Does Recycling Actually Work?

My other half has a view that recycling may actually produce more waste than not recycling.
Not wishing to simply laugh this off as a daft idea I used it as a baseline to create some online comments and views.
Wife reckons that we did not seem to use as much packaging back in the 60's & 70's, whatever the reason. I agree.

Expanding this to the OP question, what do I mean by work?

There are a number of sub-issues to this which include:-

Increased carbon footprint, recycling is not carbon neutral,

Increased amounts of non-biodegradable packaging, my non-recycle bin has a lot of non-recyclable packaging these days - I believe these is simple economics for the vendors, recyclable packaging costs more (the word here is recyclable not recycled),

If recycling works why do we have so many ocean gyre garbage patches?,

Does the "plastic bag tax" as here in Wales actually work?

Do you really believe that all that recyclable material you place outside or dump at the dump actually gets recycled properly? We have 6 separate refuse bins now, and that could increase in number. (general waste, cardboard, glass, plastic, newspaper, food waste).

If the thread produces sufficient answers I will happily create another, obvious one, how do we make it work, but that can wait till next year...

Over to you ATS, back to Ch.16 and standing by

it depends on the material, recycling polymers is mostly a waste as they degrade and cant be reuse properly, additionally they are hard to sort out so while there are several in use it actually more expensive to recycle, some ppl want to use only 1 type of polymer to avoid this problems at the time of recycling.

Metals are nice to recycle and your coke can today was surely a plane toiled a few years ago, recycling metals are actually cheaper than mining them.

in short, no recycling doesn't work but you need to do something with the toxic plastics or they will be around forever killing poor nemos or something. if they should tax you for the mess you helped to created for just living in a civilized world well... tax sucks anyways and we all hate them

Recycling IMO is a way of controlling the people and just an experiment to see how far we can be controlled. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't recycle, we need to live in a sustainable world, but what started out as good intentions as resulted in us having to separate cardboard, paper, tins, glass and food waste.

My local authority have just started collecting plastics so I now have to separate this. The amount of time this takes is surprising, but unless we do, they refuse to take it away. Which means we are left with piles of recyclable materials that we can't throw away for landfill in fear of being fined.

This has resulted in fly tipping across the city and the outlying countryside at a cost of £thousands to clear up.

It all works to varying degrees.

Last year it didnt work in CT because too many people actually recycled. What I mean is that state, and every state that has deposits on recyclable goods, budgets for you not actually recycling. They dont want you to recycle.

So last year in CT too many people recycled reducing the deposit money in the states budget. Consequently some state legislators are proposing restricting amount you can recycle or getting rid of the deposit scheme altogether.

Clean air and water is nice but when bureaucracy gets involved it's all just dollar signs. Even a blue as blue state run by geriatric hippies will throw the planet under the bus for a buck.

recycling metals is good. Recycling papers is good. I don't know if recycling plastics is good or bad, I think we should refrain from using plastics at the extent we are using them instead.

The best recycling is to reuse or fix things so they don't have to be remade. People should not want more than they need, we should buy good quality things that last a lifetime. We should ban the practice of planned obsolescence or death dating objects. That is the best practice that we can do. I would rather own something old and well made than something new, the quality used to be better long ago. There is a point where it is not worth fixing things, then the item can be used for parts.

This is in direct contrast to consumerism, a tool of the devil. The devil or Shayten is deceit

Cobaltic1978
Recycling IMO is a way of controlling the people and just an experiment to see how far we can be controlled. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't recycle, we need to live in a sustainable world, but what started out as good intentions as resulted in us having to separate cardboard, paper, tins, glass and food waste.

My local authority have just started collecting plastics so I now have to separate this. The amount of time this takes is surprising, but unless we do, they refuse to take it away. Which means we are left with piles of recyclable materials that we can't throw away for landfill in fear of being fined.

This has resulted in fly tipping across the city and the outlying countryside at a cost of £thousands to clear up.

Seriously?

