Recycled Garbage

Recycling as it’s presently sold to the public is largely a scam. About the only aspect of the business that might be legit is cardboard, and aluminum beverage cans. Those actually do get heavily reused, from what I can discern. Plastics, on the other hand, are terrible. There are too many different types, they all get mixed together in the recycling stream (and are too time and labor intensive to properly segregate).

Plus, the supply of plastics to recycle far outstrips the demand for such material, since it is almost always cheaper to utilize virgin material. There should be a push to return to more glass and metal packaging for food products, and more cardboard than plastic for general retail packaging. But that won’t happen unless it is forced on the industries that use so much plastic. And I detest the thumb of government being placed in the scale.

I will say that steel is pretty well recycled on an industrial basis. I’m always taking in scrap, including steel, and while the price per pound isn’t great, they wouldn’t be paying anything for it if it wasn’t getting used somehow.