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What Happens Now That China Won't Take U.S. Recycling
- remote_phone 8y agoWe should only allow fully recycled plastic everywhere. Completely outlaw single-use plastic that can’t be easily recycled. Everything else should be compostable. Everything else should have a fee associated with disposal. Things with dangerous chemicals like batteries, etc should have high amounts of returnable deposits. Yes, it’s going to be expensive but it’s worth it.
- xattt 8y agoI too heard the 99PI episode that cited this article.
- doytch 8y agoNot only is your snark unnecessary, this article came out March 5 - after that episode.
- Simulacra 8y agoMaybe this is a blessing in disguise so we're focused more on recycling from the start, not as an after-the-fact. Companies like Apple (and others) have been inching us towards this notion of disposable electronics. Once we can no longer simply "dispose" of things, perhaps it will push companies and governments to look at making things more environmentally responsible from the start.
- pertymcpert 8y agoPerhaps Apple not the best example there.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoIt could be a blessing in disguise if recycling is considered appropriately. Reduce, reuse, recycle, dispose, in that order of priority. Without that it is very difficult to claim, with any credibility at all, being environmentally responsible. I'm not optimistic.
- zikzak 8y agoMy mother, in her 80s, occasionally says they didn't need recycling when she was young because things were not disposable in the same way they are now. They were also pretty broke and so much more likely to "make do" than they were to buy something new. The lack of choice and diversity of goods back then probably also played a huge role in this. Not saying we should go back to that but we can learn from it.
- blihp 8y agoShe's got a point with respect to durable items. In the last century it was uncommon to throw something out just because it had a crack or tear... minor repairs were the norm. Now we throw out perfectly good phones when the battery gets worn out and it isn't fashionable to replace them. We've gotten (a bit) better at reducing wasteful packaging but much worse regarding the longevity of what's inside the package. Also, world population growth isn't helping the problem.
- mostlyjason 8y agoNo one cares because the perceived cost is zero. Burning your recycling just externalizes the cost to the environment. If I lived in one of those cities, I’d encourage the city to increase disposal fees so they can do it properly. If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners. If business can earn more profit or increase volume by using better packaging, then they’ll do so.
- BoorishBears 8y ago>If people are too poor to pay the fees, then add a sales tax on wastefully packaged products to subsidize disposal fees for low income earners That just punishes the low income people again. Taxes on goods disproportionately affect poor people because the tax is a larger portion of your purchasing power the lower your income is. A rich person, or even a middle class person, isn’t going to be put out of their habits by a couple of cents.
- barrkel 8y agoThe tax should still be on the purchase price. If essential goods end up too expensive for poor people, then the answer is to raise income levels for poor people via some kind of redistribution. In order to solve the problem systematically, incentives need to be aligned so that desired global collective outcomes emerge from local individual choices. If the cost isn't on the purchase price, there's little incentive on consumers at the point of purchase to choose a product with a cheaper disposal cost. Disposal is geographically and temporally remote; and if you're poor, you can economize on it by cheating (littering, fly tipping, illegal burning, man with a van who takes the problem off your hands, etc).
- coldtea 8y agoAnd because the percentage of income one spends for "packaged products" is gets lower the richer you get (and gets capped), the rich can just put aside a "pollute as much as I like" percentage of their income just for not having to care about recycling.
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoThe article doesn't mention Plastic China [1] the documentary that in some ways really prompted China to make this change. 1 - https://www.plasticchina.org/ https://www.plasticchina.org/
- unfunco 8y ago> "They can split the atom, but they can't recycle plastic?" I think this was a quote from that documentary, it was either posted here or on reddit previously (I'm not complaining, it was fascinating) – that quote, by a worker in a Chinese recycling plant to the owner of the plant, after being told Americans can't handle plastic, has stuck with me for some reason.
- sykho 8y agoThanks for the link. This is the first time I’ve heard about this film. The trailer and reading about the film are sad and depressing. I’ll try to watch the film. My impression is that China is making huge investments in cleaning up the country. Increasingly China has begun to assert itself and not allowing itself to be a dumping ground goes along with this change.
