The recycling truck just visited our cove. Recycling sounds like such a good thing to do. Furniture, playground surfaces, paper and so much more can be made from our trash. The next time you are carefully sorting and cleaning your recyclables, consider the following. After the trash service picks up your recyclables, they take them to a large, new facility where employees further sort your trash. Then, the materials are all buried in a landfill just like all the unsorted, nasty trash. They do catalog where the different materials are buried just in case they ever need to dig them up and use them. Guess how many times they have dug up recyclables since this expensive program was started many years ago? I think somebody missed the whole point of recycling.
“Consumer confusion about the proper disposal method of food or beverage packaging results in the contamination of recycling streams and the landfilling of recyclable containers.“
“Recycling is losing ground because it doesnÂ’t obey the laws of economics,” contends Ken Pratt, president of the Al-Jon Inc. Solid Waste Division. “RecyclingÂ’s fatal flaw is that it doesnÂ’t have a market size anywhere near the volume of materials that could be produced through recycling. Thus, you either recycle less to get a fair profit, or you recycle more, ruin the market, and someone ends up landfilling the recyclables they collected. This is happening more than anyone wants to admit. I personally have seen trucks running a recycling bin out to a landfill at night.
“I know of dozens of municipalities that have been doing this midnight dumping of recyclable materials. ItÂ’s even more prevalent than last year. Recycling is one of the first casualties of the recession weÂ’re now facing because its markets will erode still further.” { source ]
I’m trying to find you a good source. It’s called “landfilling recyclables.” I’ve found at least one source that sites a monetary incentive stating that they get more money at the landfill than by the recycling sale.
If you call the trash company, they will schedule a tour of the recycling facility for you and you can hear their explanation of the process.
This is a UK based note: “recycling typically remains more expensive than landfilling“
where did you find this out? now I feel like the recycling i do is pointless