Where Will Our Recycles Go?

[Midpack]

Plastic bags are also reusable but they've been inaccurately called "one-use" bags by the Environmental Police. They may not last as long a cloth bags but they can last dozens of times. In fact, I still have a plastic bag from a store that closed 10 years ago.

True enough. Maybe I’m wrong but I suspect at least 95% don’t reuse them. Some cities have outlawed them and other are charging 25 cents/bag to discourage them as you probably know.

 

[Rianne]

Cockroaches and Bugs we Love

China is figuring this out. It doesn't work with plastic, what bug wants to eat plastic? Worms it seems. Here's a couple of articles that show promise. I remember, as a kid, the rumor went around...what would survive a nuclear holocaust? Roaches and worms.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...llions-in-china-to-crunch-waste-idUSKBN1O90PX


https://news.nationalgeographic.com...plastic-polyethylene-trash-pollution-cleanup/

 

[Music Lover]

True enough. Maybe I’m wrong but I suspect at least 95% don’t reuse them. Some cities have outlawed them and other are charging 25 cents/bag to discourage them as you probably know.

Really? It seems that everyone I know has a "bag of bags" in their house...I don't know anyone that throws them out unless they're damaged.

Most stores around here charge 5 cents for a bag but there are a few exceptions where they are still free.

 

[braumeister]

Really? It seems that everyone I know has a "bag of bags" in their house...I don't know anyone that throws them out unless they're damaged.

Same here. They come in handy all the time.

Kroger, which I think is the biggest grocery store chain in the US, has committed to stop providing them next year. That's a good thing, and our bag of bags should last us for many years beyond that.

 

[audreyh1]

In the 90s there was one grocery store - Whole Foods I think - that had these wonderful stacking green bins that you could mount on a special cart, fill with groceries, then roll them out to the car and put them in. Really great for ferrying groceries although they could get heavy.

But they were so useful for storing stuff we ended up with a pile of them in storage and never had one to take back to the grocery store. They eventually discontinued the handy plastic bins. We ended up using bags instead anyway.

At Costco we have one reusable folding cooler bought at Costco a couple of years ago that fills half the shopping cart, and a shallow cardboard box also from Costco years ago that we fill with non-perishables.

 

[Teacher Terry]

So far our curbside recycling is still taking all the usual stuff.

 

[Midpack]

Really? It seems that everyone I know has a "bag of bags" in their house...I don't know anyone that throws them out unless they're damaged.

Most stores around here charge 5 cents for a bag but there are a few exceptions where they are still free.

We don't take single use plastic bags often to begin with, but we do have a bag of bags (a dozen tops). However, we don't reuse them "dozens of times" - usually once or twice at most. We have woven reusable bags for groceries and other things, we've never taken "single use" plastic bags to the grocery store - but maybe I'd be surprised how many other people do. I can't remember seeing anyone with single use plastic bags on their cart in a grocery store here though.

 

[imoldernu]

When I was kid... 1936 1946

Yes.. a little different back in those days... A little before the introduction of plastics into general use, beginning in the 1950's... Before that, "bakelite".

FWIW, here's what it was like when I was very young.

First of all, there were only 130 million people inthe US. Disposables of anything other than paper bags were rare. Anything that would burn, went into the wire basket burner in the back yard. Almost all glass beverage bottle went back to the store. All metal... cans or metal of any kind, went to the war effort. Nothing made of metal was thrown away. Food can containers were washed out, both ends cut off, paper labels removed, and the cans were flattened.

Food waste was almost nil. What ever was left, went into the garbage pail. Nothing ever that was not be used as animal food. We had a garbage man, who came weekly to the covered garbage container that hung from the corner of the garage, He had a leather cover on his front and back, and a large garbage bag to dump our garbage in (we called it "Swill"). His horse and buggy was filled and smelled, but only while he was stopped. The garbage was ground up and used to slop the pigs.

The result of this was that our "dump" was basically clean materials. It serviced our entire neighborhood (maybe 500 families). It was our source of wheels and things to build our go carts, guns and cannons. Playing "War" was the major kids game back then. . My mom accused the dump of being the source of my periodic impetigo, but I knew that wasn't true.

The salvage habits went far beyond that, because I remember going back after I was in college, and the dump was still in use, still not full, and yes everyone was still burning their trash, and the garbage man, by then, had a truck. By then, the U.S. Population was 200 million, and for the most part, there were still no two car families that I knew of. Only big change was from heating with coke (couldn't afford coal then)... to having an oil furnace.

Sheesh... I wonder how many of you knew that coke, was not Coca-Cola.

 

[Bestwifeever]

The first plastic bag I ever got was from a shop in France decades ago—we thought it was very cool. Little did we know....

