I’ve always wondered how legit recycling is and if it’s worth the effort to personally do it. (I live in a high-rise and I can toss my garbage down a chute on my floor, but have to bring my recycling down to the ground floor.) In college I literally saw them dump the recycling bin and trash bin into the same truck, but I know I see dedicated recycling trunks around.
I was told “soiled” recycling can’t be used i.e. greasy used pizza boxes, is that true? Recycling dumpsters are gross, isn’t everything soiled?
When companies sell a product that’s “made from recycled products” how truthful is that? Is it their own recycled products or do they source it?
Whats the deal with the recycling triangles and numbers on a product? If I recycle a number that I shouldn’t, does it ruin everything else in that dumpster?
How does any one/machine feasibly sort recycling? It seems like a herculean task.
Recycling, fact or fiction?
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The best material to recycle is aluminum, as it is cheaper to recycle aluminum than to smelt it from ore. Aluminum recycling is completely legit everywhere. Other metals may often also be cost effective to recycle, though scrap metal takes a lot of effort to sort.
Clear glass is another good material to recycle, but the problem is sifting out the different grades, and colored glass is much harder to recycle.
Everything else varies dramatically from place to place. Clean paper with no grease or food residue can be recycled into cardboard. (Those recycled paper books are generally made from industrial paper waste, not post consumer material.) Paper fibers get shorter every time it is recycled, so the quality goes down with each cycle.
Plastic recycling is often only a sham; the bottom fell out of the world plastic market when China stopped taking in scrap plastic to burn for energy. (Opinions vary on whether this was a net positive.)
From a different perspective, paying someone to haul away cheap recyclables like clean paper costs far less than paying someone to haul away garbage, so separating recycling makes a lot of financial sense.
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