- pfdietz 8y agoIt's important to understand the issue that recycling is meant to address. It's cost of landfills, not shortage of materials. The obvious (but not workable) answer is to just charge the actual cost of disposing material in landfills. But this doesn't work because it encourages illegal dumping and littering. So, I can see two solutions: (1) Some process that converts bulk garbage into something that takes up less space. Incineration and pyrolysis are like this. Maybe you get some useful energy or gases out of it, but the main point is to reduce the cost of disposal. But this would have to be cheap and clean, a tall order. (2) A tax on all manufactured goods, based on their disposal footprint, that subsidizes the landfills. Since this tax is already paid it can't be avoided by illegal dumping.
- skept 8y agoFor (2) the tax should also be based on the biodegradability of the materials.
- dylan604 8y agobiodegradability of individual items is less of an impact when the majority of trash is disposed in non-degrading plastic trash bags.
- erichurkman 8y agoWould mechanically shredding trash before being dumped help?
- pfdietz 8y agoAlso moistening the trash before burial, I think. The gases produce need to be captured and burned, though. All that methane. Interestingly, they also need to be decontaminated of traces of silicon-containing compounds, which can muck up turbines in which they're burned.
- Pinckney 8y agoWon't this lead to a lot of lightweight material (particularly bits of the bags themselves) blowing off the landfill surface before they can be buried?
- ape4 8y agoGot the robots on it
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y agoWe consume too much. Driving out of my development on trash day shows me this. Bags and bags, boxes, loads of trash for a home of 4 people. Two adults, two children. I wonder what they’re going through?
- convolvatron 8y agoits almost as if the invisible hand is encouraging us to be wasteful, to encourage growth, rather than efficient as we were all taught in primary school.
- zeroname 8y agoJust dump all the sorted garbage in sorted landfills. Recycling may become economical again at some point. In any event, future technology will deal with it better.
- jrochkind1 8y agoI assume you are joking, but I liked the joke. (If it's not a joke, it's horrifying).
- thekingofh 8y agoThe whole point was that we were supposed to be recycling, not using more fossil fuels to ship it all back overseas to be possibly just burned or buried anyways. And at best the recycled material is shipped yet again overseas back to us in the form of new products. The best thing that's come from all this is that we finally know what actually happens to all that 'recycled' material.
- hahajk 8y agoMy understanding was that our trade deficit with China meant that we had to send more shipping containers back to China and we filled them with relatively light recycling waste instead of simply sending them back empty. It was basically free transportation. But maybe that’s not be true.
- pstuart 8y agoThere is hope for being able to recycle most plastic: https://purecycletech.com/ https://purecycletech.com/
- jonplackett 8y agoSo basically, recycling is a lie. Most stuff can’t really be recycled except at great cost. Who perpetuated this lie to begin with I wonder, was it just to get us to keep buying stuff?
- influx 8y agoYes, other than aluminum, it has been debunked for some time: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6klo0p https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6klo0p It’s so religious that most people won’t even consider a debate about it. Anyone speaking out against it is a heretic.
- afpx 8y agoSome of us do it out of principle. I have no disillusions about its impact. For all the plastic I recycle, I know there’s an invisible supply chain of waste that makes my actions almost meaningless. Yet, I do it anyway, because it’s a good reminder of the values that I don’t want to forget.
- richk449 8y agoWhat principle?
- behindmyscreen 8y agoTry buying biodegradable products rather than wasting your time with recycling
- mrpopo 8y agoThe key point from the article was to try buying less, not buying different. It's also the only thing that makes from a "climate change" point of view.
- Dylan16807 8y agoSpeaking out against what, specifically? You can complain about the problems with the current system without anyone looking at you weirdly. Only if you conclude "therefore we should stop trying to recycle these things" will anyone complain. The system could be fixed, if we put effort into it.
