here's some idea as to how much money is actually flows through the recycling plans of NYC:

Now here I cannot bring bottles and cans to the redemtion machines as I please. There are many rules so that I can get my $.05 deposit back.

So if I buy a Sam's Soda from Walmart, I cannot bring it to my local grocery store for redemption because redemption machines are keyed to read UPCs. No UPC No nickel. I can also not use the machine on Sunday. They also limit how many bottles I can recycle on each day.

Also, water bottles are exempt from this recycling program.

Yep. They pick up the recyclables along with the garbage. It's co-mingled, so it's easy. I use to compost fruit/vegetable peels, but I don't really garden anymore so that doesn't make much sense.

According to that website posted by cynthetiq recycling is a 9 billion dollar a year industry in NY. Now the question is why can't NYC recycle at a profit, is it typical government inefficiency? Is it that consumer recyclables are just not worth it?

There are a lot of questions to ask, but I'd much rather see something like this market driven instead of social engineered for the obvious reason of sustainablity.

We're not required to recycle but we do. We get nice blue bins to put our recyclable goods in exclusively and they're picked up on a separate day of the week than the regular trash. We can recycle plastic, glass, aluminum and paper but we have to make sure everything is washed off fairly well before it goes in the bin. They even gave us a reminder refrigerator magnet on what can go in the bin.

I understand profitability varies by material. Metal has a huge market since it's largely re-usable as raw. Throw it into the smelter and sell it to expansion countries. Paper and plastic are subsidized to some extent as their products don't convert as completely or cost more to return to "new" condition than do "new" product. Hopefully someone who knows this better will clarify.

Obviously scrap/salvage/processors are only motivated on the profitable items. Cities end up footing the bill between items that sell and those that don't, plus the overhead. (transport, storage, separation) They are motivated however by reclamation laws and landfill availability/costs, and at some point voters.

The situation becomes more complex as private companies have taken over service from municipalities. Our own city-run disposal operation sold to a national company about a decade ago in the interest of reduced costs and complexity. Of course, community benefits were also lowered. Away went the free spring cleaning days. Up go the disposal rates, dump rates, even for things that can be sold without processing. Hello to new service charges for things that were previously seen as neighborhood beautification services. Hello to all the other cities who now have their trash hauled to our little landfill (now far beyond its original "hillside restoration" profile) with profit going to the national who'll step out when they no longer have a free landfill to support their habit. (Do I have a bone to pick? :) )

Many sides to this thing.

There's sustainability and sustainability. Aside from the year-by-year costs, there's the cost of additional landfills _and_ the horrendous task of finding some neighborhood relatively near a desirable metro area that will _allow_ a landfill to come i these days. Private concerns don't tend to factor in these long-term costs. When the nearby landfill fills up, they simply cut a deal with somebody much farther away, and pass the additional hauling costs on. And those sites get further and further away.

Somebody has to do the long-term planning. The attention span of the average corporation is 'way too short -- next quarter, too often.

I sure am glad to see a lot of people doing their part. :icare:

Someone DOES have to do the long term planning. People of old didnt have much to just throw away, everyone recycled by reusing everything they could, and there wasnt many things they couldnt. Thinking of how much civilization has modernized into using disposable products, its overwhelming at the pace in which it growed. Just two hundred years ago, people wouldnt have dreamed of just throwing things away. Thats alot of waste produced in so little time considering how long man has been upon the earth, and what about in another two hundred years, if it even lasts that long? The thought is staggering! Throwing shit away has turned into a hell of a crisis within both rural and urban areas. Land fills are filling up, with less and less areas to make new ones, and just thinking about how unhealthy it has to be for the earth and the human race to just bury trash into the ground and forget it. Its horrible. We get everything from the earth we need to survive: water, food, air, medicine, ect., a long term plan to reverse these modern bad habits must be put into action. Recycling will play a larger and larger part in getting the ball rolling to preserve what we seem to be consuming up at too much of an alarming rate.

I do recycle, too. My town is small, but they do offer curbside service if enough people in that particular area participate, and unfortunately since my town does not have mandatory law or even much awareness of the subject, most people do NOT, so the service is limited to people who actually do. I have to load mine up and take it to the center. Recently they stopped accepting glass of any kind. Imagine that! They never had any type of compost program, but that is something to write my city officials about. I recycle just about everything I can, and every time I drop it off, it makes me so sad to see all the people come through and drive past the recycling bins to the dumpster. I do what I can though, and I suppose its all I can do.

So I can not take all the soda cans in a big truck, and drive it to Michigan, where you get .10 back? Err wait sorry that is a seinfeld episode, nm

[QUOTE=NoSoup]I recycle, within reason.

I too, don't take the time to clean out a plastic peanut butter jar, but as long as it isn't too much of a hassle I'll rinse out whatever needs rinsing and toss it in the recycling bin.

QUOTE]


i wonder if the ecological footprint used in washing out that peanut butter jar cancels out the benefits of recycling it? I mean in the cost of water, filtering, disposal, soap going into the environment...

Plus the plastic is such a good landfill object, it doesn't leach (all that quickly) into the watertable.

At any rate, the really hard to clean containers like PB are not acceptable in our programme (the number on the bottom isn;t 1 or 2 or 5 I think is new one).

You just have to make sure that the beer/pop/soda/etc you buy out of state is also sold at the store in Michigan where you return them to get the deposits. :D

keyshawn.

I just started using the transfer station . When we had the flooods last fall they put load limjts on the bridges by my house,so I'm kind of on mandatory recycling. Its not bad.Cans glass and plastic in one bin, paper and cardboard in another bin.Garbage goes in a compactor. Appliances, construction debris,and large items cost whatever the guy at the office says.About 20 bucks a level pickup bed full.

yes, I do compost. Our local municipality also collects green waste, so the larger items I can't use in the garden get picked up by the domestic waste engineers. Here we have three wheelie bins, one small one for garbage, collected each week, and two larger ones (recycling and green waste), collected on alternate weeks.

The recycling bin is not sorted by us, so paper, glass, cans and plastic all go in together. They came to the conclusion that people stuffed it up so much if we sorted it, so it is all sorted centrally now...

edit - plus they don't care what number is on the plastic - they take them all...