thoughts on ethics

Speaking of ethics, I am proud of the scrap industry, it is one of the more ethical industries out there. It helps both the economy and the environment, helps conserve natural resources, and reduces global warming. Industrial recycling first started during WWII because of a shortage of materials, but in the 1960s-70s it too on an environmentally conscious character. Shortage was no longer the main reason. Building up in landfills. The public became aware that scrap contains toxic metals (mercury, lead), which contaminate soil and water and wildlife. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that in 2013, recycling and composting cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 186 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Also, metal recycling uses up to 40% less water, and aluminum recycling uses up 95% less energy than drilling for ores. And economically speaking, recycling creates nearly $18 billion in export sales per year on average.

You're saying recylced plastic all goes to landfill?

It does here, way way down here. Theres clear plastic soda drink bottles that are recycled into underfloor house insulation & thats about it.

We have a Council run recycling depot close to here & after my third load of plastic they said that they "Cant take any more this time & you will have to pay to dump it at the dump, its just bailed & landfilled anyway".
Oh well $12 later. After that i chopped it up & put it in my wheelie bin for rubbish collection.

I would have to agree with eesakiwi on this. We have special bins for cardboard, newsprint, and plastics at our transfer station. I've personally seen the attendants fill the bucket of the loader with these and dump them into the compactor. The roll a way attached to the compactor gets hauled off to the incinerator and it's all burned to make electricity. They've been doing it for years. The glass just gets dumped in a hole somewhere out of sight.

We get a lot of " wish cyclers " at our bottle redemption. They sneak in other plastics & glass along with the redeemable bottles that they donate to a local charity. We end up having to paw through the bags and pull out the redeemables. The rest just gets tossed in the trash.

There was an outfit down in Mass that was doing a pretty good business with bailing used plastic bags but that went Southbound when China implemented it's National Sword policy. The market dried up.

Most recently: Maine was all set to outlaw single use plastic shopping bags next month. Everyone would have had to bring in their reusable shopping bags. Then it dawned on them that single use bags are sanitary. Reusable bags are not.

I think a lot of the non metal recycling has more to do with politics. The environmentalists want action to save the planet so you go through the motions and toss the worthless stuff into the waste stream when nobody's looking. They get to keep their illusions and you just carry on as best you can. It's mostly about the money. It has to be a paying proposition or it isn't going to work.

Thats a good point about the old single use plastic bags being far more hygienic than the current cloth recyclable ( yeah right! ) shopping bags.

My wife works the checkout at the grocery store. They're constantly bleaching the stainless steel and the little conveyor belt because that's a surface that food is set upon.

A couple of years ago one of the customers brought in some of their cloth bags to use in place of the plastic ones we provide. My wife opened the bag and there was a litter of baby mice in there. No sign of momma mouse anywhere.

I was talking with her about this a couple of days ago. She said that some people do wash their bags but most don't. The reusable one's aren't very clean.

I re-purposed some of my wife's reusable grocery bags.

They're awesome for scrap metal. They guys at the yard loved them cause they're easy to handle and don't have any tare weight.

In the end, it will all work out. I see a day when all the old dumps and landfills will be mined for all the stuff we threw away. I see metal being a component that should have a higher rate than occurs naturally, plastic will have a fuel use, glass can be used for aggregate, the compostebles can be used as, well, compost.