Talk:Recycling/Fact farm

• Prior to the 1920s, 70% of american cities had programs to recycle certain materials.
• During World War II, 25% of US waste was recyled or reused.
• According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, US recycling rose from 7 to 17% between 1960 and 1990.
• Whether recycling is economically feasible and if there are adequate markets for recycled produces is a controversial issue.
• Advocates of recycling argue that judging the process on economic merits alone is not enough. They claim that the environmental benefits, energy savings, waste reduction and raw material conservation must also be considered. In order to make such non-fiscal benefits economically relevent, advocates have pushed for legislative action to increase the demand for recycled materials
• Opponents counter that recycling is not reasonable if it is more costly than disposal and new virgin production. Any government incentives support recycling, they claim, would not result in the most efficient use of resources. Recycling would make economic sense in a densely populated area where virgin materials are scarce and disposal costs high, yet legislated recycling in other situations would only bring unnecessary economic hardship.
• Without a market for the recycling goods, recycling is incomplete and in fact only "collection". This includes both a market for industrial production using the collected materials and a consumer market for the manufactured product.
• There is one area where both sides tend to argee: that full costs for waste disposal or recycling should be paid by the consumer.

Material	Energy Savings Through Use of Recyclables	Air Pollution Savings
Aluminum	95%	95%
Plastics	88%	—
Newspaper	34%	73%
Corrugated Cardboard	24%	—
Glass	5-30%	20%

This table is taken from, which says, "Source: Adapted from Garbage Solutions: A Public Officials Guide to Recycling and Alternative Solid Waste Management Technologies, as cited in Energy Savings from Recycling, January/February 1989; and Worldwatch 76 Mining Urban Wastes: The Potential for Recycling, April 1987."

• The recycling of old newspapers in the northwestern US is facilitated by the abundance of pulp of paper mills in that region and the ease of shipping the reprocessed paper to Asian markets. In other areas of the US, demand for old newspapers has seen a marked fluctuation.
• Due to the large amount of green glass production is the midwest United State, finding sources for the recyclates has not been a problem. In other areas of the US, however, it has been difficult to keep up with the large amount of green glass bottles imported.
• Requirements for a feasible recycling process:

1. A source of recyclates
2. A system to extract recyclates from the waste stream
3. A processing plant close enough that shipping is not prohibitive in either financial or environmental cost.
4. A potential demand for the recycled products.

• Legislated US rebates for the import of certain materials unintentionally supported virgin sourcing over the use of recycle materials.
• Most US states which offer refunds for used bottle see an 80% recycling rate.

Material	Percent of waste stream
Glass	4%*
Garden waste	20%*

^*US figures

• Glass is 4% of the waste stream.
• The shift in collection costs from local government to industry and consumers creates strong opposition to new "bottle bill" legislation.
• Disposal bans can be used in an attempt to increase the recycling rate of certain materials. Unless adequate recycling facilities are also provided, however, these bans can instead lead to increased illegal dumping.
• Minimum recycled content mandates force manufacturers to use a certain minimum percentage of recycled material in their products. This provides a demand from the recycled products
• About 24 US states have such mandates on the production of newsprint, telephone books, glass and plastic containers, fiberglass or trash bags.
• Utilization rates are a more flexible from of content mandates, allowing industry to use recycled material in any area of their process, or even contract the required recycling out to another company.
• Procurement policies are designed to encourage or mandate that a certain amount of government spending go towards recycled products. This is done either through "set-aside" policies where an amount of funding is earmarked for recycled materials, or "price preference" policies where the purchase budget is increased so long as it's spent on recycled products.
• The United States Environmental Protection Agency requires that all US government spending on oil, paper, tires and building insulation come from recycled or re-refined sources whenever possible.
• Legislation for environmental labeling of products—including availability of recycling facilities and percentage of recycled material used in packaging—encourages recycling by allowing consumers to more make educated decisions.
• A virgin materials tax is levied on producers for using non-recycled materials. While often discussed, it has been hard to put into practice due to the negative effects it would have on the virgin material industry.
• An alternative is to providing tax credits to producers using recycled materials. In the US, this would serve to counter-balance the tax credits currently received for using virgin materials through the resource depletion allowance.
• Pay per can systems charge consumers based on the amount of curbside waste collect. This indirectly encourages not only recycling (as pick-up of recycled waste is often not charged) but also waste reduction and reuse.
• Three main types of recycling collection:

• Drop-off centres are fixed or mobile locations where consumers can deliver recyclates. The operation and maintenance of the centres varies between the public, private and volunteer sectors. They are the cheapest and simplest type of recycling service to set-up, but suffer from lower public participation rates and an unpredictable flow of materials.
• Buy-back centres purchase cleaned recyclates, thereby providing an economic incentive to recycle. These have worked well for the collection of aluminum, but are inconvenient for the public section and require a large amount of stable capital to purchase the recyclates.
• Curbsite collection involves the pick-up of recyclates from homes and businesses. This system has been very effective in increasing recycling rates but has high start-up and operating costs.

• Mixed waste collection involves the city collecting all wastes at curbside. Desired recyclates are then separated out and cleaned before reprocessing. This is the simplest system in terms of public education and is most convenient if the materials to be recycled much be changed. It is also the most costly, and certain materials such as paper are often rendered too soiled to recycle.
• With commingled recyclables the recyclates for collection are mixed but kept separate from other waste. This greatly reduces the need for post-collection cleaning but does require public education on what materials are recyclable.
• Source separation is the other extreme, where each material is cleaned and sorted prior to collection. This method requires the least post-collection sorting and produces the purest recyclates, but incurs addition operating costs for collection of each separate material. An extensive public education program is also required, which must be successful if recyclate contaminate is to be avoided.
• Once the recyclates are collected (or droped-off), a materials recovery facility processes them into commodities suitable for new manufacturing.
• According to the United States Nation Solid Wastes Management Association, it costs on average $50US to process a ton of material, which can only be resold for $30US.
• The recovery facility must also take care that their environmental impact does not negate the benefits of recycling, from increased truck traffic delivering the recyclates and taking away the products, to disposal of chemical by-products of melting scrap metal and de-inking paper. This latter is rendered even more challenging than in virgin production as the recovery facility does not know what chemical dyes, paints or adhesives were used during the original production.
• Michael Munger, the Chair of Political Science at Duke University, argued that the financial costs of recycling some materials outweigh the environmental benefits, and that the environmental benefits of recycling do not compensate for the extra effort it may require.
• John Tierney, in an article in The New York Times claimed that government mandated recycling wastes more resources than it saves.
• In cases where recycling truly does save resources, such as with large scraps of aluminum, this will be reflected in market prices, and voluntary recycling will take place. Thus, there is no need for the government to mandate it.
• Tree farmers plant more trees than they cut down.
• Government mandated recycling is more expensive than putting the garbage into landfills, which means that this recycling uses up more resources than it saves.
• Some small towns with landfills are happy to import garbage from other cities and states because it provides jobs and tax revenue.
• Today's modern landfills are much cleaner and safer, and much less likely to leak and pollute than the landfills of the past.
• Regarding the claim that the U.S. is running out of landfill space, Tierney wrote, "A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side. This doesn't seem a huge imposition in a country the size of America. The garbage would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists. The millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land now available for grazing in the continental United States. And if it still pains you to think of depriving posterity of that 35-mile square, remember that the loss will be only temporary. Eventually, like previous landfills, the mounds of trash will be covered with grass and become a minuscule addition to the nation's 150,000 square miles of parkland."