I once heard a report that in some cities (New York comes to mind) all the carefully sorted “recyclable” garbage except for aluminium got lumped together again and shoved into a landfill.
Can anyone provide information that verifies or disproves that rumour?
Chosen Answer:
Recyclables are just like any other commodity. Sometimes the market is good, sometimes the market is bad. Unfortunately, you can’t just stop collecting recyclables when demand is low, like you could do with a mining or a logging operation. The recyclables keep flooding in, and when there’s nobody to sell your materials to (as happens from time to time), the recyclables just end up in the landfill with the other garbage. The only exception is aluminum, because recycled aluminum is so much cheaper than newly mined/smelted aluminum—it would take a huge shock to the aluminum markets to make recycling aluminum a bad idea.
Because sorting recyclables can also be troublesome, batches contaminated beyond a certain level have to be disposed of as garbage, too. It wouldn’t be profitable to sort out the non-recyclables from the recyclables.
And finally, in some places, they don’t have a recycling program yet. But to get people used to the idea of recycling and the collection process, they get the infrastructure in place so that when they can enact a program it can get to work right away. This means recyclables may be collected but they will go straight to the landfill.
So, in a few different cases, it’s very much possible for recyclables to end up in the same landfill all your other garbage goes to. Besides aluminum recycling, recycling really isn’t as good an idea as the environmental movement portrays it to be, neither for the economy nor for the environment. But not *all* your recyclables are treated like garbage, usually they do get recycled.
by: Kim
on: 20th January 12
