Here's what I learned about California bottle recycling CRV (tax) today and I'm not sure what newsgroup to tell about this.
You pay for 5 things when you buy a bottle of "whatever":
Why can't they be recycled? If they are paying, there must be some value.
Glass makers like adding old glass to new glass so there is some value to them. Plastic can be reused various ways. The problem that I see is the cost of hauling and sorting.
We accept and use a particular plastic where I work. It gets reused, mixed in with new material. The cost of processing it is about 1/3 the cost of new material. The problem is, people will drop off two pounds of scrap valued at 50¢ and bring it in from 10 miles away in the 11 MPG truck.
Glass also finds use in roadways (surfaces).
There are also "extraction" costs for some items.
You can get a couple of dollars per pound for motherboards -- there are lots of precious metals there but it takes effort to reclaim them. OTOH, it also takes effort to extract them from the Earth and transport them across the globe.
The (ever crapier quality) "tin" cases for PC's are a penny a pound. No value for plastics (here). Paper (books, etc.) are recycled (here) by a firm that turns them into TP. Batteries are recycled to reclaim the lead plates.
Recycling really only works when labor costs are (essentially) zero.
As a kid, our small town started recycling newspaper, glass and aluminum (cans, foil, etc.). An unmanned facility was set up in the center of town so it was "on the way to everywhere" -- the most trivial amount of "planning" and you'd never need to make a "special trip" (except down the length of the driveway to the facility).
Most larger businesses, here, purchase balers to package their cardboard box "discards" and sell the endless supply of cardboard to recyclers.
[Of course, as with other commodities, the prices/values vary so it's risky to make big investment decisions regarding them]Yup. The same truck that never is used to really *haul* anything anywhere! But, makes 'em feel good that they paid full price for half a car... :-/
Americans tend to get a hard-on about recycling. As if they are "making a difference"; as if the act itself justifies their other wasteful actions.
Reuse is the ultimate form of recycling -- don't discard it in the first place! But, folks ALWAYS want to "upgrade" for whatever reason.
I volunteered at a facility that accepted "donated items" and tried to repurpose/reuse/recycle them. Both to keep them out of the landfills (our municipal drinking water is well sourced) and to "recirculate" them to folks who otherwise "didn't have" (e.g., we would restore thousands of PC's annually and deliver them to needy families, school districts, etc. -- instead of handing them over to the materials recyclers for ~$5).
It is depressing how much stuff Americans (speaking only for the folks that dropped off stuff at our facility -- to the tune of 20K pounds/week!) discard because they've grown tired of it or some reason (though it still *works*!)
Ah, but they can feel like they're "making a difference" by dropping it off instead of throwing it away! :-/
That is the problem. Unless you are very close to the actual plant that reuses the plastic, glass or paper, new is cheaper, with a lower environmental cost. Most plastic is a byproduct of petroleum fuel, paper is a farmed product and glass is just sand. The best use I have seen of the former 2 is burning them in a waste to energy incinerator because we are pretty far away from any plants that do anything more useful with this trash. In the case of the plastics it is 1000 miles.
I'm in favor of trash to energy. Typical pound of plastic contains
18,000 BTU of energy and it is possible to burn stuff cleanly. The ash takes much less landfill space too.HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.