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Originally Posted by Fat Charlie
I'd pay for your "asset" if I were a processer who sold the finished product to manufacturers and you delivered it to me. But as a processer, I'm not going to pay you for a few cardboard boxes and plastic bottles every week. I need those raw materials by the truckload and in a predictable amount- like what your town can produce.
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Very good points.
However, I maintain that if the garbage man is going to be visiting anyhow, and I've roughly sorted my assets (recyclables) from my liabilities (garbage), then at the very minimum, the garbage collection company can sell the large amounts they collect at a price that offsets the collection fee.
Logic still demands that, at a minimum, recyclables can be collected at no expense to the person giving up the goods. If that can't be achieved, it implies that it's cheaper to just produce new materials. To follow the logic further; if it's cheaper to produce new materials, then it's likely that less total energy is expended in producing new prime material than is expended in the collection, transportation, sorting, and reclaiming of used material. Environmentally speaking, it might be better if some recyclable goods were thrown away instead of reprocessed.
While the notion that it may be better to throw things away instead of recycle them is uncomfortable to me; I accept that it may be the truth for certain items.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xist
Didn't Penn say that forty percent of material put in recycling bins is thrown away? That sounds accurate to me, not so much from them being excessively particular, or recycling being less useful than people want to believe, but because many people simply do not care.
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It sounds accurate to me, too. I see people at work "recycle" all kinds of things that can't be recycled. Heck, I'd even be tempted to "recycle" things that aren't recyclable if my tiny garbage can was full and my massive recycle can had room.
Asking each and every individual in every home to sort garbage from recyclables, and then get the result that half of it isn't sorted properly is incredibly inefficient. It would be better to just collect garbage along with the recyclables and employ more trained professionals to sort through it. They would be way faster and more accurate at performing that function than the millions of dopes already doing a pitiful job.
Heck, the ideal solution would be to tell the people in the business of recycling that they can have all of the product they want for free; all they have to do is pick it out from among the trash.