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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So from one end, the “made from recycled products”, that’s usually legit. I don’t know if that’s a regulated term but I do know companies often charge a premium for products they advertise as using recycled materials and when the people who pay that premium on purpose find out they’re lying, they quit. That kind of trust is hard to earn back.
Still, without government regulations and inspections, there’s a lot of wiggle room.
The problem is recycling is super complicated, leading to things like this:
> 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?
Plastics create this problem. There’s lots of different *kinds* of plastic, and how well they can be recycled differs for each. The numbers tell the plant what kind of plastic they are and how they can be recycled. For a rough, ELI5 difference, three examples can be like:
* One kind might be able to be melted down and made into new, similar products.
* Another kind might chemically change after being melted, but still usable as different products.
* Yet another kind might be so useless after melting, all we can do to recycle it is chop it up into smaller pieces and use that for something.
One example I think I remember is that the plastic in bottles can’t really be used to make more bottles after it melts down, but it CAN be used for the kinds of bags used by grocery stores. Those bags can’t be melted down to make other products but CAN be used to make things like larger, longer-lasting tote bags. There are also projects where they’re used as filler material in landscaping and other projects. Also a lot of people apparently like to decorate trees with them so much my locality fought really hard to end regulations that banned them.
Now a lot of these other points run together:
> 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?
Yes, this is true. A lot of times the way cardboard and paper are recycled is to soak them in water, grind them up, and make new paper out of them. Unfortunately, if there’s food residue on them, that becomes impossible to clean out of the system. The resulting paper products might include oils that can go rancid and stink or present dangers of infection. So if you put greasy stuff with food residue in recycling, the stuff with food residue can’t be recycled. And if the residue spreads to other things in the bin, THAT stuff can’t be recycled.
> How does any one/machine feasibly sort recycling? It seems like a herculean task.
It is! A lot of places can’t afford enough machinery to do all the sorting. That’s why some places ask people to sort glass, plastic, and paper separately. That at least cuts down on a lot of the job.
Some places rely on human labor. Sometimes that involves prison labor, they don’t have to be paid to do it so that can be profitable. If clever ways to get free labor aren’t employed, then someone has to pick through all the stuff and make decisions, knowing that sending the wrong stuff to the wrong machines can ruin an entire batch.
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So a big problem is it’s hard to make money recycling. It takes a ton of highly specialized machinery and a lot of labor. The point isn’t really to make a profit, it’s to try and do some good for the planet. Unfortunately, a ton of operations are set up to make a profit.
So like, the company that does my office recycling? They pay for humans to hand-inspect the bags. And they charge my company a *fine* for every non-recyclable item they find. Other companies just won’t accept recycling if they find non-recyclables. The company that did the recycling in my last apartments would throw recycling bags in the dumpster if they saw visible incorrect items in the bag. Still other companies figured out they can ship all of their material overseas and just trust that the recycling facilities over there handle it.
It’s not 100% “a scam”. But there are thousands of companies involved in it and not all of them are honest. So it’s also not 100% being done with nothing but the benefit of the planet in mind.
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