6 ms·

The real problem with having a sham mixed in with non-shams is that I've seen folks develop the attitude of "all recycling is a sham!". For those not aware, re

The real problem with having a sham mixed in with non-shams is that I've seen folks develop the attitude of "all recycling is a sham!". For those not aware, recycling aluminum is absolutely not a sham. It takes about 2x the energy to make new steel than to melt down old steel. For aluminum, that energy difference is 20x!!! This is why people will actually pay you to recycle aluminum, because running electrolysis through bauxite ore to make new aluminum is incredibly energy expensive.

mattmaroon 3y ago
I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't. The cost of recycling something is probably mostly energy (i.e. carbon emissions) as is the cost of manufacturing a replacemement (even the materials cost itself is probably largely a function of energy spent to dig them up and get them to you) so if they pay you, it is saving carbon emissions and if not it isn't. You can get paid for dropping many metals off somewhere, you have to have your city pay to do anything with the plastic. I realize there are other factors but if one needs a quick guess that would be a good way. If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant, then the carbon emissions should clearly determine what one recycles.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant Yeah... I'm not having an easy time with that one... https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/september-11-cancer-rates-fresh-kills/ https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/september-11-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005946/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005946/ https://apnews.com/article/health-cancer-st-louis-missouri-1d21a08de21dae4242bd9d42831b871f https://apnews.com/article/health-cancer-st-louis-missouri-1... https://abc7ny.com/brookhaven-landfill-frank-p-long-intermediate-school-belport/3082900/ https://abc7ny.com/brookhaven-landfill-frank-p-long-intermed...
  - wisty 3y ago
    From the first link, it seems like the slightly to moderately higher cancer risks (correlational) of living near a dump are due to socio-economic factors (smoking). Quotes: A proximity analysis, which modeled how many cancer cases could be explained by distance to Fresh Kills, found that none of the five cancer types had elevated rates closer to Fresh Kills between 1995 and 2004, although it did find that some thyroid and bladder cancer rates were higher near the former landfill site between 2005 and 2015. But the researchers still saw little evidence of a link to the landfill because they could not find any reasonable explanations for how residents would have come into contact with materials in the landfill that were known or suspected to cause bladder or thyroid cancers, especially since Fresh Kills closed. “More plausible” explanations, the authors wrote, were higher screening rates for thyroid cancer and Staten Islanders’ higher smoking rates. Smoking is a known risk factor for bladder cancer.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      The link between landfills and cancers is kind of iffy. Some research shows higher rates of cancers, others don't. My guess is that it depends a lot on what's been buried and how. What seems more certain is that you can run into other health problems like heart/respiratory issues and then there's the stench which I wouldn't want to live near even if there were no health issues.
      - simoncion 3y ago
        > ...and then there's the stench which I wouldn't want to live near... For active landfills, yeah. For decommissioned and capped-off landfills, nah, not if they've done it right. (And given that this is a regulated industry, it's very likely that they've done it right.) In my experience in the American Southeast, Academy of Model Aeronautics airfields are often built on top of decommissioned landfills [0]... so I have spent a lot of time standing on and around these things. I've never noticed any odor, soft spots in the terrain [1] that is the cap, or any of most of the other weird things one might think of when one thinks "site of a former landfill". [0] Why? Because the land is quite cheap, and a ~100 foot strip of tarmac, a few little structures (sun shelters and the like) and parking for a couple dozen cars isn't all that much weight. [1] To be fair, the runway did have to be worked on every three, five years as the terrain under it settled. But bear in mind that we're talking about bumps in a runway for model aircraft, so the amount of settling was actually not very large.
- tzs 3y ago
  > I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't. I sort of am being paid to put my plastic in my recycling bin. My garbage company charges $47/quarter for a 35 gallon regular bin, and $22/quarter for a 64 gallon recycling bin. It would require two regular bins to handle everything, which would be $94/quarter, which is more than the $69/quarter that one regular bin plus one recycling bin costs.
  - ploxiln 3y ago
    Unfortunately, how much you pay to recycle is hidden, in your taxes. You kinda need to know how much your cities pays for the recycling, vs trash, for each kind of material. Probably possible, but not easy. (But we know you can get paid for metals.)
