second, most stores don't have any machines - they're only at special stores that have a separate booth on their property that handles recyclables (and not the ones I shop at for the most part). There's two automated machines per booth + one person who handles people who bring in huge amounts of stuff. Whenever I go, it takes me about a half-hour to wait in line while the professional bottle collectors in front of me off-load 5 huge garbage bags full of bottles. Half the time, the machines simply aren't working. And the booths operate from 9 AM to 4:30 pm. Oh, and there's usually a few homeless people pan-handling for money.

When I first moved here a few years ago, I'd store bottles on my apartment balcony for half a year, and then bring them down to get my $5-10 in deposits back. A few months ago I just gave up and decided I'd just recycle those bottles along with the rest of my recyclables. $20/year is not worth all the aggravation.

You just got through saying that if it wasn't guns, it would be knives, or something else. Clearly thats not the case since the country with less restrictive gun laws has a higher rate of homicides.

So you're saying Americans are more stupid than people from Canada and the UK? It's long been known that stupid people are more prone to fight than intellectual people.

You are so full of shit. If you look at the open carry laws in the US, gun restrictions are the exception, not the rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]

Has it ever occurred to you that these laws were probably passed in an attempt to reduce crime? Kinda like lowering the speed limit in dangerous intersections?

Source? And the Bullshit episode doesn't count. Penn and Teller officially retracted that one.

There is no real market for most this stuff except cardboard and metals. (Its already in the form it will be recycled into).

Not true. Glass is generally profitable to recycle, and is in significant demand.

Similarly, PETE (#1) plastic and HDPE (#2) plastic are also generally worth recycling. In some cases, #5, too. Most of the other stuff... not so much.

Either way, though, even if the city just dumps it in a landfill, that's still better than you dumping it in a landfill. When they dump it in a landfill, they're creating a huge pile of segregated plastic. If we get to the point that we're short on petroleum and it makes sense to find every shred of plastic we can for recycling, those piles will be a gold mine. Your random bottle in the middle of your trash will still be worthless.

I mostly agree, but as far as cans go, they don't have to be very clean to go into the smelter. Smelting can deal with excess carbon, perhaps with excess nitrogen too. That's what's mostly in organic matter, right?

Actually, your numbers are off. The city gets paid $26/ton for recyclables, but if those same recyclables go to the landfill, it costs $30/ton. So the city nets $56/ton from recyclables.

Also, I live in Cleveland. The recycling rate here is really pitiful. I think it is around 3% last I heard. Most of the city doesn't have curbside recycling pickup (aside from a few pilot areas). You have to haul your recyclables to a drop off. If this system gives us curbside pickup and some enforcement, it is easy to expect the rate would at least quadruple. Combine that with the $56/ton savings and it is paid for in two years.