For those of us who spent most of our lives painstakingly separating plastic, glass, paper and metal, single-stream recycling is easy to love. No longer must we labor. Gone is the struggle to store two, three, four or even five different bags under the kitchen sink. Just throw everything into one dumpster, season liberally with hopes and dreams, and serve it up to your local trash collector. What better way to save the planet?
But you can see where this is headed.
Americans love convenient recycling, but convenient recycling increasingly does not love us. Waste experts call the system of dumping all the recyclables into one bin “single-stream recycling.” It’s popular. But the cost-benefit math of it has changed. The benefit — more participation and thus more material put forward for recycling — may have been overtaken by the cost — unrecyclable recyclables. On average, about 25 percent of the stuff we try to recycle is too contaminated to go anywhere but the landfill, according to the National Waste and Recycling Association, a trade group.
You can read the rest @
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-era-of-easy-recycling-may-be-coming-to-an-end/
Several years ago I had an opportunity to speak with a professional engineer who contributed to the writing of RCRA. He claimed the chief impact of the act was to make money for lawyers, and not to actually encourage the recovery of solid waste.
Most environmental initiatives sound good, but their implementation is quite imperfect.
My suggestion? Stop creating toxins, stop sending us stuff in plastic packages, and go back to the days of home delivery of fresh foodstuffs. Amazon and several others are approximating this, but each of their deliveries contributes to MOUNTAINS of waste. I know, because I've got some of it in my garage.
No comments:
Post a Comment