China's Waste Ban Is Causing A Trash Crisis In The U.S

My trash service doesn't even allow me to throw in empty steel shells from computers or anything like that into the recycling, even though its completely clean steel. I think a lot of the trash collection services just don't want to deal with it because too many people just contaminate the recyclables with food and simple trash waste to make it worth trying to recycle. Unfortunately, this has spread to scrap metal. Hopefully this will behave like the stock market and come back up sometime soon. I think that if America would stop trying to make so much money on the little things and instead put some percentage of money toward building the infrastructure for properly recycling these materials, we wouldn't have this problem. America is essentially importing everything, consuming it, and then exporting it all back out. What we keep is what is thrown in regular trash. Unbelievable, and it makes me mad just thinking about it.

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Originally Posted by mikeinreco

Mmmmm....eating lunch here at wendy's catching up on some forum posts

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You didn't use a straw, did you?

The MRF are not set up to handle computer cases and other scrap metal . When these items come in they have to slow down the line . Or shut it off to pick these items out.

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Originally Posted by jimicrk

You didn't use a straw, did you?

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As a matter of fact I did........I even went as far as putting a lid on my drink!!!

The city here has switched to every other week recycling hope to control costs, but have not yet cut out what we can try to recycle, that may be the next faze talking about eliminating paper and glass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8aVYb-a7Uw

Getting rid of glass would be good.
Making more aluminium cans would be great, lower weight = cheaper transport and chilling costs.
They both cost the same to make.
I like the idea thats used in places in America, glass beer bottles are only sold at 'room temp', meaning that only Ali beer cans are sold chilled
( but the 'open container' laws suck. Getting drunk in a car with a sober driver is one of lifes great experiences. Though NZ does have ' no alcohol zones' in individual towns )

more aluminum cans would be better in my opinion. maybe more aluminum foil. but i don't know how well thats really recycled either. i know alot of companies dont like it in normal aluminum. Maybe replace some plastic casings with die cast or something. like ya know like whats around your tv or something. i don't know how well that would work or not but maybe. anything has got to be better than **** plastic everything. switch back to paper bags. or make them reusable/biodegradable cloth bags more like what gets used.theres definitely ways to use less plastic.

The Shaw institute here in Maine started doing research into microplastics contaminating the earth's oceans awhile back. It sounded a bit far fetched at first, but there's probably something to it.

https://www.shawinstitute.org/focus/...-microplastics

This video is just one angle on how it's impacting the ocean environment. It's pretty clear cut that something is going on there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju_2NuK5O-E

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Originally Posted by ScrapmanIndustries

more aluminum cans would be better in my opinion. maybe more aluminum foil. but i don't know how well thats really recycled either. i know alot of companies dont like it in normal aluminum. Maybe replace some plastic casings with die cast or something. like ya know like whats around your tv or something. i don't know how well that would work or not but maybe. anything has got to be better than **** plastic everything. switch back to paper bags. or make them reusable/biodegradable cloth bags more like what gets used.theres definitely ways to use less plastic.

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Change is in the wind. The plastic shopping bags will be outlawed here in Earth Day 2020. Four other states have joined in as well.

https://www.pressherald.com/2019/06/...-plastic-bags/

By far and away ... plastic beverage containers are the most common things that come into our bottle redemption center. Wild guess ... but they might be somewhere around 80% of what's coming in ?

Aluminum cans are good for some things but not everything.

Glass is the purist's choice. We sell a lot of wine in the store. That's all in glass. It's always been the preferred choice for hard liquor too. We get a lot of twisted tea & microbrew bottles. There isn't a great market for recycled glass but it seems harmless from an environmental point of view. It's made from sand and can be ground right back into sand easily enough.

From an energy point of view: ( refrigeration ... huge electricity use ! ) All of the beer is sold chilled. Soda is sold both chilled and at room temp. Wine and liquor are sold at room temp.

I guess I see some opportunities to some things.
1. Glass.... It would seem to me that glass crushed could easily be used for the aggregate and sand used in concrete and asphalt.
2. Granulating the plastic would make it usable for something. It could be pressed into form for all kinds of applications, melted and injection molded. Even processed to make fuel and lubricants.
3. Anything burnable could be used to burn and create energy. Perhaps the plastic turned to fuel could be used to help with the burning process.
4. Anything metal (or non flammable) would be separated from the flammables during the burning process and collected and separated. Large metal items could be separated ahead of time and recycled.
5. Paper and other biomass could be composted and used for gardening and farming.

