Recycling is just a make work program for people unqualified to do anything else. The only thing that actually have a cash value is aluminum cans in most places. Paper and plastic ends up costing more to ship than it is worth and the environmental impact is usually worse too. Glass is really totally useless. We should be putting aluminum and maybe steel in the recycle, paper and plastic should be in the burn barrel (for a waste to energy plant) and everything else should just go to the land fill either before or after it is burned.
Same crap here. Incredibly stupid. Dump was originally recycling at the dump but could not afford it but now they could with getting tax they could. This is as it is done in some other places. I hard in Florida someplace 5 separate containers required. Ever other vehicle on the road there must be a garbage truck. This is what happens when politicians give a solution to a technical problem.
Why is glass useless? It may not be economically sensible to ship glass scrap very far, but the glass plant near us used every bit they could get. They made mostly bottles and jars.
That's my stealth savings account. Pay cash, get change, throw the change into a 3lb cottage cheese tub every night. When the tub is full, take it to the coin machine at the supermarket. There is no fee if you get a gift card instead of cash and Amazon is one of the available cards. You don't actually get a card, just a code you can enter into your Amazon account. A full tub nets out between two and three hundred.
Clear glass may be good for jars but mixed, colored glass is not useful for much except maybe brown beer bottles and they seem too uniform to be using much in the way of other colors. I agree, if you can hit the glass plant throwing your empty, it may be worth recycling them but trucking glass half way across the country is not.
Clear glas must be clear. When our town started recycling at the dump they has a container for clear, another for colored. One colored bottle would contaminate a big container of clear. There was always some idiot. . .
I've been told the best glass has some content of recycled in it.
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Never thought about it going into fiberglass but they take it too.
There is an Alcoa smelter near me. A number of years ago the made more off selling the electricity than aluminum. I thinkthey quit or really scaled back on the smelting and just sold electricity.
That does not change the fact that most glass in "recycle bins" gets sent to the land fill. We don't sort ours before we set it on the curb, creating make work jobs for a bunch of low skilled workers and I think they burn everything but the metal. They were just shipping it to the landfill until the paper got wind of that. This is a boondoggle all around because the indians get the first shot at the electricity coming out of the waste to energy plant at a nickel a KWH for their reservations and casinos. Granted we are 500-1000 miles away from any reprocessing plants for just about any recyclable. Even the scrap value of metal has dropped to the point that we do not have "scrappers" anymore. It used to be that any piece of metal you set on the curb was gone in a day. Now they don't even come for copper and aluminum.
I worked for a company that made the polystyrene foam clamshells for McDonalds. One of the advantages of thermoplastics is you can grind the defective product and feed it back into the line. The clamshells had a tan color rather than the pure white of virgin styrene, part of which was due to the amount of regrind being used. McDonald's is a very demanding customer and would use colorimeters to ensure the product was the same exact shade. If the process was running right and there wasn't much regrind that required tinkering.
That whole history is educational. McDonalds went from the original paper wrapping to foam to save the trees or something. Then they went back to paper/cardboard to save the landfills. Both were marketing decisions based on what the public's perception was at the moment.
I've been out of that industry for a long time and don't know what is used today but we were using freon by the railroad tank car for the blowing agent. That wouldn't fly today. The best part of the job was ice cream cones were made in another part of the plant. You could eat the defective parts. Sugar cones hot off the press are good!
I worked in foam plastics for 47 years. Our blowing agen was pentane. About 15 years ago we had to capture emission, but it did not have the bad rap that CFCs had. Nevertheless, all foam plastics were bad to an uninformed public.
Absolutely right. I contributed less to my 401k having to retire from the company very early and now I get back more than my SS.
Only something like 60% goes to retired seniors and disabled and widows and orphans get the rest, not to mention government stealing for other programs.
Company I worked for used recycle polymer in two of their most profitable products. There was a color problem but these products did not have to be clear. They did not brag about being environmentally friendly by using recycle. Customer did not need to know and might want to pay less.
Our dump takes glass, paper, cans and plastic but does not want polystyrene or plastic bags. People do not realize that all this crap must be separated and cleaned. I keep telling this to my wife that it does not matter if she washes PET soda bottles or not. Only reason to do is perhaps keep down smell of trash can in the garage.
The real problem with all of these programs is there is no investment or savings. The government spends the money as soon as they get it so current beneficiaries are depending on taxes on working people and we have a ratio of around 2.5 workers per recipient. This was a very successful program when it was around 16:1 but it is unsustainable now. There was never a "trust fund". The surplus money was always spent.
I think it was '71, sometime during the oil embargo, when I was at the NPE in Chicago and material of any type was hard to come by. I remember talking to one guy who had to take two carloads of styrene toilet seats for regrind to get one of virgin styrene. We sold thermoset molding systems so regrind wasn't an option. There was a lot creativity with replacing compounds with stuff derived from furfural. The stuff flowed like water and the moldmakers had fits adapting to it.
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