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.