I have a few cute reusable bags (made from plastic water bottles, which IMO are a much bigger problem than shopping bags—I can’t believe my generation managed to grow up healthy without having a bottle of water within arms reach at all time) that I bought as souvenirs—they smush up into a tiny attached bag and clip onto my purse strap. Not as big as a brown paper shopping bag but convenient.

 

[Winemaker]

Timely, our county just announced that we can only recycle metal cans and corrugated cardboard. So no more paper, plastic, chipboard, glass. I haven't composted except for coffee grounds because of bears, and only had a weekley bag of mostly food scraps about the size of a basketball every week. I also have to haul it to the trash truck 15 miles one way myself. We are allowed to burn, but fire danger and smoke keeps me from burning.

When we were in Glacier last year, the couple we rented a house from told us that coffee, in any form, drives bears crazy. They picked up our trash every day, and warned us not to leave any leftover coffee in the car overnight unless we want a car window broken.

I do think we were all naive to think that the cans of recycling material we take to the curb, were being reused again.

 

[Koolau]

No personal knowledge of this, but I've heard that in many locals, carefully separated recyclables are routinely added to the trash when the truck comes around. It's simply a matter of economics.

I think a good case can be made for the future costs of trash disposal (what DO you do with an old land fill?) But how does one factor that in and deal with it? So far, it's more of a slogan (talking point) than a definable concept.

If you count your cost of separation and the cost of recycle trucks and personnel, fluctuating trash-commodity prices, etc., it's difficult to believe recycling would ever pay for itself. NOT doing so must certainly have a cost, but that is in the future and unknown. Not difficult to see why recycling is more of a faith-based issue than an economic one.

I'm FOR recycling, but it's difficult to stay motivated when most (if not all) the related issues are stacked against recycling.

We (Oahu) have recently gone to banning plastic bags (over time.) Stores are no longer able to provide "free" bags - one must purchase. The main reason this has happened is because of plastic waste found in our oceans. The unfortunate (inconvenient) truth of sea trash is that most doesn't come from us (nor from the US as a nation.) It comes from other nations. To "sell" the plastic bag ban, we were treated to news photos of plastic bags blowing around our beautiful Island. I've never seen anyone throw a plastic bag on the street. They all come from trash trucks. True enough, filled bags of trash are routinely dumped on our streets and roads, but single bags are not. Those bags actually have utility as trash bags in small home waste containers - that's how we use them.

So if I'm making a point it would be this: Waste is bad. Recycling is good. Both have economic costs. So far we have not figured out how to balance those costs. Instead, we have chosen draconian methods to force compliance and create one more level of distrust in government. I don't know what the answer is, but it should come as no surprise that this subject is more a matter of personal preference (faith) than it is a scientific treatment of a poorly defined "problem." End of rant as YMMV.

 

[Sue J]

Our city still takes all kinds of recyclables but a few others nearby no longer take glass. They couldn't find places that would process it without a cost and it wasn't worth it any more.

Other posters mentioned burning trash in their yards. When we moved into our house in 1983 there was an incinerator in the basement next to the furnace and water heater. It was no longer connected to the chimney and no longer usable but I knew what it was because we used one of these when I was a kid. It was for burning household trash.

We use the large plastic grocery totes for shopping and many other uses. Our area still uses the one use plastic bags in all the stores. If they have no holes we reuse them for doggie waste and they end up in the trash. We also use these to line all the wastebaskets around the house. Yes, we have one of those bags of bags someone mentioned!

 

[brucethebroker]

Growing up in rural NJ, we were allowed to burn yard waste on the side of the street. Every fall was accompanied by the wonderful smell of leaves burning all over the neighborhood. Yes, it made smoke, but I think it was greener than putting out 9,000 plastic leaf bags to be picked up by a smelly truck.

Agreed!

 

[braumeister]

No personal knowledge of this, but I've heard that in many locals, carefully separated recyclables are routinely added to the trash when the truck comes around.

That day may come, and may already be here in a few places, but not generally. However, it seems to be getting much tougher to make money at recycling.

From an article about our local recycler:

"How do we continue to provide the service, when we have lost the value of the material," Sargent said. "We are at a 9-year low today in the value of recyclables."

With costs rising, he says Rumpke has been forced to raise recycling fees in the past year.

As a result, a growing number of Cincinnati area communities have cut back recycling to every other week, instead of weekly.

But Sargent says there is no truth to rumors that some recycling now just goes to the landfill.

"No, it is not going into the landfill," he said. "We have invested millions of dollars in the recycling infrastructure."

