Sofia Andrade, a smart girl with lots of good questions, asked, “Why can some items be recycled and others can’t?”
The primary answer is that it depends on where you live, and what kind of recycling your area offers. Sadly, you can’t recycle your glass bottle if there is no one up the chain to recycle it for you. You’re not going to melt it down yourself (or are you?). But I wanted to know (and I think Sofia wanted to know, too), in terms of all the things we can produce in the world, is there some inherent quality that makes an item recyclable or not recyclable?
The simple answer to that is no. Pretty much every material can broken down into its basic properties, and recycled. That’s according to Jeremy O’Brien. O’Brien is director of applied research at Solid Waste Association of North America, which means he knows a lot about all sorts of things we would call garbage.
So we can recycle everything! That’s exciting, right? But wait – there’s one big catch, says O’Brien. The reason why most things aren’t recycled is because it’s not economical to recycle them.
“Basically, the price of the new material will determine the price of a recycled material,” he said. “The reason some materials can be recycled and others can’t be, is because the cost of recycled material is higher than the price of a new material.”
A big factor in the price of recycling something is what made that product originally. Newspapers and food cans are easily, cheaply recycled because they’re not much more than the material they were made with – wood pulp and steel. But something like a rubber tire has gone through a chemical process in its manufacture, and it’s nearly impossible to convert it back to rubber. (That’s why there are sad places called tire graveyards.)
Your computer is made of many plastics, metals, glass, and circuit boards, which all have to be dismantled and carefully separated. You may have electronics recycling in your area, but most e-waste is exported to be recycled elsewhere in the world. The whole process – collection, transportation, reprocessing the materials, and transporting those materials to make new materials – makes it easy to see why recycled material gets so expensive.
“But recycling saves the environment! And everyone tells us we should do it!” you say.
Those things are all true. But recycling is entirely a free-market enterprise. Kind of like Wall Street (gah!). So economics dictate recycling, at least in America.
The situation is different in Europe. I lived with a family while studying in the Czech Republic, and I was amazed to see my host father dutifully filling up boxes of glass bottles and taking them to be recycled. I asked O’Brien why people in Europe recycle more actively than Americans. He said Europe has less room for the huge landfills that characterize American waste management. So they regulate recycling, heavily. My host father had a big incentive to return his bottles – he had to pay 5 cents extra when he bought them, which he would get back after he recycled.
“You can get pretty much any recycling level you want if you make it a law,” O’Brien said. “That’s not the case in US. There’s no required recycling, the economics drive the actual level of recycling.”
So what would encourage Americans to recycle more (besides regulations)? “I think what would help is a better understanding of the environmental benefits of recycling, versus using new materials,” said O’Brien. With all the talk of “eco-friendly” this, and “greener” that, we can be hopeful that’s something people are coming around to.
When government mandates and subsidizes recycling, it seems to work. However, when you look at the real dollars spent, it is always a disaster. Glass comes to mind. If you have clean cullet, the cost of making glass is much better than using sand and phosphates. One off color bottle will ruin an entire batch. Worse yet, If someone drops a piece of window (flint glass) or a ceramic mug into the mix, not only is the batch ruioned, cleaning the furnace out is prohitively expensive. So, much of the glass that is “recycled” is ground up and the MRF (Materials Reciovery Facility) and then quietly (and expensively) sent to the local landfil to use as daily cover. Many plastics are the same. If the seratation process is absolutely perfect, all is well ( except the EPA and FDA will not allow post first use materials to be used in food containers), if there is one out of pocket piece in the mix, chunk the batch out. With loow oil prices, why take the chance. Make it from virgin resin.
It is easy to sit in one’s chair and mandate all sorts of recycling dreams. It is quite another to take an unknown input and try to maintain a precise and perfect output.
I agree that economics play a big role not only in recycling, but also in the broader category of waste and what we do with our waste.
Right now it is less expensive for many municipalities to bury their garbage in a landfill, or burn it in an incinerator, than it is to create a recycling program to recycle some of that waste. For example, in places in the middle of the U.S., such as Nebraska and Oklahoma, it costs $20-25 per ton to dump trash into a landfill, whereas in San Francisco it costs something like $105. So, cities like San Fran have an incentive to create recycling programs that can dispose of waste more cheaply than chucking it in a landfill — which they’ve done: San Fran recycles 69 percent of its waste). But Nebraska, Oklahoma and other mid-country states don’t have that cost-savings incentive.
I learned this while researching an article last spring for the National Geographic Channel’s web site. My story was called “Where Does All the Stuff Go?” and it examines what happens to all the things we throw away or recycle. Here’s the link: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/human-footprint/trash-talk.html
In many cases it is less expensive for industries to use recycled materials to make their products. Kate Krebs, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition, told me that making aluminum cans out of recycled cans saves 98 percent of the energy it would take to make the can out of virgin materials. It’s similar with glass and paper — the energy costs are lower when you use recycled materials.