EVERYTHING isn't a conspiracy. if you are living with that level of paranoia, then there are medications that will help you.
Landfills are extremely expensive to build, to use, and to maintain. A landfill has to be maintained by a municipality for over 50 years after it is capped. it is wasted land as no one can build on it.

Landfills in the US are filling up a breakneck speed and are about 20 years ahead of their pre-determined lifetimes.

That is why.

reply to post by Cobaltic1978


Waste is truly a problem, they don't make you separate your trash to control you, its because if its not done by you them they need people doing it at the land fill where is harder and more expensive, as i said before there are like 7 polymers mainly used for daily life applications and there is no simple way to separate one another if its not done by hand.

recycling plastics its not about not using new raw material to cut production cost, its about doing something with the waste so it does not enter the ambient where it will be for centuries releasing toxic stuff

reply to post by nixie_nox


Here, the wood goes into the landfill. I think they should use the wood to heat the landfill buildings myself. That will save them money. They could have a few guys, even prisoners, seperating the wood from the contractor trash. They could recycle roofing also. Some of the Tires are recycled, I do not know exactly what the do with them though.

You are right though, recycling is not that much more expensive. It also can create extra jobs.

rickymouse
reply to post by nixie_nox

 

Here, the wood goes into the landfill. I think they should use the wood to heat the landfill buildings myself. That will save them money. They could have a few guys, even prisoners, seperating the wood from the contractor trash. They could recycle roofing also. Some of the Tires are recycled, I do not know exactly what the do with them though.

You are right though, recycling is not that much more expensive. It also can create extra jobs.

That is a shame. We have wood recycling here. Heck, even my little community has leaf recycling.

You could petition your local leaders to consider recycling wood.

reply to post by nixie_nox


Okay, then why has my home City been rewarded by the 'Rockerfeller Foundation' for it's job in getting the people to recycle more and more? We have just been announced as a resilient city and as a consequence stand to receive funding from this organisation.

As I said, recycling is important, but it's the extent that we have to seperate everything and we have seperate boxes for everything.

I appreciate not everything is a conspiracy and you really shouldn't go around assuming that people do. What I am stating is my personal observation.

reply to post by Shuftystick


At the end of the day, this stuff the planet produces is finite, recycling is a moral obligation by everyone, especially if you're a parent, even more so.

I have tried to encourage others to do this, and it's worked to a certain degree. EVERYONE should recycle.

My only fear is that some recycling companies, don't do what they claim to.

There is a rather large grocery chain in my area. I refuse to shop there as their prices are inflated and their products are often past the expiration date and therefore on sale.

One day when I was leaving another store, I drove by the backside of one of these stores.(they say they promote recycling by having a place to recycle your plastic shopping bags)As I drove by I saw a kid who worked there taking a large cart with about 20 big bags of "recycled" shopping bags and threw all of them into the garbage dumpster.The dumpster that goes to the landfill.

I'd say that this is an example of recycling not working.

reply to post by lonegurkha


yes recycling as in reusing the non biodegradable stuff is necessary and yes recycling as what is actually done ripping your money in the name of the planet its a scam, can we all agree on that?

Just have this crazy image of ageing sky clad hippies dancing and wiggling their bits around a pile of unrecycled crap chanting the mantra $!,$!,$!, whilst dropping the odd microdot or taking a joint...

I sailed in the Bristol Channel for decades and with a 48' tidal range at springs combined with prevailing SW winds, a walk along the shore North of Newport would reveal acres of plastic and tree trunks, tyres and other rubbish deposited on the HW mark, bit like a mini gyre in The Severn Estuary.

I don't believe that recycling works per se, but I agree with previous posters saying we can't sit back and do nothing, that would be a combination of apathy, complacency and a failure of our combined stewardship of the planet.

We still have a lot to learn from true earth people about what needs to be done.

SORRY this was meant to be a reply to thisguyrighthere earlier in the thread...

reply to post by lonegurkha


When I lived in a city we had separate bins for all the materials, plastics 1 and 2, cans, paper, etc....

The trash truck would come by and dump all the bins into the big opening on the back of the truck. No separation, no division.

