There’s something about Rick Kriseman’s recent post at RealClearPolitics about recycling which reminds me suspiciously of the underpants gnomes.
First, steal underpants:
One of the biggest challenges facing our current recycling infrastructure is that materials recovery facilities (MRFs) are overwhelmed with a growing amount of recyclable material, much of which cannot be salvaged because of inbound contamination. What’s needed is updated recycling equipment and technologies that would improve the sorting and processing of these materials. This would make the system more efficient and strengthen our domestic market for recycled materials. This added capability will reduce pollution, conserve natural resources, and decrease the amount of recyclables that end up in landfills. However, to move this vision along, we will need the help of Congress to invest in it.
Then ?
Third, profit!
The benefits to this investment are clear. Recycling helps control future waste costs and increases the lifespan of materials that would otherwise end up in regional landfills. This in turn reduces the cost of transportation to landfills outside local regions and the stress of this transport on our traditional infrastructure such as roads and bridges. In addition, recycling provides marketable goods, which reduces costs of packaging for consumers.
Recycling also has real economic benefits. According to the EPA, recycling in the United States contributes approximately 700,000 jobs, $37 billion in wages and $7 billion in tax revenues per year. Recycling is having a positive economic impact in the states too. For example, a 2017 study in Texas found an overall economic benefit of more than $3.3 billion from recycling.
Yeah, new equipment will definitely solve the problem. Both Mr. Kriseman’s post and the EPA’s paper from which its figures are derived are a bit too “from 50,000 feet” to assess how realistic any of this is.
Let’s summarize how we got where we are. Modern retail packaging, publishing, apparel, and other sectors result in an enormous amount of waste. Some of that waste is recyclable. Starting the late 1960s and accelerating during the 1970s and later, there was a major push to recycle. I was part of that push in the late 1960s. The first curbside recycling program that I know of started in 1974. In 1990 Wisconsin imposed a statewide mandatory recycling program. Recycling had typically been thought of as at least a “break even” if not money-making program.
Most of that waste was shipped to China. In 2017 China stopped accepting “foreign garbage”. Since then we’ve pretty much been stuck with our own trash.
Like all Chicagoans we have been dutifully sorting out our recyclables: aluminum cans, glass and plastic bottles, clean paper, putting them in our blue recycling cans and hauling those to the curb every two weeks to be picked up. Unlike all Chicagoans, presumably, I am aware that most of that will go into a landfill. That isn’t true merely in Chicago. It’s true in many if not most places. My understanding is that the labor costs are too high to make recycling practical, there’s too much trash, and there aren’t enough customers for the trash.
I honestly don’t believe it’s an equipment problem. I think it’s a packaging problem which is being solved far too slowly, a too much waste problem which may actually be getting worse, and a plain old supply and demand problem.
I wish I knew how many of the jobs in recycling are related to hauling. If that’s where the jobs are, we’re talking about a “cat and rat farm” situation, a perpetual motion scheme, which won’t work.
Ahh, one of my specialty areas. Kriseman is delusional like all environmentalists, and does not have the smallest understanding of what is going on. Almost everything he “knows” just isn’t true. (There’s a Mark Twain quote that’s relevant.) He doesn’t even know what “contamination” means. He thinks it means mixing of different items, e. g., paper and aluminum cans. It doesn’t. It means that some items are coated with substances that prevent their processing. Food wastes adhering to plastic film is an example, oil-soaked or mold-infested cloth and paper are others.
The eternal delusion in recycling and solid waste management is that machines will be designed that can do the sorting cheaply. Or for that matter even do sorting. The delusion has been around for over 50 years, without any result. The failures in operation and economics are legion. Even simple mass burning for energy recovery has failed because of costs and pollution. The sad truth is that sorting is done by hand by minimum wage (and unreliable) workers. Iron can be separated magnetically, and is, but nothing else is automated. Nothing. Nor can it be.
Then there is the economics. There is a natural, profitable market in metals. About 70% of steel production comes from recycled scrap, and people do the recycling because they get paid for it. Similarly for aluminum cans, but not aluminum foil. There is a small natural market in thermoplastics, because they are easily reprocessed. Some glass is recycled because it has real value as cullet in new glass manufacture. Most recyclers don’t like glass, because broken glass is a hazard to the workers. The hand sorting is dangerous enough as is. Much used clothing can be recycled as is, but the market is so weak that recyclers demand donations and won’t pay for it: viz. Goodwill.
Thats about it. While almost anything can be recycled, there is no market for any of it. The market for paper comes and goes, and often there is no buyer for the neatly separated and bailed material, and it has to be landfilled.
Recycling is basically a White, college-educated, middle class hobby. The super rich and the poor cannot be bothered. Long bitter experience has shown that college-educated people cannot reliably sort their trash into categories like metal vs. glass vs. paper vs. plastic. They always mix everything together. That is why modern recycling companies collect everything mixed and do the sorting themselves. By high school dropouts.
If you would like a really great read in this area, actually filled lots of interesting information and stories, buy and read “Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage,” by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. 30 years old and still up to date.
Rathje is a professional archaeologist who turned his professional training to the study of American landfills. The various strata tell stories about the history of the US, and you can find the signatures of large scale historical events in them.
You will like his book even if you are not interested in the topic. His stories about the failures of middle class people to sort and recycle are in some sense comic.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that’ll hurt you but what you do know that just ain’t so.”
One of my favorites. Although frequently attributed to Sam Clemens it was actually said by “Josh Billings”—Henry Wheeler Shaw.
Nice comment, Bob.
I assume everything Bob points out is spot on. I can only offer one anecdote which shows another aspect of the issue.
We once owned a company that made metallized paper used for label stock. Anheuser Busch (Bud and Bud Light) and Coors (Silver Bullet) were large customers. Paper was used because the underlying glue could dry through the label, and the paper had the potential for recycling for the fiber. But the brand managers were looking to make a change.
Eventually the problem of drying (and askew labels on beer bottles) was solved in a plastic film. The brand managers pounced and AB changed over to a the more muted film look. To my knowledge that plastic is still not recyclable, and so grows the plastic waste problem. AB sells lots of beer…….