Some Recycling Is Now Being Re-Routed To Landfills (wral.com) 166
"Thousands of tons of material left curbside for recycling in dozens of U.S. cities and towns -- including several in Oregon -- have gone to landfills," reports the New York Times. Slashdot reader schwit1 summarizes their report:
One big reason: China has essentially shut the door to U.S. recyclables. The Times notes that about a third of recyclables gets shipped abroad, with China the biggest importer. But starting this year, China imposed strict rules on what it will accept, effectively banning most of it. That, the Times reports, has forced many recycling companies who can't find other takers to dump recyclables into landfills.
"Recyclers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe have also scrambled to find alternatives," reports the Times, though most major U.S. cities aren't affected, and countries like India, Vietnam and Indonesia are now importing more materials.
But at least some recycling companies are simply stockpiling material, "while looking for new processors, or hoping that China reconsiders its policy."
"Recyclers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe have also scrambled to find alternatives," reports the Times, though most major U.S. cities aren't affected, and countries like India, Vietnam and Indonesia are now importing more materials.
But at least some recycling companies are simply stockpiling material, "while looking for new processors, or hoping that China reconsiders its policy."
All these refined materials (Score:1, Interesting)
in one place. But no, let's mine asteroids first!
LOL.
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Yeah, blame China (Score:5, Insightful)
China rejects the extremely low-grade American "recyclables" that are very poorly separated from other forms of waste.
Blame China for large amounts being subsequently sent to landfills.
Bullshit.
I have personally witnessed materials placed in recycling bins at a company I worked at in the Bay Area being collected by a non-recycling, waste truck.
Visit any business' waste dumpster in the Bay Area and you will see more recyclable materials than other types of waste.
Recycling is mostly a lie. It's a way for politicians to score green points.
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I have personally witnessed materials placed in recycling bins at a company I worked at in the Bay Area being collected by a non-recycling, waste truck.
I'm not so sure- "single-stream" recycling means the truck used doesn't matter.
I completely agree that too many "Americans" refuse to recycle properly- I witness it all the time everywhere, and I fish recyclables out of trash cans too frequently.
I know of small cities where recycling "didn't work" and they put it all into incineration and use the heat. I don't like that either, for many reasons. You certainly lose the value of the things forever.
Re:Yeah, blame China (Score:4, Interesting)
The stuff that's really valuable (metals) doesn't get consumed, and honestly it takes about as much energy to make plastic as you get out of burning it. And you don't need a huge supply chain to do it, you can dispose of waste locally and cleanly. Thow in the sewer solids while you're at it.
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Thanks! If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
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Yes, I think they're not really recycling like people assume they are. Some things are easily recyclable, other things are hard. Electronics are VERY hard. Getting a new phone every year is essentially the same thing as throwing your phone into a landfill every year. Even compostable items don't really go to compost.
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I know that recycling in Germany is vastly different than in America. It is required to recycle and if you don't, or don't separate properly, you are fined. Stores which sell products in recyclable containers are required to accept those containers back.
Recycling in America is appalling. Perhaps the mafia-controlled Big Waste companies which pushed for non-separated recycling have something to do with it. In my city there once were independent recyclers whom a building could opt to serve them and collec
Re:Yeah, blame China (Score:5, Interesting)
Recycling in Germany isn't very different then recycling in Canada. We have electronics waste funds and all the other stuff, but you can easily find with a bit of digging the number of companies in Germany shipping e-waste right to China, Vietnam, and other poor 3rd world countries for disposal. You're laboring under the delusion that there's some difference, there isn't. It was simply fools told by idiots that it was a good idea, leading idiots and fools to make everyone feel good, and people ahead of the curve to ship the waste and "make it someone else's problem." American recycling is just out in the open, other countries are simply putting a shiny bit of polish on all that garbage.
Its the same environmentalists that screech for recycling, that protest waste-to-energy plants, or waste separation facilities being built at all. Or environmental groups tying up the building of them for literal decades in court, or environmental regulations. In turn, those companies "deal" with the waste by sending it to 3rd party companies aka put on a ship and sent to the asshole of nowhere. This isn't any different then them telling you windmills and solar panels are REALLY GOOD for the environment, until you do the research yourself and find that the materials going into making it do far more damage to the environment then say, building a nuclear power plant.