- barrkel 8y agoThe garbage disposal problem, of which recycling is a subset, is due to a lack of back pressure in the consumption system. From the perspective of production, disposal is an externality. From the perspective of the consumer, disposal is an annoyance that they typically don't have enough buyer power individually to push back on to producers. Society has come up one workaround: social conscience, the green movement, so that shame can be used to attack brands, aggregating buying power to push back on producers. It doesn't work brilliantly with everyone - some people are allergic to the ritualistic, moralizing pseudo-religious aspects of the movement. Politics has come up with another: WEEE: the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. This is an attempt to tax goods by incorporating the cost of disposal into the purchase price. While the green movement was necessary to provide political will, it's much better than a directly shaming approach - the closer the cost of disposal can be pushed to the producer, tightening the feedback loop, the more likely economic incentives will work. Continuing to push the problem upstream into production is the long term answer. If you try and increase costs at point of disposal, consumers are simply incentivized to cheat, or pay people to cheat on their behalf. The whole exporting of rubbish to China wheeze was one big cheat. The costs have to be loaded at the point of purchase, and producers ultimately made responsible for costs of disposal.
- Areading314 8y agoI find that Amazon is one of the worst offenders. It's clear, especially for Amazon fresh orders, that they have zero incentive to care about their plastic footprint, and they take full advantage of this. Should be taxed or disincentivized.
- pault 8y agoUgh, I once got an amazon package that contained a product about the size of a toaster oven and it was shipped in the original manufacturer's box, nested in the box from whoever shipped the product to amazon, nested in the box amazon used to ship it. All the boxes were full of packing foam of course, so the total volume of the packaging after removing it was about a meter squared, or about 25x the volume of the product inside. It was extremely upsetting.
- forgotmypw 8y agoI've always thought recycling is a bit of a sham, designed primarily to provide some feel-good busywork for people who are concerned about environmental impact of using bad packaging, but not enough to change their habits.
- sgc 8y agoNot at all. Recycling glass and metal can be virtually perpetual, and applies to far more than just packaging. Recycling paper and plastic is obviously much more limited, and there should be funds derived from disposal fees that are used to research better, longer cycled alternatives (as well as improvements to existing recycling tech). But a 4-6x reduction in paper/plastic waste through recycling is extremely significant nonetheless. Of course lifestyle change is an important part of any solution, but certainly not a panacea or even a desired exclusive remedy.
- caoilte 8y agoI agree up until the last part. Habits aren't formed in a vacuum. Corporations sell products in bad packaging and for most people most of the time there is no reasonable way to avoid purchasing products in that form. The only way to change the situation is to legislate. A tax on packaging seems most pragmatic. Unfortunately, pragmatism would go against the prevailing dogmatic faith in the free market being the solution to all problems and so we do nothing.
- 8y ago
- chiefalchemist 8y agoPerhaps, in the near long term, this is good news? Now wasteful America can't avoid the results of its ways? Up til now, it's been out of sight, out of mind. Sure, recycling plastic feels good. But less plastic - a petroleum byproduct - period would be noticeably better. Perhaps, once the price of disposal goes up (and landfills are NIMBY) then root problem will finally be addressed? Perhaps, there is finally hope?
- mc32 8y agoIf we look back 2, 3000 years ago, disposal was a problem already. We can see how people discarded things even when they were relatively expensive. Example all the different strata at the Troy/Troja site. It’s hardly a modern problem. But in modern times we have added complications of sheer volume, toxicity, and lack of biodegradability.
- coldtea 8y ago>If we look back 2, 3000 years ago, disposal was a problem already Disposal is a problem since the dawn of time in the general since (you need to dispose waste somewhere, even if you're an amoeba), but it's misleading to call it a problem anywhere close to today's sense back 3000 years ago. It wasn't even close in neither quantity, nor quality.
- mc32 8y agoI already acknowledge that. My point is being expensive doesn’t make people dispose any less. If they are not useful they don’t get reused repurposed or recycled. Given thd volume and unprofitability we can only find ways to process them to get rid of them. Those things which have value will be recycled, etc.
- michaelcampbell 8y ago> My point is being expensive doesn’t make people dispose any less. Has this even been studied? I find the claim astounding.
- inertiatic 8y ago>My point is being expensive doesn’t make people dispose any less. Factually wrong. If I can now afford 1 unit instead of the 2 I used to per month, I will discard the packaging of 1. If prices of goods packaged in shitty packaging rises enough, people will opt for other options. This isn't a fantastical idea, it's what has happened historically. See for example what happened every time in every country that decided to force buyers to pay for plastic bags.