I could see the people being charged for collection and processing, and any end user of the resulting separated waste allowed the commodity for free, pay to have it hauled.
I have often thought it wouldn't be long before old dumps and landfills would be mined for the products they contained. The ratio of steel and brass and copper and aluminum and other resources has to be higher density and more refined than the ore pulled from the earth. I just see our trash as a very valuable commodity that if provided for free, would be something industry could use easier and cheaper than the raw resources.

Maybe I am way off base, but it just really seems like an opportunity whose time has not yet been taken advantage of or offered.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqrlEsPoyJk maybe eesakiwi can translate what they're saying so the rest of us can understand, but even without it the pictures are pretty clear here. Our aluminum frag pile at work was pretty much the same story before i left. don't know how thats going at the moment though.

it almost seems like a good time for plastic forrests company to take on a major expansion project right about now.

I think T. probably said it best. Take a number of different approaches all at once. Maybe there's no one size fits all solution ?

You know ... incineration isn't a bad thing as long as it's done right. It doesn't have to be a problem unless we make it a problem.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/e...plastic-waste/

Why can't the soda companies go back to refundable glass bottles? That would get rid of a lot of the plastic waste problems... You know, like the baby boomers used to do before the enviro purist money hungry plastic loving millennials screwed up the environment.

Ohh wow ... a blast from the past. I remember picking up nickel deposit soda bottles when i was a kid in the 60's. That's when a nickel was worth something ! (Equivalent to something like a quarter or a half dollar in today's money.)

Sad , but it's kind of a thing from a bygone era. See ... they used to take the bottles back ... wash them out ... refill them with soda ... cap them ... and then back to the store again. It's not that sanitary when you think about it. Anything that comes in contact with bodily fluids like saliva ?

I suppose it could be done like dishes in a restaurant. Maybe better to have cheap single use containers though ?

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Originally Posted by t00nces2

Why can't the soda companies go back to refundable glass bottles? That would get rid of a lot of the plastic waste problems... You know, like the baby boomers used to do before the enviro purist money hungry plastic loving millennials screwed up the environment.

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that was actually another documentary in the wormhole i crawled into on youtube about all this. apparently according to german journalists in their documentary. DW i beilieve the name of them is, coca cola actually still had that going in Thailand up until just very very (like 2017) recently. then they converted to plastic there as well. because the company would have to pay to wash out all the bottles. and eat the costs associated with all that. now they can just pump out the product and not worry about what happens to the package. in it they interviewed the vice president/ceo what ever they call him of coke. he claims the customer wants plastic because its more durable and portable. like i **** you not those words came out of his mouth. its kinda sad i think but ultimately the world as a whole votes with their money. in my opinion though if they made most liquid drinks come in aluminum i would buy more of them. budweiser was giving out water in cans when i was with team rubicon in disaster areas. if coke would put their Dasani water in aluminum cans like monster where its resealable i think more people would be willing to buy that. and as much as i hate government sticking their hands in places they don't belong i feel like they do need to step in here to come up with something. and yeah burning trash does work too. germany does it. although they have their problems as well, at least once its burnt it takes up way less space then a landfill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvYZ3sbTaQ0

Well, I'm not going to feel too guilty about plastic soda bottles. I don't drink soda, I rarely drink bottled water (and many times, it is a bottle I have refilled with water from my RO), my beer and wine is in glass bottles (which I don't care what is said, the stream of glass, ALL GLASS, could be diverted to an aggregate rock crushing facility and added and mixed with crushed rock aggregate), and I drink ice tea I make myself and pour from a Tupperware 1/2 gallon jug I have had since the mid '80's.

Crushed multicolored glass could be added to terrazzo grout and make really cool terrazzo floors. I like terrazzo and the glass aggregate would look really cool.

A glass stubbie bottle (340mls) & a Aluminium can costs the same to make.
But the Aluminium can can be recycled 12 times for the same cost it cost to make it in the first place.

The glass stubbie weighs 200 grams.
The Aluminium can, 15 grams

The glass stubbie bottle is made from 4 different materials (inc cap )
The Aluminium can, 1 material

The glass stubbie takes up more cargo weight and space & costs more to cool.
The Aluminium can, you can fit twice as much volume of liquid transported as a glass container.

To recycle a glass bottle, collection, seperation, qualification, cleaning, qualification, fill & cap. Inc glass & cleaning substances & heating wastes.
Aluminium. Collection, qualification, cubing press, melt into ingot, process into clean container again @ 1/13th the weight of glass. No waste at all.

To cool a glass container the weight is 540 gms. Vs
Aluminium @ 355 gms. So Aluminium takes 2/3rds of the energy it takes to cool a glass container of liquid.

Aluminium wins ín every instance.