Caught an interesting article in Willamette Week by the above title. It mostly discusses the fervor with which folks in the trendy community fill the blue dumpsters - not just with recyclable stuff, but with and general garbage that comes to hand. Used diapers are specifically mentioned, to give a bit of color to the discussion. Culling out non-recyclables costs resources; conserving resources is, after all, the point of recycling.
Besides dealing with recycle programs in doing commercial janitorial, I served a few years on the City of Phoenix's Environmental Quality Commission; we addressed various issues related to the City's recycling program (and I got a tour of a state-of-the-art recycling facility). There are a number unintended consequences to recycling, as it's usually done.
You'll have noticed that China has decided to stop taking much of our trash. We ship trash to less developed economies because it requires much hand sorting, and tends to cause health and environmental degradation, and we don't want to "dirty our own hands". (China is the destination of choice, rather than, say, India, because we buy lots of shipping containers full of stuff from China, and the containers have to be shipped back, full or not. Cheap to fill them.)
Much plastic cannot be recycled, due to issues at the molecular level, so it winds up in a landfill in China rather than here. That which can be recycled must, often, be sorted by hand.
A possible analogy comes to mind - sorting metal recyclables. It's easy to mechanically pull out anything magnetic - that is, iron based. If memory serves, aluminum can be pulled as well. Brass, bronze and copper, and different ... of each, can only be sorted by feel, and the trained eye. And must be sorted to be re-used. Some years back, a creative American invented equipment to do exactly that sorting. It was never used, because Chinese tariffs taxed sorted metal much higher than unsorted. Go figure.
We also had an issue, about the time of the Johnson Administration, of junk car bodies piling up around the country. Containing various kinds of metal and plastic, and glass, and other stuff, there was no cost effective way to dismantle (that is, sort) junked cars. Until a fellow in Texas invented a block-long crusher. Effective equipment made recycling junk cars profitable enough that folks scrounged most of the junk cars from the countryside, nation wide, and crushed and recycled them. You don't see many junk cars any more.
The upside of China's decision is that we will be under a good deal of pressure to find ways to profitably deal with our own trash, and might well succeed in dong so.
Now that I've got started, I talk a bit later about "running out of landfill space", and nuclear refuse.