Most of the environmental impacts of a product happen before you even open the box. For every pound of waste that a consumer produces, 7 pounds are produced “upstream” in the manufacturing process (extracting raw materials, producing the product, packaging the product). Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me that most of our virgin resources are discarded as waste — only 1/3 to 1/4 of a tree ends up as usable fiber in a paper product, for example, and the majority of what we mine does not end up as refined ore, it ends up as waste.
In the end, getting industry to waste less and be more efficient — and getting people to recycle more, too — is about conserving energy and natural resources. We can keep burying most of our residential and industrial waste in landfills, because we have the space to do so. But should we? Can we afford to waste energy (whether it’s coal, oil, wind or solar, etc) and natural resources, or should we — as a society — become more efficient and get more out of what we’ve got? With the problems of climate change and the geopolitics of energy resources, I say we can’t afford to waste ‘em.
If the U.S. regulates carbon to reduce climate change impacts, then industries will turn to recycling as a way to save money and reduce their carbon emissions. That’s what should happen. If it doesn’t happen, we might see more government mandates to increase recycling.
Today NPR had a story about how selling recyclables is becoming less profitable, because of the economic recession. Consumers are buying fewer products, so factories don’t need to buy as many raw materials — including recyclables — in order to meet consumer demand.
In the story, NRDC’s Allen Hershkowitz argues that if the U.S. government is going to invest in infrastructure, it should prioritize by investing in ecologically healing industries first — such as recycling.
Here’s the NPR link, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97933374
-Dan
I heard that story this morning! (It was a good excuse to stay in bed and listen to the radio.) Then lo and behold, the NY Times is also featuring a story about the downturn in recyclable values.
Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up
It is very unfortunate that the recession is affecting the recycling industry at such a critical time. How can we continue to push a message about the importance of recycling if recycling just isn’t happening? I think there is a strong argument to be made for government subsidies, or regulations, that encourage effective recycling.
Or considering the current political climate, do I hear, federal bailout for recycling?
If the Obama administration regulates carbon emissions, that could boost the recycling industry. That’s what NRDC’s Hershkowitz told me for an article I wrote last spring for the National Geographic Channel’s web site — see it here: “Where does all the stuff go?”, http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/human-footprint/trash-talk.html
Here’s what he said: Once we regulate carbon emissions (with a tax or cap-and-trade system), manufacturers will have an incentive to use recycled material, because when you make paper from paper, you produce 40 percent less emissions. And when you make aluminum from aluminum cans, instead of virgin bauxite, you produce 50 percent less emissions. And using recycled materials in production requires less energy input than using virgin materials — 95 percent less in the case of aluminum cans. So it will save factories money and emissions, but the emissions regulations are what might really boost recycling.
Hershkowitz also told me that any vision of sustainability relies on recycling. That makes sense because sustainable communities and businesses want to have as little waste as possible.
Some parts of the U.S. do have high recycling rates: 69 percent of solid waste in San Francisco gets recycled, 57 percent in Madison, Wisc. I’m sure other cities have high rates, too. But in the middle of the country, or away from big cities, we have lots of open space, so fees to dump trash in landfills there are low. New York City exports some of its trash to Ohio and Virginia, because it is cost-effective for them.
But we really can’t afford to bury most of our trash in the ground. After so much energy, water and natural resources go into producing something, does it make sense to us it once and throw it away? Only if there’s an infinite supply of energy, water, natural resources/raw materials — and landfills. But there’s not — and most of our oil and some of our natural gas come from abroad, in many cases from nations that don’t like us. So if we’re going to pursue energy independence and slow down climate change, recycling should be part of the solution.
Of course requiring industries to be more efficient would help, too, because for every pound of garbage you and I generate, 7 pounds of waste are created “upstream” in the manufacturing process. Most of the waste filling our landfills comes from industry. Let’s get them to waste less and create products that are more easily repaired, reused or recycled. Then we’ll be onto something.
Dan,
Obama is a politician. He knows absolutely nothing of any real science or physics. He will destroy our economy if he succeeds in shutting down our coal fired power plants. If he manages to get congress (diminutive intended) to go along with his misguided ideas, we will see a growth in governmental cost, scope and incompetence.
If an item or commodity is useful, it will have value. Value is only what a rational person will pay for an item or commodity. Any other device to decide value is without value itself.
If you believe in what you are saying, you buy what you think is “sustainable”. Try to convince others of your belief.
Please know, if you trust any politician to do anything vaguely positive, you will be dissappointed.
The only efficient way to distribute goods and services is an unrestrained market. The governmental way is the the way of Soviet Russia. Poverty and death.
We are not in danger from an impending environmental disaster. We are in danger of being destroyed by a collectivist/socialist disaster. That will consist of starvation, eugenics and economic stagnation. We are not dealing with environmental or physical problems. We are dealing with economic and political problems. the answer is in the individual. The end is in the collective.
Please tell me that picture of the thousands of tires is fake!