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Oct 14, 2008 15:22

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 ( Read more... )

recycling

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stainedfeathers October 15 2008, 05:05:53 UTC
I'm HIGHLY skeptical about this. Its a rumor I've heard for EVERY recycleable material around and I've found it mostly stems from people who are looking for an excuse not to recycle and to lazy to. The "oh, well, it doesn't matter that I'm throwing this away because it doesn't get recycled anyhow cause our city is lazy/bad government."

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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xhile October 15 2008, 06:02:05 UTC
Metal recycling is pretty good. Plastic recyling on the other hand...

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sexinstilettoz October 15 2008, 23:06:53 UTC
Well first of all, I wasn't reffering to metals at all, because it's obvious that metals are precious and can always be recycled. I was more talking about plastics. Second, I have to disagree that the people who believe this are too lazy to recycle. My environmental science teacher told me this, and the people who believe this are people who are also in the environmental fields and have done research, not people who are too lazy to save the environment.

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stainedfeathers October 16 2008, 06:53:08 UTC
Actually, I was referring to the people I personally know and have met that believe this. And they ARE too lazy to recycle and use this as an excuse/validation for their not recycling. There are some environmentalist types out there who don't recycle on the basis you speak of, but a lot of people who are not environmentalists, but your everyday Joe Somebody who doesn't much care about environmental issues but wants to do the "right thing" tends to use this excuse to not recycle. They also tend to use the excuse that it "doesn't actually do any good anyway" and "who cares?" (If you can't tell, I've heard way too many BS arguments. I start to want to smack people after hearing this drivel so often. I also tend not to know alot of environmentalists because of where I live, a highly conservative don't give a damn kinda city, so I may hear this side alot more than you do depending on where you are.)

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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