    - InitialLastName 3y ago
      In this case, it sounds like GP is using a private garbage collection service because their municipality does not provide garbage collection services (as is common in rural areas). One would expect that the costs in that situation are likely to be more representative of the actual cost to dispose of the material, as the company can't obscure its economic reality with taxes.
      - mlrtime 3y ago
        Correct and funny enough because of this I recycle MUCh more living in a conservative rural area than a progressive urban area. The private collection incentives me to separate as much recycling as I can and provides nice big free bins for this.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    My city charges extra if I don’t recycle. But, I know from the data they publish that they are simply paying to recycle everything and the rate is higher than the rate at which they dispose of garbage. So I’m still paying for it, it is not paying me.
- estiaan 3y ago
  I think you’re right in general but in Australia and I think some other places as well we have a 10c refund on plastic bottles made out of PET (Also glass and aluminium) Most of our PET bottles, for stuff like soft drinks is now also made partially out of recycled plastic, many are made out of 100% recycled PET If I understand correctly this is only economical because there is this whole system where all plastic soft drink bottles are made of PET, and so easily identifiable as PET and to get the refund you have to take it to a collection point where the only plastic entering the system are these bottles.
Dalewyn 3y ago
In my locale, throwing aluminum cans in the recycle bin earns me a disparagement from my garbage/recycling company and maybe even threats to cancel my service. The only thing accepted in the bin is relatively clean paper materials. I have to take the cans down to the recycling center and throw them one by one into some machine and maybe they'll get recycled. Any compensation I might get is from the state, which is basically a dime for a can. At that point I'm just going to throw them all in the trash, not worth my time nor fuel to drive down.
- uxp100 3y ago
  A dime a can is more than they’re worth. Of course, you already paid that dime when you bought em, but it’s not as if scrap value instead of deposit would make your payout go up.
- babblefrog 3y ago
  Can and bottle deposits are older than the general recycling push, at least where I live. It was more about keeping trash off the road sides than re-use.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  In my locale the waste management company encourages us to toss aluminum cans in the bin with everything else except for glass and paper. They use powerful magnets and eddy current sorters to separate them from the rest of the stream.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    They use a powerful magnet on aluminium? Is it enough to slow aluminium on a conveyer or something?
    - nerdbert 3y ago
      This type of machine: https://dingsmagnets.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Eddy-Current-Concentric-Operation.png https://dingsmagnets.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Eddy-Cur... The rotor contains powerful magnets and when it spins quickly it induces a magnetic field in nonferrous metals like aluminum, repelling them from the rotor so that they overshoot the "other waste" bin.
andirk 3y ago
Because plastic isn't very recyclable, recycling is therefore a government scam to control the masses, according to John Stossel https://youtu.be/NLkfpjJoNkA?si=C-PEyGnk4M109WuP&t=333 https://youtu.be/NLkfpjJoNkA?si=C-PEyGnk4M109WuP&t=333 . He clowns the idea of reusing a plastic container as making people "do things they don't want to do"? What?? The whole segment is so pro Capitalism that it is anti caring about the Earth at all. The message could have more easily been "We were fooled by Big Plastic for corporate profits".
- skidd0 3y ago
  Pro capitalism is not inherently anti environmentalism. See PERC for some info on free market environmentalism: https://www.perc.org/about/free-market-environmentalism/ https://www.perc.org/about/free-market-environmentalism/
  - orwin 3y ago
    Free market is not capitalism. You can have capitalism without free markets (in fact, capitalism exist outside of free market most of the time). The origin idea of libertarianism, probably the most pro free-market ideology, is anti-capitalist, and hate the idea of LLC, which is anti free-market, and pro-capitalism.
    - zx8080 3y ago
      Why is LLC (Limited liability company) an anti-market?
      - knowaveragejoe 3y ago
        Not anti-market, anti-free-market. At least that's what I think they're trying to say.
      - orwin 3y ago
        Anti-free market. No liability means that lying to improve returns is incentivized for the owners, and perfect information is needed to have free market.
jltsiren 3y ago
I think this problem mostly exists in places where people have a single recycling bin. If each type of material is collected separately, it's easy to establish when recycling makes sense. And then you can also create incentives for using packaging materials that can be recycled.
