Paid To Recycle

Or: Aren’t We Just Giving Away All Those Delicious Raw Materials?

Okay, maybe they’re not raw materials, but the question occurred to me when I saw this from the Guardian. Or, rather, it occurred to me to blog about it, since it had generally been occurring to me for a while.

That is, when Penn & Teller did their Bullshit! episode on recycling, they said that only metal recycling was actually profitable; metals cost so much to mine and smelt and whatnot that it’s cheaper to use already-processed metals. But now, I’m starting to wonder about plastics. No idea what it takes to recycle them into useful raw material from a consumer standpoint. I do know that when I worked in an injection molding plant making wing mirror assemblies, any bad ones where tossed into an industrial-grade shredder and the pellets of plastic were just fed back into the press, since pellet form was how the stuff got to the plant in the first place. But not sure how that translates to milk jugs.

Still, when the recycling episode aired on April 29, 2004, oil was trading at $37.50 a barrel according to some guy named “Doe”. Since then, it’s nearly quadrupled in price, which sincerely makes me wonder if petrochemical plastics aren’t looking more attractive in terms of recycling.

Which then also makes me think: wait, why the hell am I paying my curbside garbage guys to take away my recycling? Shouldn’t they be paying me for the semi-raw materials? The ones that I have, in effect, already bought since the cost of the packaging is built in to the product?

Then again, that would probably be the end of curbside recycling, especially if someone will swipe an iPod out of my car they’ll probably go around with a bag and appropriate the contents of my recycle bin as well.

Crossposted with klech.net