I heard the other day that all these bottles and cans that we "recycle" actually don't get recycled and instead get tossed back and forth between different companies, or end up getting dumped into the ocean and/or other countries due to the fact that recycling costs tons of money to do. Does anyone have any information or articles on this or can
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Metal is extremely valuable and the rates for it have gone up (just ask my boss who works with lead and other metals and is crying over the increase in prices.) It wouldn't get shuffled between companies (transporting it costs money, specially with gas now and a lot of aluminum isn't light) and a recycling company wouldn't go through the trouble of collecting that much of a metal that can get them such a good turnaround just to dump it in the ocean. A city wouldn't dump it either because that's essentially "free" money coming in (people giving it to them for no cost at a recycle center or for low cost at a resale center) and, as I said before, the price of metals has gone up, a city, no matter how shitty the government, wouldn't just trash something that valuable. The only way that the cans would get dumped would be people not recycling them. My boss recycles every metal that comes by him (even our lead scraps at work and the scraps he finds being thrown out at construction sites) and makes a real nice sum off of it. (We get to go on a company lunch when the scraps barrel gets recycled every few months- 10 employees, all you can eat at red lobster. That gives you some idea of what I mean by the price of metal being high =P)
Yeah, I think this rumor is a bunch of BS. I also cannot find any evidence of it being true either (but I did find that 50+% of cans are recycled and the number is going up still.)
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And plastics are a whole different beast than metals or paper. They are difficult and inefficient to recycle- they can only be recycled once or twice before they're essentially worthless material. And with all the different types and chemicals it can be hard and harmful -to- recycle them if you can recycle them at all (in my city only #1 and 2's can be recycled). If there is any truth to this rumor it would be with plastics, but not with cans or paper or whatever and that's simply due to the nature of plastics.
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