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Some things are easily recyclable, other things are hard. Electronics are VERY hard.
That puzzles me a bit. Compared to digging into the ground and melting various minerals, often with a low density and "polluted" by other minerals, one should think that the same process with electronics where the density is high should be easier.
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Re:All these refined materials (Score:4)
I'm thinking one day there will be a booming mining industry at many city dumps.
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You might be old enough to have walked into some of the old dumps as a kid, I did and what did I discover ... auto parts, houses, pipes, batteries and every assortment of things in a home.
What is currently being mined in old dumps is the methane. If they can start pumping in higher oxygen air into the lower layers ( which, btw is low in O and does not rot very quickly it's like the bottom of the ocean ) you'll effectively start the decomposing processes faster, and if you can get that to kick in, the organi
Re:All these refined materials (Score:4)
I bet there is a lot of gold from old computers tossed into dumps
Yes, I remember going through the city dump when I was kid. I was a small town so there was basically no rules on what you could or couldn't dump there. One of the thing that I remember was the amount of copper there. Copper pipes and copper wire. So yeah, there is a lot of heavy metals in these old dumps.
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Just now? (Score:2, Insightful)
Jesus tits. They've been sending lots of recycling to landfills, forever.
Paper and colored glass recycling is just a show. Getting you to sort your trash is just conditioning you to do what your told.
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In related news: on days when my recycling driver is sick, the garbage truck picks up the recycing.
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The last time a recycling truck came by my house, it seemed like a Grateful Dead tour bus. I'm not kidding. Really laid back dudes.
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Jesus tits.
Thanks for that imagery.
[ Condolences to Catholics, who will have to power through Confession ... ]
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When I hear "Jesus tits" I always think of that scene [yandex.net].
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Channelling my Uncle. Way before that movie. He could cuss for an hour, without repeating himself once. When I was 6, I was in awe.
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Jesus tits. They've been sending lots of recycling to landfills, forever.
This is correct. A lot of "recycling" isn't actually made of recyclables - people throw in stuff (mostly various types of plastic) that they assume is recyclable, but actually isn't. So at the waste processing plant these things get removed and thrown in with the rest of the (non-recyclable) garbage. Other things are theoretically recyclable (and have the recycling sign on it) but very few places have the capabilitiy to recycle them, or there just isn't a market demand for these materials. It's fairly easy
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They're burning gas, to maintain the temperature. Plastic is 15 kinds of nasty when it's not burned really hot.
Glass, alcoholism...nonsense. Vodka bottles are relatively tiny, glass is associated with beer houndism. Beer is food.
Re:Just now? (Score:4, Funny)
Stalin was a Georgian. Let's nuke Atlanta.
Re:Just now? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah. And Hitler was Austrian.
G'day, mate!
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Hitler was a vegan.
No he wasn't. He ate eggs and dairy.
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So Hitler was a vegetarian.
Which is proof that being vegan makes you a better person than vegetarians!
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Well then, it's time to open some domestic plants. (Score:2)
C'mon, Trump! Didn't you promise jobs? Here's your opportunity.
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As if that lying sack of shit is actually going to do anything that doesn't directly benefit him.
Seems to me, that if you and the parent poster really gave two fucks instead of Trump bashing. You'd be petitioning for waste to energy facilities. After all, Trump *reduced* regulations and adjusted the environmental regulations on things like that, so go on. It doesn't benefit him, but he's already created the environment to make it happen.
Oh what? You don't want to do it. Gee it's almost like you're the same delusional idiots that believed recycling wasn't really shipping waste to another country or
Recycling in NZ used to work... (Score:5, Interesting)
When recycling started big time here in NZ we had open recycling crates that were great, everyone could see what was in the bin, not so good for privacy [you drink too much wine]. Later they changed them to larger lidded wheelie bins and then the recycling content was degraded significantly as no-one could see the crap that was being put in there. No doubt China didn't appreciate the hugely lowered quality of recycling material that they were getting.
I suspect we're not the only country that is guilty of this...
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WA is using a few transparent bins to 'raise a conversation'
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... [abc.net.au]
They should make this mandatory for recyling bins so you can see if people are contaminating it.
Fun Fact: I heard pizza boxes are not recyclable because of all the oil from the pizza soaking into the cardboard!