 

[Midpack]

That day may come, and may already be here in a few places, but not generally. However, it seems to be getting much tougher to make money at recycling.

From an article about our local recycler:

"How do we continue to provide the service, when we have lost the value of the material," Sargent said. "We are at a 9-year low today in the value of recyclables."

With costs rising, he says Rumpke has been forced to raise recycling fees in the past year.

As a result, a growing number of Cincinnati area communities have cut back recycling to every other week, instead of weekly.

But Sargent says there is no truth to rumors that some recycling now just goes to the landfill.

"No, it is not going into the landfill," he said. "We have invested millions of dollars in the recycling infrastructure."

I don't know how widespread sending recycling to landfills is yet, but it is sweeping across the country. Many sorting facilities have bales for recycling stacking up hoping for an outlet, that probably won't materialize in the long run. Other facilities have run out of room and are taking bales to landfills now. It is sporadic where I am, some weeks our recycling bin goes directly into the trash truck to the landfill - and it's not scheduled or known in advance.

The outlets (mostly China) have been substantially curtailed, and there's no reason to believe that will change back again. Some of our recyclables are going other less developed countries, but that won't last forever either. If the Pacific NW and other major metro areas are running out of places to send recyclables, where are other communities sending theirs? It doesn't matter how much we spend on recycling infrastructure if there isn't an outlet.

Plastics and papers from dozens of American cities and towns are being dumped in landfills after China stopped recycling most “foreign garbage.”

In the Pacific Northwest, Republic has diverted more than 2,000 tons of paper to landfills since the Chinese ban came into effect, Mr. Keller said. The company has been unable to move that material to a market “at any price or cost,” he said.

Other communities, like Grants Pass, Ore., home to about 37,000 people, are continuing to encourage their residents to recycle as usual, but the materials are winding up in landfills anyway. Local waste managers said they were concerned that if they told residents to stop recycling, it could be hard to get them to start again.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html

 

[Patricia Lyn]

In Boise/Meridian (Idaho) we have a plastics recycling program called “Hefty recycling Program” which requires you to buy these orange plastic trash bags (Hefty brand) to collect various plastics in. They accept a lot of traditionally unrecyclable stuff like plastic film, produce bags, grocery bags, 3-7 numbered plastic containers, styrofoam, shipping peanuts, etc. All this is tied up in the orange bag and put into the recycling bin to be sorted out at the recycling facility. It then is baled and sent to Sal Lake City for melting and processing into fuel.
This program is in the beginning phases but the company wants to go nationwide with it and build these facilities in major population centers.
Unfortnately, they still don’t accept plastic water bottles or clamshell plastic containers (nothing ‘crinkly’) so I avoid buying anything in clamshell containers or water that is packaged in plastic. It’s hard to pass up fresh berries and other produce packaged that way, especially the organic berries from Costco! I’ve written to costco to ask what, if anything they can do to switch packaging but they got back to me and said they were “looking into it”.

 

[Koolau]

Unfortunately, just because we want to keep the planet nice for our off spring, we can't repeal the law of supply and demand. A "little" recycling doesn't affect the "normal" flow of materials much, but when we all start doing it, suddenly, the paradigm shifts (glass made from sand is already set up - glass made from, well, glass, not so much in most situations.) It will take time and consistency of supply of recyclables before the wild swings of prices begin to smooth out. In 20 years (those of us still around, heh, heh) will look back on this time as a time of transition to the new paradigm. Let's hope it all works out - for our kid's/grand kid's sake. As always, YMMV.

 

[samclem]

Unfortunately, just because we want to keep the planet nice for our off spring, we can't repeal the law of supply and demand. A "little" recycling doesn't affect the "normal" flow of materials much, but when we all start doing it, suddenly, the paradigm shifts (glass made from sand is already set up - glass made from, well, glass, not so much in most situations.) It will take time and consistency of supply of recyclables before the wild swings of prices begin to smooth out.

Regarding all, but especially the bolded part: I think the answer is more likely to be on the demand side than the supply side. As long as producing "new" materials (and waste) is more profitable than using recycled feedstock (plastics, paper, glass, AL, steel, etc), then that's what will happen. Right now, it seems the most direct way to change things is for consumers to place a higher value on goods made with recycled materials. Since the cost difference of new vs recycled materials is generally small, and the materials cost is usually a small percentage of the retail price of an item, it only takes a tiny improvement in the "retail" value of an item to tip the scales toward use of recycled materials.

 

[Sunset]

I have seen some lovely parks made out of landfills, and I can see in couple of hundred years, that people may mine landfills for the valuable resources concentrated within.

But for the short term, turning them into parks is a great way to introduce green space for urban settings that can never be build upon due to the leakage of methane gas. By the time a properly placed landfill is full, the city will be starting to build around it.