- xp84 3y ago
  Agreed, the single stream is the biggest joke ever. Like, what kind of recycling can you really do with paper covered in food drippings from yogurt containers, food and beverage cans, etc. And what's the exact process for washing those plastic containers just caked in food? And given that they're commingled on the scale of entire buildings or residential blocks, do people really believe that 100% of such large numbers of people meticulously wash their garbage? Personally I would just recycle aluminum and that's it. Everything else is just a roundabout trip to the landfill in the current setup.
  - RandallBrown 3y ago
    How exactly does multi-stream recycling solve any of the problems you've mentioned? It's pretty easy for recycling centers to sort out most of the glass and metal from that stream and then as technology improves they can sort and recycle even more of the plastic. As for the food waste, I just assumed it was mostly destroyed by the recycling process. The high temperatures for metal and glass recycling make that seem easy to me. Plastic would be harder, but I think that's also part of the reason plastic can only be recycled a couple of times (it's not "pure" after it's recycled.)
    - cityofdelusion 3y ago
      Generally speaking, food waste renders products un-recycleable. Even minor amounts of impurities make molten glass and molten metal totally useless.
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        It goes through a process. It doesn't make metal or glass useless. Biological Treatment: Organic waste, including food waste, is often separated either at the beginning of the process through manual sorting or through processes like anaerobic digestion. In some facilities, organic waste is processed separately to produce compost or biogas.
jacquesm 3y ago
When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades long contracts with municipalities.
- zx8080 3y ago
  Is it because of a total municipalities corruption and the monopoly of those conglomerates?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    It's because they saw short term gains. Corruption, maybe, but not that I'm aware of. The big haulers here were all established parties that got to bid on these contracts and they played a very smart game but given the various downsides for society and the municipalities themselves in the longer term I can't rule it out either. It certainly doesn't make a whole pile of sense. One day glass was a valuable resource, the next you had to pay someone to get rid of it. Likewise for paper, compostables etc. This all happened in the 80's or so and recycling was the nominal driver. It outright ignored that we were already recycling. The big killer was to package everything in plastic and with plastic liners, even things that look like paper are often coated with plastic on the inside. So now we have two problems: the valuables are recycled and create a profit twice for the haulers and they charge real money for the ever increasing mountain of plastic. People harp a lot on the straw ban, I get it, it is symbolic. But I would have gone much further: anything perishable that can be packaged in paper should be packaged in paper, and the paper industry should be incentivized to recycle as much as possible with the least energy as possible. Because right now recycling paper often gets skipped on account of the energy requirements (because we like our paper to be white). Instead it gets lumped in with the compostables or biomass and burned for electricity. There is a ton of information on all this and it is obviously very variable from one locality to another but in the end resource extraction, energy use and leftover waste are the killers, those need to be curbed and far more drastically than we are doing right now. So much stuff is single use it is just terrible, and there are no real alternatives either. If you shop at a normal supermarket for a family of four at the end of the week you'll have a small mountain of packaging.
calvinmorrison 3y ago
It its a 20x differential surely there would be demand to purchase it from the end user instead of fining them for not sorting properly?
- its-summertime 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
- gizmo686 3y ago
  There is. A quick Google search found several companies near me who will by scrap metal off of me. The problem is that a pound of aluminum goes for about $0.45. That does not come close for paying for a weekly curbside pickup service, which is what most individuals use for recycling. Heck, they probably wouldn't even take an unsorted collection of "recyclables". The company I am looking at drops the price for unspecified "dirty" aluminum to $0.25 per pound.
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    Right so its not worth doing. Simply your just distributing stolen time and labor to subsidize it .
    - gizmo686 3y ago
      You are paying for the curbside pickup anyway, so the marginal cost of recycling aluminum is small.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  I’ve never lived anywhere in North America where scrap merchants wouldn’t buy aluminum by the pound or steel by the ton.
aardvarkr 3y ago
Aluminum can also be recycled an infinite number of times, unlike other materials.

