John Tierney in the City Journal: The plastic panic has never made any sense, and it’s intensifying even as evidence mounts that it’s not only a waste of money but also harmful to the environment, not to mention humans. It’s been a movement in search of a rationale for half a century. During…
Tag: recycling
Wednesday’s Links
Note: We apologize for being offline earlier this week due to a major outage caused by a fiber cut. Welcome back! Georgetown University to divest fossil fuel stocks. Will sanity (about climate change) make a comeback? Old wind-power turbines are going into landfills.
Friday’s Links
A new crime appears in California: recycling fraud. H-T Waste Dive. Africa’s worst infestation of locusts in 75 years, thanks to the war against pesticides. Democrats propose a “National Climate Bank” to invest in climate innovation —with $35 billion from the U. S. government.
Thursday’s Links
Sales of electric vehicles fell 6.8 percent in 2019. British newspaper the Guardian halts fossil fuel ads, accepts auto ads. H-T Charles Rotter. Subsidies, regulation, or both? Recycling bills percolate through Congress.
Curbside Recycling: A Costly Mistake
Recycling companies are facing hard times. Partly that’s because in 2017 China started closing its doors to waste. It doesn’t accept mixed paper or most plastic or electronic waste.
Although some recycling (such as electronic waste) has been relocated to South Asia, the dwindling market for recycled material has sent prices downward, making it difficult for the entire industry.
But the biggest problems face companies—and communities—that pick up and sort household. Approximately 60 curbside programs were canceled in 2017, “with even more drop-off site closures and material limitations,” says Waste Dive, a newsletter about the waste industry. (The newsletter does note some programs that had been dropped have come back.)
Material that is supposed to be recycled is ending up in landfills, an Atlantic article said earlier this year. Companies are debating how to cope with the shrinking market. A debate over the “single-stream” versus dual-stream (requiring homeowners to separate recyclables) continues.