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

Originally Posted by eesakiwi

Thanks. We are having sorta the same problem here in my part of NZ.
We have 2 big plastic rubbish bins, one is for recycling waste, glass bottles, tins, plastic bottles and paper/cardboard, & a few other things like clean polystyrene.
It gets picked up by the rubbish truck every 2 weeks, taken to the recycling centre, sorted, bailed & sent wherever it goes.
The other bins for just rubbish & its picked up weekly.
'They' are wanting to shut down the recycling station & i dont know what will replace it.

The glass problem? I have wondered if the glass could be made into 100% glass bricks. Hollow bricks i guess would help insulate against cold. They would absorb heat nicely.
The problem with glass is contamination, if theres any glass of a higher melting temp, scientific glass, oven dishes etc, a tiny piece of that in the recycled glass object wont melt it & will cause a sharp spot, since it wont expand & contract the same, it will cause the other glass to break.

We dont have the machine for taking bottles/cans. We did about 30 years ago for a short time, for Ali cans.
Then some idiot did something that got his little daughter hurt by the machine & the machines were shut down.
They would give you prizes randomly, free coke cola, free AA batterys, small prizes etc.
They took in huge amounts of ali cans too. Theres no redemption on cans/bottles here except standard scrap Ali can price of NZ1.00 /Kg. ( uS$0.68 cents/Kg )

Alot of places in America are starting to do that 2 giant plastic can thing now too for garbage pick up. one for "recycling" one for landfills. anything outside the bin is like a $25 charge to pick up except for the special pickup weeks spaced out throughout the year. kinda sucks cause it killed curb shopping in alot of areas around me. and now its way harder to find smaller metal items to keep them out of landfills. sure the metals are supposed to go in the townships recycling bin but i'm also fairly certain that unless they standardize recycling across the state and teach how to recycle properly in high school, that most of the people in my area will never actually place the correct items in each bin.