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.
I lived in Southern California and they recycled glass. Tennessee and Alabama don’t. Glass can be recycled virtually forever from what I’ve read.
Depends on your local municipality. If they have the infrastructure to recycle its definitely worth it, along with the industrial composters.
If your area doesn’t recycle properly, its probably not worth it.
I worked in the industry for years and the thing to understand about recycling is that it is a commodity. If there is a market to buy it, it can and will be successful. The value of recyclables really depends on what you’re recycling. Certain types of plastics and cardboard are highly valuable and can be repurposed multiple times.
Other things — less so.
Soiling — or contamination — is a very real concern in a single stream environment. With single stream recycling, all your recyclables are commingled and liquid and food can contaminate things like cardboard and ruin it. The problem is — a lot of a little bit of contamination adds up so it’s best to keep things as clean as possible. Dump all liquids out of cans and bottles and clean as much food waste off as possible.
It’s not a scam — but there needs to be someone on the other end who wants to buy what’s being recycled.
Yes often it’s more like downspiralling, collected PET bottles for example can be recycled ~9 times or so, then the material has degraded too much. You need lots of water and energy as additional input into the downspiral. Mixed trash can not be recycled in the sense that there just is no cycle. You can melt this trash into crude shapes like deck planks, railway sleepers, park benches and so on. But that’s it, you essentially delay the problem a single step into the future while using lots of energy. At least the stuff is not being burnt, so no emissions from that or at least not immediately.
People say it’s reduce, reuse, repair, recycle but if you had to – out of those 4 words – find the odd one out, then it would be “recycle” because it’s a lot less effective than the other three, and should be treated as a last resort.
Id say recycling is a bit of a scam, take where im from aka Norway where the government constantly brags about us recycling the majority of our waste aka we burn it to produce energy
Or that our most advanced plastic recycling facility is only able to properly recycle maybe 20% of the plastic
>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?
Generally these are legit, but they may not be open up on how much of a % of the sourced materials are recycled and as folks generally pay a premium for such products this is trust companies will not want ot break.
>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?
these are seen on plastics the concept being that you have a number of different types of plastics that will fall under one of 2 types:
Thermoplastics(ie PVC, PET) that can be molded upon aplication of heat: these are for most part very much recyclable and their indicatino of such is the trinagle symbol with the number denoting the type of Plastic(you care about these because during triage they get separated)
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THermosetting plastics, once heat is applied ot them once, they are hardlocked in their shape and cannot be molded further, these are NOT recyclable(but can be repurposed by shredding them and using the result in other manufacturing)
>How does any one/machine feasibly sort recycling? It seems like a herculean task.
often, it has to be done by hand with the crews working at recyclying centers, the triage we do ourselves is very much preliminary.
>Recycling, fact or fiction?
its a fact, but not all metrials are madeequally and not all nations that do it in scale have the funds or interest to overly invest in it, the most notable saving you can do by recyclying is aluminum, which is a bitch to make from raw materials(and limited since it has to be mined thru an energy intensive process), but notably easy ot recast from recycled waste.
>I was told “soiled” recycling can’t be used i.e. greasy used pizza boxes, is that true?
Contamination is a huge issue with recycling, because it’s usually cheaper to just throw away an entire load rather than pick out the part that’s contaminated. Around here they stopped collecting glass for a while because people would put glass in their blue bin and it would break, and the broken glass would contaminate the paper and cardboard. Now we have a grey bin for glass, separate from the blue bin.
>Whats the deal with the recycling triangles and numbers on a product?
The triangle on plastics is *not* the recycling symbol, but the fact that it looks like one isn’t an accident. The number is a resin identification code (basically what kind of plastic it is) This is a good video on the subject: https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g
During covid we stopped recycling collection, the only commodity that was missed and was being cried out for was glass, no one cared about the rest.
Some commenters have addressed all of your questions, I think one underlying question is “is it worth the effort to do my recycling”, if I’m not mistaken doing that has a cost for you (it’s less convenient than the regular garbage) but you’re not sure if it really does bring value.
Has you’ve said, the task of recycling is pretty big, in order to be somewhat successful, it needs to reach a critical mass. No factory will invest in ways to procude with recycled material if there’s small quantities available. No sorting facilities will get built for the same reasons. No collection for small quantities. Etc etc…
This is precisely why throughout the process you’ll see recycled material finding its way into the normal trash cycle… One of the reason is also that cities/governments don’t want to invest in the facilities themselves, or not fully, so they need to make it interesting to companies to do that.
All in all, while at a certain point in time your recycled trash doesn’t get recycled, that’s a necessary step into the whole process being put in place, in other words if people don’t sort their trash, then recycling will never happen.
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