I think it's become apparent that the whole recycling concept is misguided. There's just not enough economic value in these materials to justify the socialized cost. It's better to dump the waste into proper landfills.
Ultimately environmental impact is mostly about CO2 release these days. We're not running out of most of these raw materials. And for the one big one we are (oil) having it end up buried in a landfill is about the best realistic option we have today.
Don't be so quick to throw the entire concept of recycling in the bin (so to speak). Plastic recycling may be a scam, but metal recycling is simultaneously economical, effective, and better for the environment than extracting new metals. Steel, copper, and aluminum are all successfully recycled in vast quantities; the majority of the metal we produce these days was recycled rather than fresh-from-the-ore.
Metal recycling is fine and there was a thriving industry in metal recycling before anyone heard of "recycling". Metal recycling also does not require any subsidies. Your typical auto junkyard is a good example.
The issue is the small scale household recycling that does require subsidies and is a strain on local government budgets. You are basically cutting needed services to the community such as funds for libraries, parks, police, and schools in order to subsidize good feels for upper middle class households, which is a regressive and wasteful policy.
This is really a technological issue -- in 15 years, it might make sense to recycle something else, but then a market will develop and cities wont have to pay to do it, as it will pay for itself. But regardless of future breakthroughs, it's unlikely that we will ever be able to recycle a substantial proportion of household waste.
Yes! Metal is extremely recyclable. I think the biggest problem was the move to single stream in nearly every US municipality. We should have 3 different bins. This requires more personal responsibility and more infrastructure, but it is far easier to separate at the waste source than in a massive dump of every crushed together in India or elsewhere.
It really depends on the specific material. Recycling aluminum gives huge energy savings, something like 95% reduction in energy, because refining bauxite is a bitch. Bottle-to-bottle PET recycling also works, but most other forms of plastic recycling are a farce.
Sure, but consumers use tiny amounts of metal that can be recycled. A can a day is like 10 pounds a year or about $4 worth of scrap. It borders on pointless and certainly is with the associated negatives of the way recycling is done today.
So yeah if you want to collect all your metal scrap for a year and bring it to the local yard then yeah that's a net positive. But skipping a single plane trip is probably worth an entire lifetime of recycling.
According to wikipedia, the amount of aluminum cans recycled is actually substantial:
> Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminium from the raw ore.[4] For this reason, approximately 36% of all aluminium produced in the United States comes from old recycled scrap.[5] Used beverage containers are the largest component of processed aluminum scrap, and most of it is manufactured back into aluminium cans.[6]
This seems to line up with the fact that you can actually get paid for aluminum cans, the metal used aluminum cans are made of has enough value that it actually makes economic sense to pay people to recycle them.
Looks like that goes to a dead cite but I can find similar numbers from the aluminum trade organization. They don't have an actual methodology that I can see but it's probably safe to assume they're cherry picking numbers. The most likely way is that they're comparing energy used in ore at the factory vs scrap at the factory. That will heavily favor scrap because it excludes all the energy taken to transport it.
>This seems to line up with the fact that you can actually get paid for aluminum cans, the metal used aluminum cans are made of has enough value that it actually makes economic sense to pay people to recycle them.
It's not economically viable to send trucks to pick up people's recycling like most cities do. As an example, my city charged $120 per residence to do that.
You've got to account for everything that goes into the typical single stream recycling we do. The emissions of the trucks, the sorting plants, and the cost to pay people to do this. I've not see an analysis that tracks the carbon emissions of all these to see if it outweighs what we get from recycling. But looking at the dollar flow it seems basically impossible that it's a net positive. You just can't charge $120 a year to haul away $30 of scrap (or less) and end up with a carbon savings.
Yeah I recycle glass, cardboard, metal, and "high quality" clean plastic (mostly bottles). Bags, wrappers, envelopes, food containers, any sort of foam, and other similar packaging/padding material goes to the landfill.
This is not correct at all. Environmental scientists are developing a more sophisticated framework to describe the safe operating envelope for humans and it includes plastic and novel entities.
Ultimately environmental impact is mostly about CO2 release these days. We're not running out of most of these raw materials. And for the one big one we are (oil) having it end up buried in a landfill is about the best realistic option we have today.