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So, as a consumer (in the US), should we just dump everything in a landfill?

Or is it still worth it for some things? What about:

- Clean paper/cardboard

- Plastic grocery bags that go to a separate recycling center

How much depends on the local facilities and how they handle it?

I’ve tried to “do my part”, but the more I hear people talk about it, the more it sounds like we’re better off just landfilling it all.

5 comments

> How much depends on the local facilities and how they handle it?

None of it. With a few exceptions, non-metals take significantly more energy to recycle than to make from scratch and the end result is lower quality than the recycled material. Since that energy usually comes from fossil fuels, it's just pumping more CO2 in the atmosphere to save a tiny bit of landfill space, which isn't even remotely a pressing issue for our civilization (we have lots of space!)

Metals like aluminum and steel take more energy to make from scratch (ore) than to recycle, so they're worth recycling and anywhere from 50-80% of the steel and aluminum feedstock in the world is from scrap metal.

It also makes sense to recycle stuff like old tires because those turn into massive ecological hazards when they burn.

There is more to recycling than energy consumption.

For example, wood is a limited resource. In many parts of the world, almost all growth outside protected areas is harvested and used. By recycling paper and cardboard, you make wood available for higher-value uses.

Household waste is often incinerated. Even if you are not going to recycle glass, it can make sense to separate it from general waste.

Energy is only one part. The full dollar cost should be accounted for. Wood is abundant in parts of the world. For those parts it probably makes no sense to recycling but we should let the market figure it out.

Wood is abundant in Canada, Russia, and some developing countries. Other developed countries (including the US) are densely populated enough to use everything they manage to grow.

Here in Finland, paper recycling started in the 1920s, and it was first purely for economic reasons. Household paper collection started soon after WW2.

Wood is fully renewable.

Metals, especially aluminum, are useful enough to recycle that it's sometimes worth extracting them from the municipal waste stream (this is a no-brainer if your waste is incinerated, rather than sent to a landfill directly).

Glass, plastic, and paper are generally at best marginal for recycling, especially because they can be sensitive to contamination in the recycling process (oops, somebody threw a greasy pizza box in the recycling!). Glass and some kinds of plastic products work really well for reuse rather than recycling, but a municipal recycling stream isn't conducive to reuse; you're probably more likely to see them ground up and 'recycled' as some kind of aggregate. For plastic, I'd expect that just about only a plastic water bottle or the like is close to practicably recyclable.

And this is where I wish local collection agencies and companies focused on. Be clear. That paper, throw in the trash. Collect metals, glass if it’s feasible because you are close to a glass manufacturer. But nothing else.

That’s my gripe there is no clear rule set and it’s highly localized and in those localized areas there are no clear guidelines. Most collection companies just say they take everything when it fact some or a lot of what’s being collected gets sent to the landfill.

> Clean paper/cardboard

This, plus soiled paper, can go in the "yard waste" bin here in western Washington state where it is sent to an industrial composter.

> Clean paper/cardboard

If there's really no tape or anything and it's just the cardboard without printing or gloss, these will compost just fine. If our paper towels don't have chemicals on them (ie, we used them as napkins) we actually just put them right in the chicken coop.