- 8y ago
- everybodyknows 8y ago>Plastic clamshell containers are difficult to recycle because the material they’re made of is so flimsy—but it’s hard to find berries not sold in those containers, even at most farmers’ markets. Yes, but it's easy to find farmers grateful to take them back for reuse. Same with those green plastic open baskets. Plastic produce bags can be brought back in a shopping bag for reuse by ourselves. +1 for farmer's markets.
- skybrian 8y agoIt seems like the key is to get people to feel good about throwing things in the trash? There should be campaigns to "keep our recycling clean" and "when in doubt, throw it out". Treating recycling as a moral issue may actually be making things worse, to the extent that encourages people to think that putting more stuff in the recycling bin is better.
- fouc 8y agoI think it would be a fascinating problem use some combination of AI/robots/etc to design a hugely effective way to sort garbage. Even better if it was possible to do an army of tiny robots that would just go out and fetch all the garbage etc.
- ThomPete 8y agoThis is one of those things that should be viewed as a long term opportunity rather than a short term problem. The worst solution would be to just find another country to send the garbage. The best solution would be new technologies locally which would allow us to deal with garbage.
- lukeschlather 8y ago> Even in San Francisco, Reed kept pointing out items that aren’t easily recyclable but that keep showing up at the Recology plant: soy-sauce packets and pizza boxes This is funny, because I was just at SFO yesterday where I got Sushi while waiting for my flight, and was confused by the lack of garbage receptacle. There was a "cans/bottles" recycling bin and a compost bin. A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.) So there's a fair amount of institutional negligence going on.
- Havoc 8y agoWhat's the issue with pizza boxes?
- chrisseaton 8y agoThey're often soaked in grease. My community won't accept them for recycling either.
- hinkley 8y agoMine tells me to put them in the compost bin. Still teaching the family though.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- stevesimmons 8y agoSaturated with grease
- deftnerd 8y agoAs others pointed out, they're soaked with grease. In fact, the problem is so bad that enough pizza boxes bundled with clean cardboard has spoiled entire ton-sized bundles of cardboard shipped to China. Cardboard is valuable to recycle, but our inability to remove contaminated cardboard from the recycling stream has really caused major issues. Because of that, China has stopped accepting paper and cardboard products from the US for their recycling operations.
- alexandercrohde 8y agoPlastic: A real problem as burning it releases estrogens (more formally 'endocrine disrupters') into the air. However $1 bottle deposit and glass bottles seems entirely viable to me. Maybe a bit of an adjustment, but a hundred times smarter than burning. Papers: As far as I know this can just biodegrade. Compostable, no?
- jerrac 8y agoHas anyone run across something that would work at the individual home level? A machine that sorts and cleans the plastic into small bales in your garage. Maybe something similar for paper and aluminum?
- jelliclesfarm 8y agoWhat about plasma incinerators? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
- skunkworker 8y agoI've wondered about this as well, I guess in land-constrained locations this could be advantageous, but AFAIK they are not energy-positive on their output.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoOff topic, but isn't it amazing that shipping garbage across many oceans is profitable?
- Animats 8y agoIf we can somehow figure out how to better sort recycling, some U.S. markets for plastics and paper may emerge. The technology exists and is in production. Here's a new 90 ton per hour recycling plant, from Bulk Handling Systems, in California.[1] This is a good video to watch to see the whole process. Some of the separation is done with the usual air separators, vibrators, and screens. Optical sorters controlling air jets do some of the separation. This plant has no manual pickers; it uses AI vision controlled robots for the hard separation stations. This is not a prototype; it's a big production plant. Separating different plastics can be done with near infrared multispectral imaging. Here's a TOMRA sorter doing that in a real plant.[2] That's from 2015. Finally, here's a big plant in LA which takes in plastic bottles and puts out clean plastic pellets ready for injection molding into new bottles.[3] China is still accepting US plastics for recycling. It just has to be sorted down to 0.5% contamination, and that's being checked. The standard used to be 1.5%, it wasn't really enforced, and 5% contamination was not uncommon. US recyclers have to upgrade their facilities to the point that there's no manual picking required on the output. Big cities are dealing with this. Smaller communities have problems, because they don't have enough volume for the newer equipment and don't generate enough material to find buyers. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=254&v=4FpsH_ETT7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=254&v=4FpsH_ETT7... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0OZ7Mlmkvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0OZ7Mlmkvk [3] https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside-the-worlds-largest-plastic-bottle-recycling-plant-0 https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside... [4] https://www.wastedive.com/news/china-contamination-standard-MRFs/519659/ https://www.wastedive.com/news/china-contamination-standard-...