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Fun Fact: I heard pizza boxes are not recyclable because of all the oil from the pizza soaking into the cardboard!
As an aside: They can usually go in yard waste, if you get the option.
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Fun Fact: I heard pizza boxes are not recyclable because of all the oil from the pizza soaking into the cardboard!
So, seeing this statement I started googling around a bit and it seems like several US newspapers have ran this story.
When I looked up the same things in Swedish (My current place of residence.) sources I got search results directly from organizations dealing with recycling and they all say that pizza boxes should be recycled with other cardboard packaging.
That makes me think that there are three possible scenarios:
1) Non-recyclable pizza-boxes is an urban myth floating around in the US and the recycling ce
Re: Recycling in NZ used to work... (Score:2)
It doesn't solve anything. It will just force people to dump on the side of the road and good luck trying to figure out who did that.
California has had some of the most ridiculous laws regarding waste, specifically about TVs and electronics. What did people do? Dump all that crap on empty land. It wasn't until they started making the dump take this stuff for free and putting up signs for it did this side dumping stop.
But it still didn't solve the waste problem at all however. I'm sure the random dumping of
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Fun Fact: I heard pizza boxes are not recyclable because of all the oil from the pizza soaking into the cardboard!
Fun fact: outside of North America, we don't usually soak our pizzas in oil (and assorted fats).
Seriously, the pizza box has a separate cardboard "tray" inside that soaks up anything that leaks (fat, sauce, wayward toppings). Since the pizza is not leaking like crazy (as with would be the case with the Pizza Pizzas and Dominos of this world), you can usually just throw away that tray, and the rest of the box is dry and can be recycled.
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Don't assume that change happened countrywide - I'm in Cambridge, Waikato and we still have open crates for tins, glass and plastic, and we use cardboard boxes for cardboard and paper.
I know for a fact that this is the way it's done across the Waikato.
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What people have found was the old sorted recycling bins
Let's be clear... (Score:5, Interesting)
...China wasn't taking it because it's some sort of a utopia of recycling.
This story makes it sound like because of Trump, recycling isn't happening any more. Recycling (of these items that are no longer going to China) WAS NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPENING. It was being taken out of the sight of effete righteous dilettante Westerners who didn't want to *actually* deal with the hard choices of their 'recycling life style'...and essentially being dumped around the corner in the poor people's neighborhood.
The US is *awash* in recycled paper and plastics. Nobody wants them. Nobody can use them. Even National Geographic, the MOST self-righteously environmental organization, prints its magazine on virgin clay-coated paper, justifying its choice to refuse recycled base by its mission to deliver stunning photography being more important than the small amount of recycled paper it might consume. (Until very recently it wasn't really even recyclable after.
That's rationalized HOGWASH.
Re:Let's be clear... (Score:5, Informative)
Likewise plastic waste is recycled into other plastics. They *could* do that pretty efficiently until recently as their labor costs have risen.
A positive side-effect for them is to watch us squirm under the weight of our own waste.
Waste (Score:3)
The US isn't running out of room in it's landfills. You can put a modern landfill just about anywhere. The limiting factor is nobody wants a landfill in their county.
http://www.slate.com/articles/... [slate.com]
The other factor is we are throwing away less and less garbage per person, as packaging becomes more efficient. 30 years ago nearly everything you bought in a store came in it's own box, even if it was already in a tube or dispenser. Wal-mart forced companies to do away with the extra box to save money.
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You just wrote a fact about Wal-mart doing something good. I can't wait to see the replies you get!
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Who needs landfills? Sweden's got along fine without them for some years now. (And we're not the only ones [wikipedia.org].)
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This is literally a lie packaged to sound reasonable. Most of the plastic that is being rejected is the "dirty plastic". The kind that is effectively impossible to recycle without it costing you an arm and a leg, because you need to do so much separation of crap from actually usable plastic. Which is why it's usually against the agreements to ship it for recycling.
Which was utterly ignored by clear majority of companies shipping it to China.
If you're shipping clean, recyclable plastic, they seem to be still
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Need to ban some dumb things, like bottled water instead of drinking tap water. The clam shell sales packaging. Some retail packaging is very wasteful.
