The can recycling thing is a giant, unmitigated PITA. You are charged 10c a can or bottle when you buy them. Then you have to stand in a nasty, dirty "recycling area" and feed the damn can into a disgusting machine to get your 10c back. The machine I use requires you to insert the can or bottle so the machine can read the bar code on the can. I guess to prevent some type of can scam? The code reader often fails to read the bar code and you get to throw out the can and your 10c. So who is making $$$ on this whole ordeal? Damn sure aint me! If you guys dont have to deal with a deposit / return system count your blessings!

Commercially, recycling cardboard and certain papers makes sense.

(We don’t pay for our cardboard dumpster at the plant, because the company makes money off it)

Metal has always been recycled.

I’m really surprised that glass isn’t. TMK, glass requires a certain amount of recycled glass to work - but folks no longer have to separate glass by color so I suppose it isn’t needed as much.

Crushed glass is a useful fill. (At least, we found it useful)

I know tires are usefully recycled - I know of a company which uses the rubber to make asphalt for highways and recovers the steel - but I’m not sure if they rely on the disposal fee as well.

Our ex-mayor let it slip in an interview about the landfill being overrun with recycling. Everyone laid into him asking "Why is recycling going to a landfill?"

This is the same doofus that got busted for putting garbage into the public recycling containers and then had the balls to say in the local paper that "It's sad that the citizens can't understand the new recycling rules".

He became the subject of Facebook memes.

quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
Commercially, recycling cardboard and certain papers makes sense.

Certainly not here. The local motorcycle dealer I frequent is in a city that has a recycling program built into the garbage collection. The garbage company must also include recycling which is a net loss so it simply adds cost to the garbage fees. But the contract states they only have to take care of recycling for residential customers. So they have separate pick up for residential "recycling" containers filled with plastic milk jugs, newspapers, pizza and Chinese dinner boxes, old magazines, cans, beer bottles, etc. Nothing for commercial, they won't take any paper, plastic, bottle "recycling" from commercial as it costs them money.
The MC dealer asked the garbage company if they'd take clean, bundled, cardboard. The stuff they have from hundreds of boxes a week is perfect broken down cardboard boxes, not the crap in residential recycle bins. The company said no we won't take it as "recycles" because we don't have to, and it goes to the land fill anyway.
So rather than fill their dumpsters with clean cardboard which they'd have to pay to have picked up, they trailer it all to their warehouse property and burn it. About 3 trailer loads a week. Meanwhile there are two coal burning power plants within 10 miles.

A sham? Yes! Absolutely!

It is around here

quote:

Originally posted by Flash-LB:
Our recycling was cut way back a while ago, no more glass, no more of a lot of different things.
...

Ours also cut back a few years ago. We have separate trucks come for trash and recycling. No glass and only #1 and 2 plastics. I naively think there is some good to it. If it all goes into the trash why limit what they take?

Fairfax County burns their trash in Lorton at the Covanta facility.

https://www.covanta.com/where-...r-facilities/fairfax

The only kind of recycling that makes any sort of economic sense is metal recycling, whether aluminum, steel, iron, copper, etc. but only on a per pound basis. Otherwise too much labor is involved. Not surprisingly, man has been doing metal recycling for thousands of years. The rest of it's just feel good nonsense.

^^^You need to add to that, Cardboard and Paper...

Recycled Cardboard is made into Kraft, which is used to make new Cardboard. Just think of the impact on Amazon alone! And all of that mixed paper in made into Recycled Paperboard. The box for literally every single boxed item you can buy at the grocery store comes in a Recycled Paperboard box. There are a multitude of uses of Recycled Paperboard, but it's in EVERY aisle at the grocery store!

The last time I went to our landfill I saw recyclables being dumped together with everything else. This was a few years ago, it may have changed.

Like all shams, someone is making money on it

A massive waste of time.
My wife religiously recycles even digging plastic bottles I use out of the regular garbage.
Not worth the effort even if the idea behind it is admirable.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
The real purpose of that fee is to get people to drop that stuff off so it can be disposed of somewhat properly instead of pitched out along the road.

I see all sorts of shit on the side of the road including bottles and cans. Why is there no 5-cent deposit on newspapers, cardboard or pizza boxes? All of which I see at the side of the road.

In my state, we have recycling bins that are everywhere. Every house has at least one, sometimes two. There is no reason for the bottle deposit scam when we can just drop the cans into the bin like the newspapers, cardboard and pizza boxes that we put into the blue bins. Again, it's about the money and who gets it.

We were stuck behind a city garbage truck with the hydraulic arms the other day. One stop had a recycling bin and a separate trash bin. He dumped them both.

So much for recycling

quote:

Originally posted by Tn226:
We were stuck behind a city garbage truck with the hydraulic arms the other day. One stop had a recycling bin and a separate trash bin. He dumped them both.

So much for recycling

They did that with my next door neighbor around 2 or 3 weeks ago. It's all a scam and a way to empire build for some city employees.

quote:

Originally posted by 41:
Fairfax County burns their trash in Lorton at the Covanta facility.

https://www.covanta.com/where-...r-facilities/fairfax

Heeey, that's one of my customers.
They have several of those facilities.

It is certainly less economically sound than when energy was cheaper.

Hmm. Maybe they pick up our stuff commercially, as there’s a paper mill, about 30 miles away.

I had an acquaintance who was in the pamphlet business.

He sold his waste pamphlets for a decent amount per ton.

At times, cardboard was high enough he tried to encourage us to sell it, but never to the point that it was worth fooling with, when it’s picked up for free

quote:

Originally posted by Tn226:
We were stuck behind a city garbage truck with the hydraulic arms the other day. One stop had a recycling bin and a separate trash bin. He dumped them both.

So much for recycling

Sometimes they do that here, but usually there are 2 separate trucks on trash day, one for trash and one for recycling.

We'd rather they just go back to twice weekly trash pickup and stop pretending they are recycling.