Recycling is Fiction


     I guess it was Recycling Today, or some other industry publication 
where I read China was dumping bales of plastic into the ocean that we 
shipped over there from our recycling programs, back in the nineties.  I'm 
sure they've put a stop to it since then, and the offenders were 
reprimanded.  
	 At that time I had read this, most of the garbage pickup service 
and recycling contracts for the city of Seattle were given to Waste 
Management, which received something like $135/ton for garbage and about 
the same for recyclables.  I never heard of any sliding scale for scrap 
material they could sell, like paper or aluminum, so whatever the rate 
was, it was probably adjusted for recyclables as a whole, which included 
commodities that cost more to collect and sort than their scrap value.  
Sure they could sell the aluminum cans, but it cost more to sort paper and 
plastic than it was worth.  In essence, the most cost effective way, in a 
lot of cases, was to bale the material up and ship it overseas for 
processing, especially where regulations were a little more lax.
	 Years later I heard a report where some college students got 
grant money to study a thousand mile circular vortex of debris floating in 
the Pacific ocean.  A lot of it was broken down plastic, bits and pieces, 
maybe a millimeter in size or less.  Over time, as little as few months,  
UV rays make plastic brittle and it will break up, if you leave it in the 
sun for very long.  So my conclusion is that we Americans, in our green 
appetite to recycle, paid contractors to bale plastic up and ship it over 
seas where the processors found it cheaper to just dump the plastic over 
the sides of the ships, or off a dock, than to sort it and process it into 
a recyclable feed stock.  Plus there wasn't that much you could make with 
used plastic, back in the nineties.
	 Plastic is not recyclable, or only marginally so under the right 
conditions.  The consumer can not recycle plastic effectively.  They leave 
the lids and labels on, and there's enough debris left inside of plastic 
bottles to make it too expensive to clean and sort.   It was cheaper for 
companies like Waste Management to pay a company five dollars a ton, in 
China, than to pay eighty dollars a ton in the States to sort and clean 
the plastic into marketable scrap material.  So Chinese contractors made a 
profit by just accepting the scrap material and either letting it sit 
there on their lot or finding a cheap way to dispose of it, like in the 
ocean.
	 I'm sure it wasn't just China and I'm sure the other countries 
have put a stop to dumping now too, but there's that vortex that's 
floating around in the ocean.  Plastic, it seems will take thousands of 
years before it totally degrades, so my conclusion, America, is that 
recycling is fiction.  We've been sold a bill of goods, that's costing us 
far more than we're able to sell it for.  It's a hefty tax that we can't 
afford anymore.  Scrap aluminum and glass is fine, when there's a market 
for it, but our illustrious bureaucrats have bundled all sorts of blue sky 
into recycling that's costing taxpayers, probably $150 a ton or more, now, 
and we can no longer afford that infrastructure if we want to restore 
American commerce and industry.
	 
	  Reader beware.  This is only a conspiracy theory, without proper 
references.  I apologize, but then again I'm not getting paid to write 
this down or do the research.  I did however, work in the industry, so I 
think it's highly likely.

kb
kbushnel.sdf-us.org/contact.html
UUUUUUUUUU