mattmaroon 3y ago

I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't. The cost of recycling something is probably mostly energy (i.e. carbon emissions) as is the cost of manufacturing a replacemement (even the materials cost itself is probably largely a function of energy spent to dig them up and get them to you) so if they pay you, it is saving carbon emissions and if not it isn't. You can get paid for dropping many metals off somewhere, you have to have your city pay to do anything with the plastic. I realize there are other factors but if one needs a quick guess that would be a good way. If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant, then the carbon emissions should clearly determine what one recycles.

autoexec 3y ago
> If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant Yeah... I'm not having an easy time with that one... https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/september-11-cancer-rates-fresh-kills/ https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/september-11-... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005946/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005946/ https://apnews.com/article/health-cancer-st-louis-missouri-1d21a08de21dae4242bd9d42831b871f https://apnews.com/article/health-cancer-st-louis-missouri-1... https://abc7ny.com/brookhaven-landfill-frank-p-long-intermediate-school-belport/3082900/ https://abc7ny.com/brookhaven-landfill-frank-p-long-intermed...
- wisty 3y ago
  From the first link, it seems like the slightly to moderately higher cancer risks (correlational) of living near a dump are due to socio-economic factors (smoking). Quotes: A proximity analysis, which modeled how many cancer cases could be explained by distance to Fresh Kills, found that none of the five cancer types had elevated rates closer to Fresh Kills between 1995 and 2004, although it did find that some thyroid and bladder cancer rates were higher near the former landfill site between 2005 and 2015. But the researchers still saw little evidence of a link to the landfill because they could not find any reasonable explanations for how residents would have come into contact with materials in the landfill that were known or suspected to cause bladder or thyroid cancers, especially since Fresh Kills closed. “More plausible” explanations, the authors wrote, were higher screening rates for thyroid cancer and Staten Islanders’ higher smoking rates. Smoking is a known risk factor for bladder cancer.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The link between landfills and cancers is kind of iffy. Some research shows higher rates of cancers, others don't. My guess is that it depends a lot on what's been buried and how. What seems more certain is that you can run into other health problems like heart/respiratory issues and then there's the stench which I wouldn't want to live near even if there were no health issues.
    - simoncion 3y ago
      > ...and then there's the stench which I wouldn't want to live near... For active landfills, yeah. For decommissioned and capped-off landfills, nah, not if they've done it right. (And given that this is a regulated industry, it's very likely that they've done it right.) In my experience in the American Southeast, Academy of Model Aeronautics airfields are often built on top of decommissioned landfills [0]... so I have spent a lot of time standing on and around these things. I've never noticed any odor, soft spots in the terrain [1] that is the cap, or any of most of the other weird things one might think of when one thinks "site of a former landfill". [0] Why? Because the land is quite cheap, and a ~100 foot strip of tarmac, a few little structures (sun shelters and the like) and parking for a couple dozen cars isn't all that much weight. [1] To be fair, the runway did have to be worked on every three, five years as the terrain under it settled. But bear in mind that we're talking about bumps in a runway for model aircraft, so the amount of settling was actually not very large.
tzs 3y ago
> I think asking whether they pay you or you pay them is probably a great way to guess which is good and which isn't. I sort of am being paid to put my plastic in my recycling bin. My garbage company charges $47/quarter for a 35 gallon regular bin, and $22/quarter for a 64 gallon recycling bin. It would require two regular bins to handle everything, which would be $94/quarter, which is more than the $69/quarter that one regular bin plus one recycling bin costs.
- ploxiln 3y ago
  Unfortunately, how much you pay to recycle is hidden, in your taxes. You kinda need to know how much your cities pays for the recycling, vs trash, for each kind of material. Probably possible, but not easy. (But we know you can get paid for metals.)
  - InitialLastName 3y ago
    In this case, it sounds like GP is using a private garbage collection service because their municipality does not provide garbage collection services (as is common in rural areas). One would expect that the costs in that situation are likely to be more representative of the actual cost to dispose of the material, as the company can't obscure its economic reality with taxes.
    - mlrtime 3y ago
      Correct and funny enough because of this I recycle MUCh more living in a conservative rural area than a progressive urban area. The private collection incentives me to separate as much recycling as I can and provides nice big free bins for this.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  My city charges extra if I don’t recycle. But, I know from the data they publish that they are simply paying to recycle everything and the rate is higher than the rate at which they dispose of garbage. So I’m still paying for it, it is not paying me.
estiaan 3y ago
I think you’re right in general but in Australia and I think some other places as well we have a 10c refund on plastic bottles made out of PET (Also glass and aluminium) Most of our PET bottles, for stuff like soft drinks is now also made partially out of recycled plastic, many are made out of 100% recycled PET If I understand correctly this is only economical because there is this whole system where all plastic soft drink bottles are made of PET, and so easily identifiable as PET and to get the refund you have to take it to a collection point where the only plastic entering the system are these bottles.

