[Xist]

Your argument has always been that we should pay people as little as possible to sort it and we always point out that paper and cardboard get ruined that way.

Here is an NPR article about why China stopped buying our recyclables, which you clearly dismissed:

Waste expert Joe Dunlop at the Athens-Clarke County materials recovery facility near Athens, Ga., explained the problem. Conveyor belts deliver tons of trash every hour, with magnets diverting metal and paper going into bins for recycling. Some plastic is binned up, too, if it's recyclable — bottles, for example.

That doesn't work for non-ferrous metals!

And there was this brilliant tactic to increase profits: West Coast ports in the U.S. were full of empty Chinese shipping containers that had come to deliver goods to American consumers. "So it made a lot of sense to send [waste] out though the port in an empty ship that was going back anyway," Bourque says.

He pulls up a 2-foot-square piece of cardboard out of a 10-foot-pile of trash. "A cardboard box wrapped in our No. 1 contaminate, film plastic," he says. "That's just bad. What is so awful about a cardboard box that they had to go and do this to it?"

The cardboard/plastic combo originally held beverages, he says, "but have you ever had to unpackage containers? It's a pain in the butt."

How often do you see a cardboard carton, for milk, nectar, broth, etc., and their is foil and\or plastic bonded to it?

China had plenty of capacity to handle plastics and lots of cheap laborers to sort the recyclable materials from the nonrecyclable. By 2016, the U.S. was exporting almost 700,000 tons a year to China alone. Overall, China imported 7 million tons from around the world.

In fact, Bourque actually tracked some of the plastic scrap from his operation in Berkeley. In 2016, he buried a GPS transponder in one of his bales of paper and plastic waste from the Ecology Center. Waste brokers bought it. He followed the transponder's electronic signals to a town in China. Bourque then contacted local residents to document what happened to it. They reported to Bourque what they saw.

"And what we found confirms some of our worst nightmares: dumping in the local canyon of materials they couldn't recycle, plastic in the farmland incorporated into the soil of the cornfields nearby," he says.

Exports from the U.S. to Thailand jumped almost 7,000 percent in one year. Malaysia's went up several hundred percent. Those numbers dropped in 2018 after those countries cut back on imports.

They already stopped buying our recyclables?

Stiv Wilson is an environmental activist and documentary filmmaker who works with a project on waste called The Story of Stuff. He has also been working with an environmental group called Ecoton in Indonesia, another big importing country. Wilson visited a town near a recycling plant in the city of Surabaya. The plant takes paper bales mixed with plastic.

"That plastic gets separated by the paper factory," he says. "It gets dumped in the neighboring community, and then the only way to get rid of it is to openly burn it. It is also used as fuel for boiling water to make tofu in small tofu factories all around. ... Air, water and land (are) all affected by this."

These new dumping destinations aren't likely to last. Already, Vietnam and Malaysia are cutting back imports of scrap plastic because they are overwhelmed. They can't handle the huge diversion of plastic to their countries since China shut out imports.

Where Will Your Plastic Trash Go Now That China Doesn't Want It?

Don't like NPR?
"`[A] lot of the plastic China received in recent years was poor quality, and it became difficult to turn a profit.'” Fox News: Thanks to China, over 100 million metric tons of plastic waste will soon have nowhere to go

That was an extremely short article. This one is slightly longer, but neither has many details, and it took at least 5 tries to load this and spam Esc before Fox News cleared the page: Fox News: Recycling programs seen as a waste in many communities because of high costs, inefficiencies That seems to just say "Throw away everything! It is cheaper!

Unfortunately, I have spent all day on this, and haven't found any solutions.

Undoubtedly I had better ways of spending my time, but I am still waiting on at least one letter of recommendation. Each person who agreed to submit one for me simply needs to copy and paste--one previously wrote a LoR, which I copied and pasted into an e-mail.

At least one on-line program also has a deadline today, so I am going to see what time they cut us off and what other requirements they have.