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You can sort it any way you want it, but increaskngly, it’s all going to the same place.
Recycling has always been the friendly face of environmentalism, the feel-good thing that even Republicans would cheerfully do to save the planet. It became popular much like taking a daily aspirin to ward off a heart attack; it was always easier than the alternatives, things like strenuous exercise and rigorous dieting. Recycle, or pay a hefty carbon tax? Yeah, we all said, I can recycle!
It didn’t take long for a significant number of us to enlist, egged on by environmental organizations that discovered it was far easier to recruit members with pitches based on recycling than, for example, admonishments to forswear air conditioning. Just recycle, the implicit message was, and you can continue with your hedonistic lifestyle — as long as you separate the plastic trash from the aluminum trash.
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In the diverse landscape of waste disposal needs, roofing projects often generate substantial debris that requires specialized handling. For those in Hillsborough County, roofer dumpster rental becomes a practical solution to efficiently manage the waste generated during roofing projects. These dumpsters are designed to accommodate roofing materials, ensuring a safe and convenient means of disposal. Whether you are a roofing professional or a homeowner undertaking a roofing project, opting for a roofer dumpster rental hillsborough county offers a tailored solution that aligns with the unique requirements of roofing debris. This efficient and specialized waste management approach not only enhances the overall workflow of roofing projects but also contributes to maintaining a clean and organized work site.
Whatever the merits of the proposition, the instant that the number of adherents became significant, recycling became industrialized, in much the same way that a critical mass of believers turned the term “organic” — applied to supermarket stuff — into a punchline. In the 1980s, industry had one answer for every question, and when the question became how can we make a ton of money out of the rising tide of recyclables the answer, as always, was “China.”
Before long, every ship that brought a cargo of disposable plastic products to the ravenous American market returned to China with a cargo of disposed-of plastic. China, blessed with cheap labor and indifference to pollution, happily recycled our trash. In fact, before long, and for the past quarter-century, China has processed nearly half of the world’s recycling.
We need to remember that with this profitable industrial process chugging happily along, at best less than 10 percent of discarded plastic was being recycled. A bit more than 10 per cent was being incinerated, and the rest — 80 per cent — was dumped in landfills or on the landscape. Plastic trash washes up on all the world’s shores, and has collected in vast mid-ocean gyres — the so-called Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii contains two trillion pieces of plastic and is twice the size of Texas.
Still, when China suddenly stopped accepting all but the cleanest of trash for recycling a year ago — stopped accepting 99 percent of the plastics and a third of the paper it had been processing — the reverberations stunned the world of trash. There were two main reasons for China’s decision: one, having become a consumer society, China is now awash in its own detritus and has all it can do to dispose of it; and two, people simply will not be rigorous about sorting their recyclables and keeping them clean. As a result, most recycling streams are seriously contaminated and adulterated, and thus dangerous for the people and machines trying to process them.
After January of last year, when China’s decision took effect, mountains of unwanted plastic, paper and glass began appearing on docks and in warehouses across America, Europe and much of the world. There were only two solutions: burn it or bury it. And that is what is happening now to up to half the materials designated for recycling in the US. The implications for air pollution, and rapidly filling landfills, are dire.
Meanwhile recycling programs, especially in small-town and rural America, are winking out of existence because not only are they unable to get paid for their product, they can’t get anybody to take it anywhere. Except the incinerator and the dump.
It’s just another case of “garbage in, garbage out.”
Even if China decided tomorrow to take all of the recycling, entropy will still win. A few cycles of a recycled product isn’t the original product. Just use less–supermarket have to go back to 1940…or earlier.
I’m not sure on the timing of all this. Is it possible, that the Chinese import restrictions on garbage kick started the Trump administration’s “trade war?”
In other words, China fired the first salvo, a big one, and America is retaliating, but since it is too embarrassing to publicly admit that a waste embargo is the focal point of this shocking new “problem,” the US is claiming it’s about lost jobs and stolen secrets, and other issues American administrations – each one progressively loaded with an ever growing entourage of free trading Goldman Sachs types – have never given a rat’s ass about in the past.
Or am I entering a weird, conspiratorial place, and it really is about trade imbalances and the death of the blue collar worker?
As a kid I collected soda bottles and turned them in for the 2 cent deposit. Five bottles would get me a Hershey bar. Milk bottles were sanitized and re-used in much the same manner. Grocery bags were of paper, as were coffee cups and straws. Toys were made of wood, rubber, cloth and metal – plastic was a novelty.
There was less waste by far and recycling was not a word.
Cars were preposterous and had lots of chrome. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis freaked out the ‘greatest generation’ on the Ed Sullivan Show, but we kids ate it up!
