Cost of recycling

So today I ventured to clean up the recyclables in a closet we have designated for their collection. We can’t get around the collection as the town fines us should we throw them out in the garbage. But I got thinking, if I am going to be sorting these items out and getting them prepared to take to the recycling center then I am going to time out how long it takes me to do this. In our household we stock pile the items until it is worthwhile to pack them all into the car and take them to the center, other wise the fuel required to make a weekly trip would be so much that it would off set the cost of actually doing the collection. Well so I thought. So anyway, I spent about 2 hours separating the flyers, the bottles and cans and plastic into bags that segregated them. Now that would equate to about 30 dollars of wage that someone would have to do if there was a service doing this. But this didn’t account for the lost time each day for someone to wash the item, which in turn also costs us as we have to pay for heating of the water, and the water and removing the label and separating the caps from the bottle and then putting them in their bin. In industry they would automate this, as having humans touching these items just adds a portion of a wage to them thus making it too cost in-effective to stay in business.

Oh, but wait this was the topic of the book The Skeptical Environmentalist which points out that recycling is the only industry in the world where is it ok to pull a loss because after all we are saving the planet. But if you really look at legislation in cities and town centered around recycling isn’t this more like a tax then a levy? Because after all you are working for free to sort and clean all the products you have already paid for and then you pay into fuel and transportation to willing do something that an industry would do if there was one. And still once the plastics are reground and pellitized they can’t be sold as virgin polymer because they can’t make virgin products again because of public out cry. There are a few products that can be made that take higher concentrations of recycled polymers but for the most part anything that is colored is where they end up.

Now something i do not agree with which I over heard at my last attendance to the recycling center was a lady being told that if they by any chance mixed up the plastics in the bin that it would screw up the recycling process. Well, I ran plastics for 21 years. Setup extrusion lines, ran shifts and pretty much was involved in plastics ground up and any time we ever got cross contamination it did not thing more then plugged the screens. Which I might add happens with all the dirt that is sucked up because of the static plastics give off. Often with profile lines there are continuous screening systems that pull anything foreign out of the flow of plastic anyway. Cross contamination just isn’t a big deal.

Personally, i think that the public should look into how plastics are handled and how cost effective recycled plastics are. I doubt the trading system has changed much in the last 10 years, it use to be you took a really big gamble when you bought recycled polymer. You never knew if the product in the boxes had been recycled more then 4 times and would make nothing but garbage, or someone had a couple of pails of stones in the bottom of the box. Often you never got to sample the boxes prior to buying it and in my experience you might have 1500 pounds of good product and then 1500 pounds of scrap. Regrind that would not run got put into products that where expendable, pool noodles are one of those expendable products which often end up in the land fill anyway.

I would encourage everyone to check out Bjorn Lomborg