Linen n' Things Could Become Cardboard n' Plastic as Recycling Market Dries Up
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 12. 8.08
Images by Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Lots of people are worried about what to do with all those empty big-box stores in power malls across North America. Here is a solution: Fill them up with recyclables. There doesn't seem to be much else to do with them right now as the bottom has fallen out of the market for old cardboard and plastic. As the New York Times points out:
The scrap market in general is closely tied to economic conditions because demand for some recyclables tracks closely with markets for new products. Cardboard, for instance, turns into the boxes that package electronics, rubber goes to shoe soles, and metal is made into auto parts.
As we noted previously, the recycling business was never about saving the planet or doing the right thing, it was about business. Big, profitable business. The Times writes:
The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too — like grocery chains and other retailers — have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.
But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.
It never did make much sense to collect garbage and ship it to China. Now it is exposed once again as a system where the consumer does the work and the taxpayer pays the bills, all for the convenience and profit of the industries that sell the stuff. It really does prove that recycling is bulls**t.
Now is the time that municipalities and taxpayers should be insisting on producer responsibility and deposits on everything. The amount of waste will go down in a big hurry.
New York Times
Recycling is Bullshit; Make Nov. 15 Zero Waste Day, not America Recycles Day
It's Time for Deposits. On Everything.
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"Now it is exposed once again as a system where the consumer does the work and the taxpayer pays the bills, all for the convenience and profit of the industries that sell the stuff."
... this may be true in first world countries, or generally applicable to large-scale recylcers, but it's not rule of law.
I'm an e-waste recycler in South Africa, where the taxpayer has nothing to do with bearing recycling costs. The latest government initiative attempting to do so is failing miserably - leaving us recyclers to once again continue trying to keep up with recycling demand and maintain head above water as the economy disintegrates and costs exceed income.
Yes, recycling is a business (there's rent to pay and everything's gotta eat - where you get money for food simply varies from job to job) - but there are still those of us in the industry with more of an eye on the good of the planet than cashflow.
Which is why we're carrying on offering our recycling service (free of charge in my case) even if it means tightening our belts and finding part-time alternative income to keep it going. It's far better than the alternative - seeing landfills, open places and sidewalks fill up with everything you've worked so hard to keep out of them.
I don't think we have a trade balance, so there are likely empty cargo shipps that have to go back to China to fill up on 'goods'.
Here in Elkhart County, Indiana, the county has an agreement with a local recycling provider to provide big metal recycling bins at drop off points throughout the county for 1 & 2 plastic, tin/aluminum, glass, newspapers/magazines and cardboard. Taxpayers pay nothing, the company provides the service for free (I forget the name of the company right, they're local).
And if you live in the county seat of Goshen, where I do, you can even pay $5 a month to have otherwise unemployed men and women on bicycles come pick up your recycling bins every other week. Otherwise you have to take your own recycling to the drop-off point.
Provides employment, promotes bicycling and zero-carbon recycling transportation (to the bins at least) and costs the taxpayer nothing.
There is a bit of a butterfly effect about all of this. A few thousand people in Nevada buy homes on ridiculously cheap credit. A few years later, housing prices plunge and suddenly many homeowners owe more on their mortgages than the houses are worth. The mortgage rates begin to rise (apparently, no one read the fine print) and homeowners begin to default. At the same time, we realize that the geniuses on Wall Street have bundled these mortgages into complex investment vehicles, and nobody knows what they are worth today or, even worse, what they will be worth tomorrow. Banks begin to fail. The economy craters. Commodity prices drop. And our little recycling centre on Galiano Island is unable to sell scrap metal anymore.