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> The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times. I suspect that matters a lot more when all the local recycling plants have shut dow

> The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times. I suspect that matters a lot more when all the local recycling plants have shut down because a vendor in a different country offered such good pricing for a while that nobody could/wanted to compete, but has since greatly raised they prices. Weight does matter quite a bit when shipping something literally halfway around the world, but we don't have to ship it around the world. We need to get our own capacity to recycle locally built up again.

Nasrudith 6y ago
Weight matters less than you would think for long distance shipping - look at ore and crude oil for one both could have /major/ weight savings by in situ refining but the economics confirm shipping it to be refined is the winner. Global shipping's sheer scale tends to snap people's intuitions in two compared to the actual numbers as it feels like it really shouldn't be this efficient by cost or carbon. The reality is that when you keep on getting bigger and bigger container ships the efficency when fully loaded keeps going up. Think of it like how a diesel train is more efficent than a highway of commuters despite the tonnage difference between one car and a full train.
- kbenson 6y ago
  The current situation with recycling is that China used to take almost everything, and then over the last few years it's gone from that to first "only very clean stuff" to "we don't want certain materials at all". Unfortunately, since they were such a reliable vendor for so long, many of the local recycling plants shut down, here and elsewhere in the world, and a lot of stuff we used to recycle ends up in the landfill, but there's also a lot of stuff that's right on the edge, so some recycling centers store it for a period hoping the economics make sense in the near future as markets fluctuate. Now, global shipping is cheap, but I'm sure for large portions of the country there's also a portion of the cost which is even getting the goods to a large port, which may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Localized recycling helps not only with the the global shipping, but also a portion of the local shipping, as well as likely bringing back capacity to recycle goods that we just can't feasibly do economically right now. Some of that is shipping cost, some of it is just rectifying the mistakes of depending almost wholly on an outside vendor that then cut off service.

Nasrudith 6y ago

Weight matters less than you would think for long distance shipping - look at ore and crude oil for one both could have /major/ weight savings by in situ refining but the economics confirm shipping it to be refined is the winner. Global shipping's sheer scale tends to snap people's intuitions in two compared to the actual numbers as it feels like it really shouldn't be this efficient by cost or carbon. The reality is that when you keep on getting bigger and bigger container ships the efficency when fully loaded keeps going up. Think of it like how a diesel train is more efficent than a highway of commuters despite the tonnage difference between one car and a full train.

kbenson 6y ago
The current situation with recycling is that China used to take almost everything, and then over the last few years it's gone from that to first "only very clean stuff" to "we don't want certain materials at all". Unfortunately, since they were such a reliable vendor for so long, many of the local recycling plants shut down, here and elsewhere in the world, and a lot of stuff we used to recycle ends up in the landfill, but there's also a lot of stuff that's right on the edge, so some recycling centers store it for a period hoping the economics make sense in the near future as markets fluctuate. Now, global shipping is cheap, but I'm sure for large portions of the country there's also a portion of the cost which is even getting the goods to a large port, which may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Localized recycling helps not only with the the global shipping, but also a portion of the local shipping, as well as likely bringing back capacity to recycle goods that we just can't feasibly do economically right now. Some of that is shipping cost, some of it is just rectifying the mistakes of depending almost wholly on an outside vendor that then cut off service.