Recycling is garbage
According to John Tierney. There are only a few things that are economically practical to recycle (aluminum and cardboard come to mind) and the rest is cost prohibitive. Even The City (My The City) acts this way. See, we have a local recycling center ran by The City (My The City). When you show up, you have to show ID proving you are a resident, or else they won’t let you drop it off. If recycling is good and profitable, why would they turn anyone away?
October 5th, 2015 at 10:43 am
Recycling is profitable, for the recycling company. They charge to cart your trash away and then they sell the recycled material. I need to be in that racket…er…business.
October 5th, 2015 at 12:25 pm
Picking up, transporting, sorting, and storing all refuse costs more than can be recouped from recycling and reclaiming. To the degree that some can be resold to offset some of the costs -and there’s all kinds of “costs”-, especially if it is done by private enterprise, I’m all for it. Nothing wrong with conserving some resources and reducing waste storage (landfill), unless like everything else, the narrative takes over and actual cost be damned, as with dumbass “green” cars and power production.
October 5th, 2015 at 1:53 pm
Steel, iron, copper, and brass are also economical to recycle, and done so in great quantities.
October 5th, 2015 at 1:58 pm
Why do you refer to this as “The City (My The City)”
I don’t understand.
October 5th, 2015 at 2:25 pm
“The City (My The City)”
Same reason Click & Clack always said “Our Fair City” instead of Boston, Beantown, or Birthplace/Deathplace of Civilization…
Lends an air of literary snootyism that K-ville, K-town, and Knox Vegas just don’t. I like it.
October 5th, 2015 at 2:28 pm
I shoulda said birth/death place of independence for Boston, Philly likes to lay claim to freedom.
October 5th, 2015 at 4:43 pm
Its a boondoggle.
If any local news reporter was worth their salt they would do an expose on the financials of their town’s recycling program and they would have a real honest to goodness hard hitting news story. But they dont… because journalism is long dead.
Its a giant flush of tax payer funds. Costs are through the roof and revenues are slim to none. All it really is is an enormous expenditure to make people feel all warm and fuzzy about doing something good for the environment. Meanwhile… how much does it cost to run that giant earth f*cker fleet of trucks that it takes to collect it all? How much does it cost to run all the heavy machinery at the recycling center? They dont run on unicorn farts and those tax dollars are not carbon neutral.
Its such a case study of how inept govt is and how easily tax dollars get flushed for the sake of feel-good policy.
*FYI glass almost always gets mixed back in with the landfill stuff. If its broken its worthless, so unless they are forcing you to sort it before collection then they are not even recycling it.
October 5th, 2015 at 6:00 pm
@Adam S, I believe he is channeling “The Tick”.
October 5th, 2015 at 6:28 pm
I run a fair sized maintenance team. When I took over, we recycled everything. We paid to have electronics taken away, light bulbs, etc. What a waste of money. Local landfill is just fine taking these items. If I have to pay you to take it, it’s trash collection, not recycling. Now we recycle metals that we sort ourselves. The local recycler is great to work with and pays us a fair take for our efforts.
October 5th, 2015 at 8:37 pm
Nearly any metal is worth recyling in truth just simply because of the cost of finding the ore and digging it out of the ground. Recyling paper and crap like that which doesn’t take nearly as much to produce is ridiculous…
October 5th, 2015 at 8:39 pm
There was a dustup on a famous “smart military” blog just t’other day over which city was The City. Some wag submitted Unc’s usage as The Truth, and it ended the argument. So, obviously, Unc is right on this, at least in the city (*My* The City).
Recycling was undertaken solely to save landfill space. Back in the day, sonny, we were convinced [by TIME] that soon, very soon, the whole country was going to be, well, land-full. FWIW, NYC (*their* The City) is still dispatching those garbage scows into the Atlantic, every day. AND shipping double-bottom semis to the Midwest. Be interesting to see how recycling has done just in that one area of concern.
October 5th, 2015 at 9:21 pm
Whatever happened to reduce, reuse, recycle In that order)?
Anyway…
That lowest common denominator, the dollar, is as good a metric as any to determine the natural resources that go into any good/services. Those dollars represent materials, equipment, labor, overhead, profit, etc. It is easy to see that materials and equipment are (in some form) natural resources. The remaining, even if a pure dollars profit, eventually are used to buy other goods. Turn the crank… eventually all dollars are converted to natural resources.
TL;DR: Whatever the cost of anything, those dollars represent natural resources expended.
The mere fact that recycling programs cost more per ton than dumping it all into the landfill shows that this method of ‘recycling’ is not ‘green’.
More than one commenter above has found this to true as well.
October 5th, 2015 at 11:58 pm
Friend back east in MA there says they HAVE to recycle everything and separate it by Law of the local township, so they do — and it get’s collected in different trucks and then it ALL GETS THROWN INTO THE SAME DUMP. But the Township gets money from the State (MA) for behaving like it’s important, and that money is most important.
October 6th, 2015 at 3:16 am
When they build a new landfill they line it to protect the water table and land gets reused as a park, golf course, etc. There is no “running out of space” for landfills. That is a greenie lie.
I’ve played many a round of golf on an old landfill. The ride from the 16th green to 17th tee box takes you past a huge pump that collects the methane and other gasses.
October 7th, 2015 at 8:43 am
Algood Tennessee has the only profitable recycling operation that I know of locally.
They make liberal use of DUI and low level offenders to produce properly sorted garbage. Several of the long term staffers are mentally handicapped because TN allows them to be hired at a lower pay scale(or there are tax benefits). Last time I was there, I asked about the program and was told that they actually buy unsorted garbage from surrounding cities to process. Made the tiny town a couple of million dollars.
Nashville’s supposed recycling program costs almost 20% more per ton than just dumping. Can’t tell the hippies that though.
October 7th, 2015 at 9:13 am
My county (Williamson, TX) used to let residents drop off anything from old lawn mowers to window AC units to old dishwashers at the “recycling” center for disposal. It was free. A lot of it went directly into the landfill next door. Some of it was disassembled for copper or other metals.
Now Waste Management, Inc., runs the landfill and the recycling center and they charge us to recycle our appliances. A lot. And most of it still goes into the landfill next door, which is run by WMI.
That is recycling. Money for the corporation, not much actually profitably reused.
October 7th, 2015 at 10:33 pm
“It was free.”
That you paid nothing at the dump station does *not* mean it was free…ain’t nothing free mikee, you know that.
October 8th, 2015 at 7:32 pm
In Baltimore City you don’t have to show ID to dump trash at the drop off center… much less to recycle. Which is even the weirder part because the city has no limits on the amount of recycling you put out. If you have a lot, they will make arrangements for special pickups.