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Every other Monday the recycling pick-up truck barrels through my neighborhood. Most of the time I have a blue recycling bin full of various paper bags --each separately filled with glass, plastic, aluminum, and paper. For being a good citizen of the earth, the city of Minneapolis gives me a $7 credit on my waste management bill.
Given the current status of recycling in the country,that recycling credit could soon become a recyling charge. The question is,how much are you willing to pay for recycling trash that no one wants to buy anymore?
Around five years ago I was working on a story about recycled paper and why corporate America was relaxing policies that required annual reports and marketing materials to be printed on recycled paper.
It was during the research for that story that I learned that virtually no recycled paper was being produced in the United States.In fact,there are few recycled products made in America. It was too expensive.The American recycled industry is really a pick up the trash, sort the trash, sell the trash business.
The countries that actually produce recycled products are/were primarily China and India.For all intensive purposes, our trash has literally been going on a slow boat to China.
Not any more. China has pretty much closed its recycling business and that has in turn had a crushing effect on American recycling centers.
The business model for recycling American style is very simple. If it costs less to pick up the trash then the price they get for the trash,they make money. These days they aren't making money.
As a result, some communities are telling people save your trash, we can't afford to pick it up.
Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices. Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.
Like many industry sectors,people in the recycling business were blind-sighted by the swiftness of the economic downturn. They just didn't see it coming.
As recently as September, scrap metal was going for over $500 a gross ton -- now you're lucky to get $100 for the same amount. Same thing with cardboard, which was selling for as much as $135 a ton. It's down to $35! That's when recycling centers can find a buyer at all.
The lack of buyers, some recycling centers have halted collections, and are asking people to store recyclables at home, at least until the market picks up.
This is not just a problem in the U.S., in Canada the demand for recycled products has dropped 90%
The prices for recycled material are the lowest they have been in the past 15 years.
“The decrease started approximately during the Beijing Olympic Games. China decided to close its border to recycled products,” said Bolduc.
Recycling companies are now stockpiling dangerous amounts of compacted cardboard, aluminium, plastic and steel, unable or unwilling to sell the material.
However, despite the downturn, environmental agencies are insisting recycling is an environmental necessity.
"It's vital that households and businesses continue to recycle their waste," Chairman of Sydney organisation Do Something, Jon Dee, told Fairfax.
"From a climate change point of view, we can't afford to start sending recyclable waste to landfill."
And the British recycling industry is facing collapse unless the government frees up money to help support the industry.
An elderly lady from Cornwall has collected huge quantities of plastic containers, bread bags, and yoghurt pots in her garage. “The local council won't take it”, Mrs Oates-Koomen explained, “They say there's no market for it in this country. So I have no choice but to collect it in a plastic bag.”
Her plight is becoming increasingly common among British householders. Hertfordshire council has warned residents that they will no longer be allowed to recycle margarine tubs, whilst Devon and Scarborough councils have begun stockpiling plastic to prevent an ecological disaster.
In Cambridge, paper recycling bins are being axed. The surplus paper is being ploughed into fields used for farming.
The solution is complicated.Putting trash in landfills is reported to be twice as expensive as recycling, not to mention the ecological damage. However, recycling businesses can only make money when there is a lot of trash to recycle.
So the plastic, cardboard and newspapers that you leave out
