OT; NYC news, recycling in trouble again....

[trader_4]

CBS NYC had a story about recycling in the tri-state area and how it's having trouble again. Seems most of the recyclables here have been going to China and China has now tightened their standards as to what they will accept. It has to be like 99.5% pure, not crap mixed in, or they won't accept it. That's a problem and it's going to either cost more to process it to meet the standards or they have to find someone else that wants it or it will go to the dump.

I have said for years that I'm amazed that the single stream recycling here in NJ works. If you go to the town facility, it's shocking what a crap fest it is. We put paper, glass, cans and plastic into one stream. But if you look at what shows up, it's a big mess. Plastic flower pots with dirt still in them, glass jars with sauce still in them, paper that's wet, contaminated, and various other plastics from appliances, chairs, who knows what, that probably can't be recycled. It's all mixed together in one big, hot mess. I thought at the time I'd like to see the facility where they separate it and what winds up at the dump. I can't see anyway they are going to get to 95.5% purity, no matter what they do.

[Ed Pawlowski]

When our town started recycling you took everything to the dump and sorted it. I was on the committee that got it going and spent a lot of time at the dump helping and teaching people. It is amazing how careless and dumb people can be. An one brown bottle can contaminate an entire dumpster of clear glass. Happened every week.

[gfretwell]

Recycling has been a sham since day 1. We make the homeowner do extra work sorting their trash, we run an extra truck, we pay government workers to sort the trash again. then we try to find someone who will take it off our hands without charging us too much and most of it ends up in the landfill anyway. The only thing that makes sense to recycle are metals for 99% of the country. Beyond that, if you are pretty close to a plant that reuses plastics, carefully sorted plastics of the types they use has some value. The same is true for paper but again, only if it is carefully sorted. Glass is an even bigger loser. Like you say, one beer bottle in a dumpster full of clear glass makes it solid waste. The problem is that beer bottle may be in 1000 pieces by the time it gets to the municipal sorting center. You still need to be pretty close to the glass plant to make any sense of it.

I live in a place with a waste to energy electric plant. We should be sorting metals in one bin and things that burn in another. The rest should go in the trash.

[invalid unparseable]

That's the way I feel about it. All trash should just go in one container to the dump and be sorted there. The hauler we use, Evergreen, is required to give DE residents 2 cans, one for recycle and other for rest of trash but in other areas of the country everything goes into one can. DE and other areas still require workers at dump to sort out crap. We pay for the state handling the trash in increased fees and our bottle bill which used to give money back on returning bottles but is now kept by the state.

It's a wasted of money to have 2 garbage trucks come each week when only one is needed. I understand in some areas of the country, each house may have up to 5 different containers for various waste to recycle. Sounds like a circus to me.

[trader_4]

If places exist that put garbage and recyclables into just one stream, they are rare. Despite posts like this claiming this is common, I have yet to see someone provide any examples. And I can't imagine it would work. For example, once you have garbage mixed with cardboard and paper, it's no good.

DE and other areas still require workers at dump to

And you know this how? You've conducted a cost analysis and know that paying to send it all to a landfill would have been cheaper? I suspect not and this is just another trumpet type shoot from the hip with fake news, make stuff up to fit your preconceived notions. From my conversations with the workers at the local town facility here, they say recycling is saving us money. You claim only one truck is needed. Here we used to have one truck that came twice a week. That was replaced by one truck for trash one for recyclables, each comes once a week. So, it's basically the same workload. And we've been getting paid for the recyclables, while we have to pay for trash that goes to the landfill.