 

[samclem]

I have seen some lovely parks made out of landfills, and I can see in couple of hundred years, that people may mine landfills for the valuable resources concentrated within.

I wonder if it would be prudent to segregate the waste before burial. Stuff that won't break down and might be economically recycled later (esp glass and plastics) in a different pile from other stuff? But it would be far more efficient to use it again now rather than transport, handle, store it a few times.

 

[indiajust]

The only reason chinese companies accepted trash was in the hope it would be reused to make new products, mandated whether it was economical or not. That did not happen.

Many government product regulations do not permit the use of reused plastic. Degraded material properties also rules out reuse for many recycled materials.

Glass is processed sand. It is economically wasteful to recycle it. Japan forces beverage distribution into the same glass container, only the label is different. Can you imagine if miller and bud looked identical? Not in our consumer culture.

Metals pay the bills, barely.

We adopted a push policy of mandatory collection, to create a supply of materials, in the rash hope that a market for the materials would appear afterward. It did not work.

The best bet at this point is to go back to garbage to energy power plants. Burn everything, collect the metals for reuse, use the ash for asphalt paving and concrete, sell the electric power to reduce coal usage. Zero waste.

If product design takes a step up and designs consumer products intended to be made from recycled plastics, and cultural acceptance follows, then we can move toward the desired goal of reusing the materials.

 

[Midpack]

The best bet at this point is to go back to garbage to energy power plants. Burn everything, collect the metals for reuse, use the ash for asphalt paving and concrete, sell the electric power to reduce coal usage. Zero waste.

I assume you’re joking. Burning garbage would be much worse than burning coal, which is already far worse than oil, biomass, natural gas, hydro, nuclear or renewables.

Trash incinerators are the dirtiest way to make electricity by most air pollution measures. Even with air pollution control equipment in place, trash incinerators emit more pollution than (largely uncontrolled) coal power plants per unit of energy produced. Coal power plants are widely understood as the most air-polluting source of energy, but few realize how much worse trash incinerators are for air quality.

Trash Incineration More Polluting than Coal | Energy Justice Network

 

[Canoeboy]

Our county has several “Recycling Centers” run by Waste Management (WM) which are free to use to residents and home/property owners. This was part of a 40 year deal that allowed WM to locate a landfill in the county. These centers accept more than typical recyclables. There are separate dumpsters for 1) yard waste/brush/logs, 2) construction materials/bulk items, 3) metals, 4) tires, 5) household waste, 6) CFC containing appliances and a tank for 7) waste oil. Past this area are the covered roll-offs for traditional recyclables which are comingled - paper, cardboard, 1&2 plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and metal cans. Despite signs stating no glass or plastic bags, people throw them in anyway. Many people also don’t break down cardboard as requested. Glass was discontinued in January as there is no market.

Each recycling center lists the past months recycling rate on a sign when you drive in. Goal stated is 40%, but actuals over past year have been between 5-15%. That is a sad reflection on our society. I know my recycleables are at least double my household waste. Another sad point is that oftentimes the yard waste gets contaminated by someone tossing in a soda can or bag of garbage. When that happens the whole dumpster gets land filled rather than being turned into mulch.

County makes it easy and free but many folks just don’t seem to care to make the effort to use the facility correctly.

 

[indiajust]

Not joking. Recycling has been a very expensive virtue signal, amounting to segregated collection, landfills and trash export. We have filled the oceans and landfills using an expensive inefficient collection system of diesel fuel and trucks.

In a choice between water pollution, ocean pollution, vs the incremental problems of garbage to energy power plants to coal... I prefer to avoid the impossible problem of ocean clean up in favor of standard air pollution controls on a power plant.

Had we burned the plastic instead of "recycling", the oceans would be clean and the landfills empty or non-existent.

Not perfect, but a step in the right direction. Materials that become a valuable commodity (like high quality US cardboard) will be recycled because it is valuable economically. Materials that do not yet have a developed resale market get eliminated until a market develops. The land, water supply, and ocean stay clean and we avoid the 1000 year environmental boomerang of policy consequences from fake recycling. Coal consumption gets pressured even lower.

 

[zedd]

Trucking heavy glass bottles from the bottler, to the distribution warehouse, then to a grocer, then home, then back to the grocer, then back to the warehouse, then back to the bottler... That’s a lot of person-hours, fuel, and water use...

Why not just have beer trucks with tappers on the side make regular neighborhood rounds. Bring your own one, three or five gallon bucket.


Remember back when you could buy a bucket of beer at your local pub? No? Well me neither but I saw it in a movie once.