Sure, maybe the guys on our specific route were bad and it worked great everywhere else in the city. But then I considered that the trucks themselves did not have compartments. Just the classic giant compacting trash truck.

Went that way for all my time in that city and as far as know they still do it.

In that respect "recycling" was just a feel-good veneer over business as usual.

And we've all read the reports of the African landfills where kids "recycle" electronics with toxic chemicals to strip the metals and burn or bury everything else.

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


ok ppl if you get rip off and somebody call it recycling it really doesn't mean that the real thing is not necessary

Indigent
reply to post by thisguyrighthere

 

ok ppl if you get rip off and somebody call it recycling it really doesn't mean that the real thing is not necessary

Did I ever say that?

If it can be done it should be done. But we shouldn't let municipalities blow smoke up our asses and sit back like we did a good thing. That's like passing "gun control for the children." It's just fantasy that does nothing to confront the issue at hand. Too many people seem to figure "my town recycles so we're good" without ever actually looking into what is really going on. The mythical carbon offsets come to mind.

Because it is apparently so flawed the best course of action, as a poster mentioned earlier, would be to tame our habits as consumers. Stop buying junk, avoid products that are obscenely packaged, avoid plastic anywhere we can, etc...

Moving away from a city that collected for me to a rural area where I had to bring all my stuff to the transfer station myself really opened my eyes to how much waste one household creates and since moving my waste has been dropping month after month.

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


In the city I live in, they just started recycling. They gave us a large bin to put all of our recyclables in. The truck comes by and dumps all the materials into the truck.They don't even have to get out of the truck.You leave the bin near the curb and they have a big claw that dumps the bin into the truck.

The material is taken to a facility where they pay people to sort it.For this service we have to pay around 200 bucks a year.Before recycling our taxes covered garbage pick up.So the privilage of recycling costs us alot of money as we pay for the pickup and then they sell the materials to various firms who reuse it.Win,win for the trash company. Looks like a racket to me.It's rumored that the local Mafia owns two of the biggest trash companies in the area.

There are constantly reports of illegal dumping there at the landfill. It's at the other end of the county from us. I have a good griend who lives down the street from the landfill maybe a quarter of a mile or so.I have been at his house in the wee hours of the morning sitting on his deck behind the house.We have seen and heard black helicopters hovering over the landfill.We are wondering why.Never see them in the daytime.Seems odd to me.

Recycling works.

All metals that get recycled means less mining is needed to dig up the raw material, and a lot of metals will not have to go through a costly, polluting process to become the end product.
Chemicals are often used to refine material into a state of purity.

Plastic recycling works because it's creating a product what is used for new plastic usage, and it does this from the garbage we would normally throw away.

Paper recycling causes less need for cutting down forests, so the forests that do get used for new raw materials can grow a little longer, which helps creating a sustainable process.

The question is what you like to get out of your recycled materials, and will it be profitable to recycle a product into new products. When there is no money to earn nobody will think twice to get their hands dirty.

The fact is that every recycling process works because someone is making money from it.
And maybe some environmental concerns to spark some creativity taking care of the waste problems...

My 2 cents

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


Our recycling effort involves at least one, sometimes a second vehicle which seems a bit daft as each vehicle seems to have a driver and 2 or 3 operatives. This is in addition to the dustcart that collects the general garbage and usually precedes the recycling truck.

It makes you wonder what we will have to do to make recycling work in the round? Not everyone can get to the tip or is fit enough to chuck things into a skip. Fly tipping is definitely on the increase and for some obscure reason that completely escapes me can usually be seen in the vicinity of traveller sites dumped by the side of, or even in the middle of the road. It's almost as if these illegal waste dumpers are shocked into their act by the site of a genuine recycling based community that is environmentally responsible and much maligned. You only have to see the volume of car shells around these sites to realise that recycling can work? They are class leaders in the recovery of non-renewable resources such as abstraction of copper from inside plastic cables using ancient earth based combustion methods.

No, whichever way you look at it, voluntary, enforced (dustbin police) or motivated by profit, it's not working, the waste continues to grow and the pollution is getting worse.