- Scoundreller 8y agoThe optical scanners sometimes can’t read black plastics. It just absorbs IR. We should discourage them. The scanners are cool since they’re analyzing the plastic itself; not reading codes. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/restaurants-coffee-plastic-takeout-balzacs-1.4600160 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/restaurants-coffee-pl...
- Scoundreller 8y ago
- leke 8y agoI'm hoping innovation happens.
- rasz 8y ago^^^"What Happens Now That China Won't Take U.S. TRASH" there, fixed that for you
- crb002 8y agoCardboard/paper can go to EU and South America. Electronics can get mixed in with ore worst case. Best solution w electronics is grinding and separating them in house and reselling to rare earth refiners.
- IshKebab 8y ago> Then there’s the challenge of educating people about what can and can’t be recycled I have never lived anywhere where the local council has made any remote effort to do this properly. Surely they'll list a few common items that can and can't be recycled - like maybe 10 things. But people come into contact with a vast array of different items. 10 doesn't cut it. They mention wire coat hangers - why can't they be recycled? I would have thought since they are metal they could easily be magnetically separated and melted down with all the other metal. No recycling box says whether or not you can recycle wire coat hangers so you just have to guess.
- abootstrapper 8y agoProducers have to be made responsible for disposal. Perhaps a tax on the weight and type of material of the packaging minus recovered and reused materials.
- andrewstuart 8y agoTo solve the problem: stop making the packaging/garbage. It's not solved by working out what to do with all the packaging/garbage, it's solved by stopping making it. "Recycling" is the distraction/sleight of hand that the packaging industry uses to make you feel OK with the infinite spew of garbage it creates. Finally China has shown the lie of recycling. In your kitchen, if the water tap is gushing water onto the floor, you don't spend all your time focusing on how to mop up the water, you turn off the tap. Same thing.
- nobodyandproud 8y agoThe answer is to put the burden of recycling back on the manufacturer, and add a refundable cost to packaging on purchase. Businesses have zero incentive make products easy to recycle. If I recall, the only recycling success stories involve aluminum, glass, and perhaps paper. These are relatively easy to recycle, yet even these required financial incentives.
- advertising 8y agoWhat about the idea of everyone having their own cup and water bottle that they take everywhere. If you want the drink to go and forget your cup, buy a new one at a high price or have it there.
- merpnderp 8y agoI'd bet one of the most immediate consequences is a lot less plastic winds up in the oceans. We know just a few rivers and cities account for nearly all ocean plastic, and I'd assume several of these are major routes for imported plastics.
- sct202 8y agoYeah I watched a documentary on what happens to the imported 'recycled' plastic, and stuff was blowing away in the wind, burning, kids were picking thru it by hand, etc. I'm not surprised that China would want to put a damper on the whole thing.
- merpnderp 8y agoI bet I watched the same documentary, and I was overjoyed when China banned imports. The US and most western countries have spent a ton of money upgrading garbage dumps to have moisture barriers, large fences, and other containment features, and the plastic is much safer there than in the oceans.
- hedora 8y agoCalifornia could raise a tax, let’s call it a “CRV” tax for container redemption value, and then use it to subsidize curbside pickup of pre-sorted recycling. Seriously though, at the current 5-20 cents per container crv tax, how can recycling in California not be profitable for the state? Where is that money going?!?
- HillaryBriss 8y agomuch of it goes to individuals who collect and sort the materials and bring them to recycling centers for a cash reward. a lot of times, these individuals collect the materials from big blue bins consumers have carefully filled and placed at the curbside near their residences. another place the money goes is to people in Arizona who gather plastics in that state and truck it across the border to cash in on California's generous recycling rewards program.