Life was good. Now life sucks.
Yes Greg, I can also relate to that golden age of common sense reality and calling a spade a spade.
Sadly now gone the way of Beatle haircuts and bell bottoms.
Oh, and back then the stock market had a degree of REALITY as well, unlike the current XBox game version that is being played out on our flat screen laptops.
Yup, the low hanging fruit of cheap oil/electricity of the 20th century is NOT going to come back either. Sorry kids but these are now the GOOD OLD DAYS, enjoy ’em like Greg and I did the 60’s and 70’s!
Yup, I hear ya!! I think we should all go back to those days, don’t have to wait for a “government program” to tell us what to do. Just do it ourselves.
Those of us who are older know how to do it,(if we still have our memories!). Loved your first paragraph, I well remember those days. Though I remember when I first got married, 1976, my sister’s mother-in-law called me up and asked if I needed a bag of clean glass jars. She had too many and was unable to throw them out, having been raised in the Depression. Of course I took them!
Seems to be another case of ‘kick the can down the road’and lets ‘pretend’. Any one with a brain and maybe a few years of life experience can remember the 70’s and the issue of pollution and trash in Western countries. Always the question – what to do with it? remember landfills and local municipal dumps filling up, choked waterways, clogged stormwater drains etc etc, but never the answer to that question was- stop making it in the first place.
Instead the packaging industry really hit its straps, polymers became more and more miraculous and wrapped everything. More packages with packages within like a Russian doll. Now it is standard and nothing changes but now we can see the extent of what was going to happend, oceans full of garbage, plastic particles in just about everything, including us and untold build ups of who knows what toxic chemicals and what a waste – to use good land to fill it with garbage. Still not a new problem with any large civilised group, Rome is after all blessed with several hills that turn out to be mountains of broken pottery, urns etc, well at least it did no harm and became a pretty hill.
Yep and recycling was always a con. We live rural, we are keen to keep anything organic, including paper which when burned becomes potash good for stuff. We generate on a scale of 5 to 1 toxic or useless plastics etc to recyclable organics. We cannot bury it we cannot burn it so every months we take it to the local tip carefully sorted for possible recycling, now it just goes to there landfill.
And I understand the situation in Asia is just as bad if not worse because they have so downsized plastic for holding small portions of food etc that they generate some millions of tons of this stuff discarded daily just from people eating, same story, crap in the gutters, streets, choked landfill and polluted waterways.
To my fellow boomers waxing nostalgic over the common sense days of our youth, I would remind you that that economy was no more sustainable than the current one. Yes, grocery bags were paper but our grandparents took their own basket to the store and did not drive V8 cars.
Meanwhile a couple of suggestions for reducing your plastic waste. If you buy from small local producers they will often fill a used bag you bring. For instance our baker hands me superior bread which I put in my own bag. (Food safety rules prohibit them from putting it in a used bag but not from handing it to me ‘naked’!) Take small bags and refill them in the bulk food section. If glass bottled milk shows up support it right away. You will pay a deposit and more for the milk, ours is organic so worth more.
And of course, grow all the food you can.
The plastics industry and the consumer-product corporations LOVE recycling – they’re big boosters of recycling – because they don’t have to deal with the expense of returnable containers.
This is a great web site: https://discardstudies.com/2014/07/09/modern-waste-is-an-economic-strategy/
The above article posting quotes a Lloyd Stouffer, who was editor of a industry rag called Modern Packaging Magazine. Stouffer gave a speech at the November 1963 convention of the plastics industry. His remarks included the following. What a classic:
“It is a measure of your progress in packaging in the last seven years that [my 1956] remark will no longer raise any eye-brows. You are filling the trash cans, the rubbish dumps and the incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages–and now, even plastics cans. The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.”
https://discardstudies.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/stoffer-plastics-packacing-today-and-tomorrow-1963.pdf
There you have it. The switch to disposables was not some act of nature – it was a deliberate campaign by corporate America to foist off their problems onto the public. As a result of this SOB’s pontifications, we now have swirls of plastic the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. Recyclables are just disposables by another name.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the opening scenes of
Wall-e as a not-to-distant future for our crumbling civilization.
In the film, the humans escaped the mess they made but we
are not going to have that opportunity. We will slowly be buried
garbage.
Great flick!
This discussion of material waste production and subsequent handling is only one of the predicaments generated by the systems of industrialized civilization meeting the reasonable and unreasonable demands of people. Another predicament that is not often mentioned is the soil nutrients that are extracted ib the food generation and then go to the cities where countless people convert it to waste than goes down the sewerage system, often into the ocean.