Quote:
Originally Posted by Xist
Anyway, China is the largest purchaser of recyclables, but Arizonans have been mixing more and more garbage with their recycling. Fewer places are purchasing recyclables and cities need to hire more people to sort out garbage, so it is becoming unprofitable--if they can even find a purchaser.
Phoenix has sent over 200,000 tons of contaminated recycling to the dump. Smaller cities sometimes do the same with clean recycling when they cannot find a buyer. China now demands that recyclables be 99.5% pure and nobody can meet that standard.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...mpe/752442002/
In an opinion piece I found when I was looking up that above article states:
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opin...bly/761822002/
Was that sponsored by dump magnates or something? Landfill barons exist, right? |
Have you ever lived in an apt complex before? People use the recycle bin as a garbage dump. At my complex, the recycle has a slot to push recyclables through, while the garbage bin requires a key and has no access except by opening the door. Lazy people are just going to dump everything in the recycle.
So, recycled goods require sorting since people are lazy/ignorant/uninterested. If it requires sorting, why not just have all garbage sorted and not separate out the recyclables? Instead of asking every consumer to spend time sorting these things, leave it up to machines and experts.
Finally, most recyclable goods are not worth recycling. The only reason to recycle glass is to prevent broken bottles from littering the ground. We're in no danger of running out of the raw materials for glass, and from an energy perspective it is more costly to recycle it than to just make a new container.
Likewise, I doubt most paper goods are worth recycling. How much energy goes into sorting, transporting, shredding, cleaning, and remanufacturing paper into new paper goods compared to growing new pulp trees and turning them into paper products?
Some things are worth recycling, and those tend to be metals. You don't even have to force people to recycle most of them because they have intrinsic value. People will steal the wiring from homes just to cash in on the recycle value of the copper. If recyclables have value, there would be no need for laws compelling recycling, and people would either be stealing the resources, or be willing to pay for them.