Dalewyn 3y ago

In my locale, throwing aluminum cans in the recycle bin earns me a disparagement from my garbage/recycling company and maybe even threats to cancel my service. The only thing accepted in the bin is relatively clean paper materials. I have to take the cans down to the recycling center and throw them one by one into some machine and maybe they'll get recycled. Any compensation I might get is from the state, which is basically a dime for a can. At that point I'm just going to throw them all in the trash, not worth my time nor fuel to drive down.

uxp100 3y ago
A dime a can is more than they’re worth. Of course, you already paid that dime when you bought em, but it’s not as if scrap value instead of deposit would make your payout go up.
babblefrog 3y ago
Can and bottle deposits are older than the general recycling push, at least where I live. It was more about keeping trash off the road sides than re-use.
nerdbert 3y ago
In my locale the waste management company encourages us to toss aluminum cans in the bin with everything else except for glass and paper. They use powerful magnets and eddy current sorters to separate them from the rest of the stream.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  They use a powerful magnet on aluminium? Is it enough to slow aluminium on a conveyer or something?
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    This type of machine: https://dingsmagnets.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Eddy-Current-Concentric-Operation.png https://dingsmagnets.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Eddy-Cur... The rotor contains powerful magnets and when it spins quickly it induces a magnetic field in nonferrous metals like aluminum, repelling them from the rotor so that they overshoot the "other waste" bin.

andirk 3y ago

Because plastic isn't very recyclable, recycling is therefore a government scam to control the masses, according to John Stossel https://youtu.be/NLkfpjJoNkA?si=C-PEyGnk4M109WuP&t=333 https://youtu.be/NLkfpjJoNkA?si=C-PEyGnk4M109WuP&t=333 . He clowns the idea of reusing a plastic container as making people "do things they don't want to do"? What?? The whole segment is so pro Capitalism that it is anti caring about the Earth at all. The message could have more easily been "We were fooled by Big Plastic for corporate profits".

skidd0 3y ago
Pro capitalism is not inherently anti environmentalism. See PERC for some info on free market environmentalism: https://www.perc.org/about/free-market-environmentalism/ https://www.perc.org/about/free-market-environmentalism/
- orwin 3y ago
  Free market is not capitalism. You can have capitalism without free markets (in fact, capitalism exist outside of free market most of the time). The origin idea of libertarianism, probably the most pro free-market ideology, is anti-capitalist, and hate the idea of LLC, which is anti free-market, and pro-capitalism.
  - zx8080 3y ago
    Why is LLC (Limited liability company) an anti-market?
    - knowaveragejoe 3y ago
      Not anti-market, anti-free-market. At least that's what I think they're trying to say.
    - orwin 3y ago
      Anti-free market. No liability means that lying to improve returns is incentivized for the owners, and perfect information is needed to have free market.

