I spoke with an employee at my local recycling centre earlier in the year, when dropping off a car load of waste. I asked him how they recycle the plastic and his response was "Don't worry lad, we burn it all and to recycle it into nice clean energy".
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Zero Waste
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Ohhhh that’s how recycling is done.
the only material that is really useful for recylcing is copper and alu. esp alu since it's refining process is very energy intensive and recycling it is actually cheaper.
recycling paper and plastic is mostly energy/cost negative compared to making it new.
If I remember right, glass is extremely efficient in recycling.
If it is recycled. But the profit motive isn't there, so in a lot of places it simply isn't. In Canada's second largest city, it all goes to landfill, and they don't even have a bottle return system yet.
And that's why metal and glass rule ♻️
Where facilities exist. Glass goes to the landfill in many areas.
I'm shocked it's taken this long for an article like this to show up. This has been an open secret since the beginning.
One big issue is using single-stream recycling where everything goes into the same bin and it's the responsibility of the recycler to separate them all back to individual types. That is simply way too complicated and expensive for most of the materials so they just don't do it, and most of it simply goes into a landfill.
When the sorting is done by the consumer as it's done for example here in Finland where we recycle more than 90% of bottles and separate everything else into their own bins, you end up with much higher recycling rates. We do still lack enough processing capacity to deal with it all so a lot of it is burned for energy, but at least essentially nothing is going to a landfill any more.
I don't think that tasking people to sort waste makes long-run sense. Not an efficient use of human time -- you cannot just treat that labor as zero cost.
If recycling becomes important enough, we can develop waste sorting machines and they can harvest the landfills. If we aren't to the point where that makes economic sense, then we aren't to the point where recycling a given item is sufficiently warranted.
I remember bringing the old glasses bottles to the store for a deposit. That system worked pretty well and provided incentive to not just toss them.