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100 % correct except for one thing --
Even National Geographic, the MOST self-righteously environmental organization
National Geographic Magazine is now owned by Murdoch/Fox, about as far as from the environment as a company can get. BTW I let my subscription lapse after the third in a row issue with a large article about the Holy land. See
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
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Re: Let's be clear... (Score:2)
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Most apartments outside China have trash chutes in the hall. So you don't have to carry it downstairs and it lands in a dumpster, where it can be picked up by truck.
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They don't do that in Guangzhou anymore, where in the last 4-5 years I've been seeing people getting ticketed for simply tossing their trash over the fence surrounding the bins and the like. (And no, not some tourist area--this is a very typical neighbourhood where there's little if any signage using Latin characters and I'm more often than not the only Caucasian in sight.) I can't speak for other areas, but the authorities in Guangdong really started cracking down on littering, etc. a few years ago, and yo
Nanotechnology Recycling (Score:1)
I realize some people will label this as uber-technological overoptimism, but I've always thought that the trash problem will ultimately be solved once and for all by a self-reproducing nanobot ecology that hunts down abandoned materials such as iron, copper, glass, and so forth for ultra-clean recycling. The notoriously appalling Great Pacific garbage patch -- gone. Active and closed landfills around the world -- emptied out, thoroughly sanitized, and turned into recreation parks. Centuries of trash dumped
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And once those nanobots start recycling things we're still using and don't want to recycle, we'll finally have the monkey revolution.
Planet of the apes, here we come!
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He's trying to pass his questioning to someone else and he found someone to recycle it for him.
Yawn (Score:1)
Old news. My parents stopped recycling 10 YEARS ago when they saw the recycling truck emptying at the same landfill as the garbage.
I won't cum in your mouth (Score:2, Insightful)
and we are running out of landfill space.
Problem with letting policy lead the market (Score:3)
The market doesn’t follow if it’s not profitable to do so, and recycling will never be profitable..
or even be revenue neutral.
Large segments of our western society believe recycling is important. An even larger segment - which broadly overlaps with the first, somehow - doesn’t want to actually pay for anything.
Re:Bears (Score:1)
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Re:Problem with letting policy lead the market (Score:4, Interesting)
Not quite true. Steel is cheaply recyclable and easy to sort. Aluminum is very easy to sort, and has the most profitability. Plastic on the other hand? Plastic it's cheaper to make more then recycle it. Most plastic in Canada is mixed with car tires at cement factories to make clink. Same in the US, especially since you guys like cement highways far more then we do up here.
Paper? Forget it. Should be burned or dumped into pits for methane gas retrieval, and used for power. Cheaper and more environmentally friendly to plant more trees. Then breaking it down, de-inking, re-bleaching, and reprocessing it.
Electronics? That's a hard one, especially with all the lead. Switching to tin didn't do us any favors in that one either. Simply more e-waste as electronics fail at a higher rate.
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Paper? Forget it. Should be burned or dumped into pits for methane gas retrieval, and used for power. Cheaper and more environmentally friendly to plant more trees. Then breaking it down, de-inking, re-bleaching, and reprocessing it.
Where, exactly?
Maybe in North America it's cheaper with its vast empty (of people and farms) landscapes with endless forests. In places like Europe...I don't think so. I mean, the industry lobbying body says itself [politico.eu] that "we want every fiber back...it’s our precious raw material". Furthermore they say 88% of corrugated boxes are made from recycled material...so why would they be doing this if it were cheaper to just cut down fresh trees? Well, because it isn't cheaper to cut down fresh trees.
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Take your pick. It's not hard to do, you could be importing pulp from Russia. Or you could be doing sustainable forestry like Canada but you're not. You make large tracts of new growth forest environmentally protected then, environmentalists start whining when companies go to harvest it. Of course they want all those waste products back, existing policies are counter productive to a variety of other methods.
Good. We need to take responsibility. (Score:2, Insightful)
It is really sad that we think of ourselves as the most advanced country in the world and yet almost nothing we do is truly sustainable. We take pride in protecting our children and yet consume resources at an alarming rate.
We should be working toward creating systems and infrastructure that is 100% sustainable even if adopted by all of the world's population. That is simply responsible engineering.
It is only cheaper to just landfill the materials because we aren't considering the costs our children will in
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That's not the only cost to future generations that we need to think about--and hey, the future is already here [bbc.com].
