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Recycling in America

economist.com

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Re: Recycling in America

#71

Post by cleverjake »

rrggrr wrote: post #44

This article is insane. The cost of recyclables is so closely correlated to variable costs (like energy prices) that efforts to mandate or close loop recycling always fail over a long enough timeframe. Also I suspect Walmart has no idea the extent to which recyclables are used in their products since about 70% of Walmart's products are produced in China, and China consumes the majority of US (and European) recyclable…

> Also I suspect Walmart has no idea the extent to which recyclables are used in their products since about 70% of Walmart's products are produced in China

You'd be 100% wrong. Walmart investigates the crap out of most if not all of their supply chain.

Re: Recycling in America

#72

Post by steamy »

freehunter wrote: post #65
steamy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no big fan of taxes and big govt.

How are incentives and tax breaks any less "big government" than a tax itself? You still need an agency to oversee the administration of the incentive and tax break. That argument isn't anti-big government, it's "I don't want to pay for my negative externalities". Taxes are a cost of doing business. Tax breaks and incentives is unearned income.

Just for the record, I'm not in favor of big biz either.

Apparently from the discussion here, working with recycled material is more costly for corporations and therefore they

would not be compelled to give up profits to save the environment and improve sustainability.

So, it's now either the people's or the govt's duty to step in and try to mitigate the risk since the market dynamics are

not favorable to work on their own.

People or govt could help by subsidizing the cost of recycling the materials and making it more appealing for businesses to

use them in their manufacturing processes and therefore preserving the environment.

As to which is better raising taxes or giving tax breaks from the point of view of govt interference, I believe that

incentive is less invasive and more importantly less coercive than raising taxes and distorting the market and pushing the

increase in operating costs to the consumers instead.

Re: Recycling in America

#73

Post by ZeroGravitas »

gregsq wrote: post #58
jobu wrote: post #6

"Most recycled materials should be cheaper than virgin commodities" Surprisingly this just isn't true. It takes a lot of work and chemicals to clean inks and glues out of paper for recycling. Penn & Teller looked into this in an episode of Bullshit! a while back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4 Aluminum and clear glass are very efficient to recycle, plastics and colored glass depend on commodity prices,…

This is one of the reasons we have seperate collection bags for recyclable materials in the UK for households. We don't have the benefit of landfill space, and it's economically more efficient to seperate paper, glass, metals and other potentially recyclable materials at source, than at a post process stage. The resident has two bins side by side, and sorts at source.

Assuming your talking about the homeowner sorting each type of material seperately, it depends on local facilities. Some have "single-stream" plants that take all recycling mixed together, which seems like it may be the way forward as the sorting machines get more efficient and ingenious.

Re: Recycling in America

#75

Post by laurencerowe »

philfrasty wrote: post #3

Will never forget how I (German) walked into a Safeway in San Francisco with my bag full of bottles and asked the cashier where the deposit-machine is. She had absolutely no clue what I was talking about.

AFAICT the CA bottle deposit is a way of encouraging the homeless to sort garbage.

Re: Recycling in America

#76

Post by deciplex »

steamy wrote: post #52
fake44637 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a mix of both: start charging (more) for waste disposal but make recycling pickup free.

I'm no big fan of taxes and big govt.

So what? Figure out if the idea is likely to work and judge it based on its merits. Unless you're ready to prove that "taxes and big govt" necessarily and inexorably lead to adverse outcomes because of basic physical laws, the way you're evaluating policy proposals is totally irrational.

Re: Recycling in America

#77

Post by sandstrom »

Sweden is a pretty interesting case. Only 1-2% of trash ends up in landfills. Much is recycled [reused], and the rest is burned for energy (heating and electricity).

An interesting tidbit is that recycling [reuse] rates has increased such that there isn't enough trash to burn (and burning is still much better than landfills). So Sweden now import trash from neighbouring countries.

Two light-weight articles:

- http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/28/163823839/swe...

- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/sweden-imports-tras...

More in-depth, from the organization running Swedens recycling:

- http://www.avfallsverige.se/fileadmin/uploads/forbranning_en...

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