jltsiren 3y ago

I think this problem mostly exists in places where people have a single recycling bin. If each type of material is collected separately, it's easy to establish when recycling makes sense. And then you can also create incentives for using packaging materials that can be recycled.

xp84 3y ago
Agreed, the single stream is the biggest joke ever. Like, what kind of recycling can you really do with paper covered in food drippings from yogurt containers, food and beverage cans, etc. And what's the exact process for washing those plastic containers just caked in food? And given that they're commingled on the scale of entire buildings or residential blocks, do people really believe that 100% of such large numbers of people meticulously wash their garbage? Personally I would just recycle aluminum and that's it. Everything else is just a roundabout trip to the landfill in the current setup.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  How exactly does multi-stream recycling solve any of the problems you've mentioned? It's pretty easy for recycling centers to sort out most of the glass and metal from that stream and then as technology improves they can sort and recycle even more of the plastic. As for the food waste, I just assumed it was mostly destroyed by the recycling process. The high temperatures for metal and glass recycling make that seem easy to me. Plastic would be harder, but I think that's also part of the reason plastic can only be recycled a couple of times (it's not "pure" after it's recycled.)
  - cityofdelusion 3y ago
    Generally speaking, food waste renders products un-recycleable. Even minor amounts of impurities make molten glass and molten metal totally useless.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      It goes through a process. It doesn't make metal or glass useless. Biological Treatment: Organic waste, including food waste, is often separated either at the beginning of the process through manual sorting or through processes like anaerobic digestion. In some facilities, organic waste is processed separately to produce compost or biogas.

jacquesm 3y ago

When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades long contracts with municipalities.

zx8080 3y ago
Is it because of a total municipalities corruption and the monopoly of those conglomerates?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  It's because they saw short term gains. Corruption, maybe, but not that I'm aware of. The big haulers here were all established parties that got to bid on these contracts and they played a very smart game but given the various downsides for society and the municipalities themselves in the longer term I can't rule it out either. It certainly doesn't make a whole pile of sense. One day glass was a valuable resource, the next you had to pay someone to get rid of it. Likewise for paper, compostables etc. This all happened in the 80's or so and recycling was the nominal driver. It outright ignored that we were already recycling. The big killer was to package everything in plastic and with plastic liners, even things that look like paper are often coated with plastic on the inside. So now we have two problems: the valuables are recycled and create a profit twice for the haulers and they charge real money for the ever increasing mountain of plastic. People harp a lot on the straw ban, I get it, it is symbolic. But I would have gone much further: anything perishable that can be packaged in paper should be packaged in paper, and the paper industry should be incentivized to recycle as much as possible with the least energy as possible. Because right now recycling paper often gets skipped on account of the energy requirements (because we like our paper to be white). Instead it gets lumped in with the compostables or biomass and burned for electricity. There is a ton of information on all this and it is obviously very variable from one locality to another but in the end resource extraction, energy use and leftover waste are the killers, those need to be curbed and far more drastically than we are doing right now. So much stuff is single use it is just terrible, and there are no real alternatives either. If you shop at a normal supermarket for a family of four at the end of the week you'll have a small mountain of packaging.

calvinmorrison 3y ago

It its a 20x differential surely there would be demand to purchase it from the end user instead of fining them for not sorting properly?

its-summertime 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
gizmo686 3y ago
There is. A quick Google search found several companies near me who will by scrap metal off of me. The problem is that a pound of aluminum goes for about $0.45. That does not come close for paying for a weekly curbside pickup service, which is what most individuals use for recycling. Heck, they probably wouldn't even take an unsorted collection of "recyclables". The company I am looking at drops the price for unspecified "dirty" aluminum to $0.25 per pound.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  Right so its not worth doing. Simply your just distributing stolen time and labor to subsidize it .
  - gizmo686 3y ago
    You are paying for the curbside pickup anyway, so the marginal cost of recycling aluminum is small.
dghlsakjg 3y ago
I’ve never lived anywhere in North America where scrap merchants wouldn’t buy aluminum by the pound or steel by the ton.

aardvarkr 3y ago

Aluminum can also be recycled an infinite number of times, unlike other materials.