- zmmmmm 8y agoI guess this might be an unpopular opinion, but I've never seen hard numbers proving that recycling is actually necessary. I am curious, what would be the consequences of simply digging big holes and burying all our rubbish? I understand that some of it generates greenhouse gasses, so that might have to be dealt with separately. But for general inert waste, is it that bad to just stick it in the ground?
- unstrafed 8y agoIn 1990, A. Clark Wiseman from Gonzaga calculated that if we dug a landfill 100 yards deep and put in all trash generated in the US for the next millennium, it would fit in a square area of land 35 miles on each side (assuming of course levels of consumption and disposal from the time). By point of comparison, replacing all existing energy sources with solar and wind power would require orders of magnitude more acreage. I'm not sure if most New Yorkers have ever seen a place like e.g. Nevada, but I'm not exactly worried about the amount of land needed for landfills. New technologies allow landfill operators to extract some of the waste and use it for industrial purposes (particularly methane, with potent greenhouse emissions, albeit relatively short-lived). It also remains true that some forms of recycling - paper, cardboard and metals like aluminum or steel - are still cost effective, provided that the public stops trying to recycle their pizza boxes. I've often wondered if environmental policy would be better served by focusing on sorting high-quality, cost-effective recyclables into recycling plants and putting everything else into the landfill. IMO, recycling has ceased being about - or perhaps never was about - economic efficiency or ecological health, and is mostly a cheap way for people to feel like they're doing the right thing. I have become somewhat skeptical about recycling, and even I feel the shame of being a heretic against pathos-laden gospel first preached in grade school for failing to throw a plastic bottle into the recycling bin.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoThere are endless 'convenience' obscenities built into the consumer interface that could easily be eliminated through legislation. Many 'solutions' were invented up to a century ago, then discarded over the years (for convience/profit). Example: boxes of bottled water sold in separate plastic containers. Replacement: go to a water distributor with a 5-gallon re-useable container. 'Inconvenient' to the consumer? Tough bounce. Milk bottles ... soda bottles ... Example: Grocery stores used to pack groceries into boxes products were shipped in. 'Want plastic or paper?' NEITHER. Consumer may choose to bring in/rent re-useable crates. And so on. There are -endless- working solutions that will eliminate the massive costs of creating all of this waste and of disposing of it. WE have let this happen, and WE deserved the consequences.
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoExample: boxes of bottled water sold in separate plastic containers. Replacement: go to a water distributor with a 5-gallon re-useable container. 'Inconvenient' to the consumer? Tough bounce. Or maybe just raise the quality of tap water
- leoh 8y agoIt seems to me that landfill prices ought to be baked into the price of products sold.
- Camillo 8y agoWhenever we're talking about mass transit, or communications, or trains, or pretty much any other piece of infrastructure, there are always lots of people saying that America can't do things like Europe does because it's huge, everything is dispersed, there are enormous low-density stretches, etc. Where are all those people when the subject turns to garbage infrastructure? If you have so much empty space, take some of it and make a huge landfill! Put it in a desert or something. Make some hills out of garbage. There's precedent, too. When the US government needed to test nuclear weapons, they got a big honking piece of desert and nuked it. When they needed an area with very low RF interference for some spy stuff, they found some low-density place and banned radios there. When they need to test artillery, desert again.
- HillaryBriss 8y agomaybe it's time for more plasphalt https://www.dot.state.pa.us/public/Bureaus/design/SEMP/FACTS/Plasphalt%20District%205-0.pdf https://www.dot.state.pa.us/public/Bureaus/design/SEMP/FACTS...
- Animats 8y agoMaybe the US should have high tariffs on packaging materials to prevent their importation and force domestic manufacture.
- lumberingjack 8y agoAlot of my Immediate family works for one of the largest trash pickup, dump, and recycling facilities in the Midwest you're kidding yourself if you think that recycling is keeping stuff out of the dump when they get overloaded with too much recycling which is about every 3 days everything goes to the dump most plastics go to the dump only about 10% of a really gets recycled.