China did the RIGHT THING (Score:2)
Why? Because the pollution from just 16 of China's ships is more than what the world does with vehicles. Now that is pollution,not CO2. Still, we need to stop this insanity.
Hopefully, the west will get smart about this. Just go into old mines and put the various sorted elements for future recycling. And as to the un-wanted elements, such as mercury, lead, etc
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I pretty much agree completely with the opinions expressed above, with just a slight hesitancy when considering the situation from the perspective of comparative advantage. However:
... the pollution from just 16 of China's ships is more than what the world does with vehicles. Now that is pollution,not CO2.
While I could probably spend some time searching t'internet to verify this, any chance you could provide a link to the source you obtained this interesting nugget from please?
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Here is one that is not sensationalist about it. [theguardian.com]
Wiki [wikipedia.org]
Basically, CHina COULD decide to clean up the oil that they burn in those ships, but, that would mean major cost increases for exports.
Instead, they use the cheapest, which means almost straight oil.
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Thanks for the links. I somehow missed that news report at the time.
In fairness, however, I don't think most container ships are owned or run by China, per se. If memory serves there's only 2 or 3 really big organisations that run the vast majority of the container fleet - Maersk is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I do have a vague recollection that one of the co-operatives is largely SE Asian based. Not that it's important as such, your point was well made.
It would, however, seem mo
Recycling is mostly waste (Score:2)
One of the great disasters in preserving the environment is the widespread belief that recycling is somehow close to reducing consumption and reusing.
It depends on the case, but recycling is usually closer to outright waste than not consuming something, but most people seem to see recycling as nearly benign environmentally. Marketers know that slapping the word "recycle" on a product makes people think they're green, borderline tree-huggers. Now our world is drowning in garbage people think they are innocen
This is actually interesting (Score:2)
What I find interesting is that CHina did this to punish Trump for his tariffs. BUT, I think that this actually helped the world. Yeah, at the moment, nations are scrambling, but this will force nations to have a surplus of elements that they can build with.
Happening in my town (Score:2)
Only thing is the mayor didn't tell anyone and they keep charging for recycling. Oh, and he's paying something like $50/ton to dump it in a landfill in the next state vs $10/ton to send it to a local recycling facility. Scandal!
Recycling takes a lot of effort... (Score:2)
Placing paper and plastic in a bin is only one way to do it, and as the article shows, it's not very effective a lot of the time. If you care about the environment, there are more effective ways: buy used electronics like phones, instead of new. Buy recycled stuff, reusable bags. Don't put the vegetables at the grocery store in a little plastic bag. Then go out and enjoy the outdoors, which is the very thing that is being threatened by our unsustainable consumption.
Don't give up just because our efforts don
Oh My God. OP'er editordavid was born yesterday? (Score:2)
This is the oldest process and biggest non-secret of the entire recycling industry.
What do you do with product sent for recycling that you can't recycle? (Three guesses, first two don't count).
Does the reason why you can't recycle it change what you do with it? (Three guesses, first two don't count).
Too much product returned for recycling is just as common as non-recyclable material contaminating the recycle stream. Like, this had to be figured out on day one, a bazillion years ago (they've been recycling a
Cuba? (Score:2)
Cuba is pretty resource poor with little access to metals and plastics. We should start trading with them for recyclables. They could really use the materials.
Admit Reality (Score:2)
Re: Oh no! (Score:1)
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Follow your leader, immolate yourself.
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The real problem is too many people. So anyone with more than two kids is part of the fucking problem.
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So that's why the news tell us that you millenials are having less sex than pretty much anyone in modern age. You think that having sex means having a "fucking problem".
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I always found it stupid how "recycling" these days seems to involve smashing glass bottles, melting them down and then producing new glass bottles... Seems an extremely energy intensive process compared to just washing the bottles and refilling them.
Deposit bottles should be cheaper than melting down or disposable bottles, it just needs infrastructure in place which again shouldnt be hard - a truck delivers the full bottles to a store, the customers return to the store to buy more products and in doing so
Re: Time to bring back "deposit" bottles (Score:2)
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I'd bet that at least in the USA the biggest reason this doesn't happen is the convenience factor. On the business side plastic bottles are probably cheaper to buy than just the cost of cleaning old bottles, not to mention the cost of transport.