Is Recycling Waste Paper a Waste of Time?

Well, I can be cynical about this and suggest that nobody really cares as long as the garbage gets picked up and they don't get fined for putting the wrong stuff in the wrong garbage can.

But I do believe that there are a good number of folks who as a matter of environmental consciousness or a desire to be good citizens try to manage their garbage and recycling in a responsible manner. I identify with those folks but a lot of that has to do with the fact that I'm retired and can afford to spend a little extra time with the recycling efforts. I, for one, like to do it right

For me the biggest issue is knowing just how much good I am doing. Our county, (Santa Cruz, CA) does a reasonable job of communicating best recycling practices to customers whose garbage goes to the county dump. But they could do better. Their big problem is diminishing space in the county landfill; but like all government entities these days money is a big issue and the sales value of recycled material like paper, metals and yard waste is also a big issue.

I'm not sure there is a better way of transporting recyclable materials from residential sources that what is being done today with the use of special individual containers for each class of material and special garbage trucks that have separated bins and compactors for the different types.

To me the idea of me getting in my car and transporting garbage and recyclables beyond the end of my driveway is a heavy disincentive to recycle. IHMO this is a non-starter.

One thing that might be useful is to provide special recycling bags or suitable containers that will go into the garbage trucks, get compressed and still come out intact at the transfer station where the recyclables get sorted out. In my county they provide free 5 gallon jugs to put waste motor oil in. They request that oil filters and other motor oil contaminated waste like rags be put in heavy ziploc bags. Ditto small batteries for flashlights, etc. Recently they have requested that pieces of plastic film be put into larger plastic bags, tied closed (handles on plastic shopping bags work well for this) and put in with recyclable plastics, metals and containers.

I ask for paper bags for groceries at the local supermarket and use them for paper and cardboard recycling. I remain unsure whether it is necessary to tape or tie them closed with cord to keep the package intact. Indications are that in my area they don't really care because the sorting machinery can handle loose paper.

I wonder how best to do this when the trend in local CA cities to ban all non-reusable shopping bags, paper or plastic becomes widespread.

Personally I think there should be heavy duty plastic garbage bags with build in tie cords in different colors(just the tie cords in special colors would work) for the various recyclable materials. I certainly wouldn't mind buying and using such bags if they would give me a payback on garbage collection fees proportionate to the value of well sorted recyclable materials. Maybe the county would provide bar code stamps to put on each recyclable bag to provide an appropriate credit depending on the value of the stuff inside. When emptied on a scale and given a quick inspection at the transfer station an operator would scan the bar code and enter a value code. This info would make its way into the computers and credits would show up in the next garbage bill. A county website would contain hints and detailed information on how to increase the value of your bag of recyclables. This process is not unlike what goes on at the special recycling stations where we take our beverage containers here in CA.

Ed Weldon

Ed-

I am of the opinion that tying the recycling incentive to some sort of financial reward is the wrong way to go. People who are not going to accept responsibility for the damage they do to the environment are unlikely to be motivated for long by a small financial incentive.

My personal difficulty with recycling is that I just do not generally generate enough recyclable trash to where I can effectively keep it sorted- with the exception of newspaper, of course, which is quite easy to recycle in this city. But when my total trash production for a day might fill a one gallon container, how does one sort this appropriately for a re-cycler? (OK, once or twice a week, I might put out a 5 gallon trash bucket, but most days it just isn't that much). I happen to live in a part of the world where it is possible (and convenient) to buy most of my food fresh, without a lot of packaging- and egg shells and coffee grounds go to the garden. We don't drink a lot of sodas, and beer comes in glass bottles, which go back to the brewer.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that there needs to be a fundamental shift in lifestyle if one really wants to tackle the trash problem. Even here in Panama, most people aren't very conscientious about the trash they generate (or how they dispose of it). I doubt that small financial incentives are going to have minimal impact on the general populace...

While I am totally with you about the need for a radical shift in the modern lifestyle, most psychological research into recycling behavior suggests that small incentives can make all the difference. Here is one successful start up to that effect: https://www.recyclebank.com/

cwarner7-11 -- You haven't been hanging around the USA "what's in it for me?" culture in the last 10 years. Here it's not just a matter of the primacy of self as a guiding personal value. There is lots of social pressure to make your every action appear to be for the benefit of "self" lest you be viewed as a loser or even un-American because you are in conflict with the wonderful capitalism that has made our country the greatest of all. ('scuse me here while I suppress the impulse to vomit). And this same social pressure comes up with anything that is a current fad including those things that are "good for the environment".

I'm figuring that as soon as many people see that they will directly benefit in cash by recycling they will join the holy crusade. The fact that they may be working only for pennies will escape them. They have little idea of the value of money and suffer from a general characteristic of "innumeracy" having no concept of the meaning of powers of 10 and being incapable of visualizing the difference between a thousand and a billion. But the social pressure to "make a buck" off the deal is pretty big around here.

Where you live is different in many ways. Perhaps people there are less jaded by outrageous prosperity and are more willing to think of the other guy. In a different culture maybe the idea of being paid to do something socially good doesn't play well. Or perhaps there simply isn't enough order and structure in society to provide effective rules or guidelines.

I do think that the application of small biases to a large society can have important effects if given time. It's just that the bias has to be the right kind for the situation.

Ed Weldon

Ed, you wrote:

" I certainly wouldn't mind buying and using such bags if they would give me a payback on garbage collection fees "

I am against buying new plastic bags to recycle paper. This is counter productive to re-package waste material that usually comes from over-packaging commercial product.

We use a large, three sections, plastic bin that last for many years. It is made of recycled plastic. This bin is picked up once a week by a specialized truck with three compartments for paper, metal, and glass. Each sector of the city has a specific pick up day so that the truck is always in use. This way there isn't much contamination of the material and a good use out of the service. Small towns can share a similar truck one day each. There isn't any problem with accumulating the relatively clean material for a whole week.

The real garbage is collected independently in the typical garbage truck. Twice a week in the summer and once a week in the winter. That is enough.

No incentives are used other than summer jobs for students who walk around and educate people. There is actually some peer pressure for neighbors when comes recycling pick up day. We know who doesn't do it and place a comment or two to the lazy neighbors. Eventually almost everybody becomes converted. This is one of the good thing that is worth doing.

Now, all we hope is that the recycling truck doesn't get emptied at the landfill site like it has happened in the past...

"I am against buying new plastic bags to recycle paper"

This smacks of ideology trumping pragmatism. Is this really the kind of position you want to take in such an important issue as recycling?

Right now I essentially "buy" the paper bags I use to recycle paper and cardboard since the super market offers a 5 cent discount each if you supply your own bags for groceries.

Ed Weldon

We don't need to produce and consume new resources to recycle used ones.

There is enough used plastic containers in what we recycle to hold the old stuff. We don't need to buy anything new to do the job properly.

Producing new plastic bags to carry recycled material is counter productive. Use the old bags that you trashed.

I recycle to reduce my consumption of resources, not to increase it like you do.

marcot --

I understand where you are coming from even if I don't agree with you. Things are different in other parts of the world. Here in Northern California we currently have 5 or 6 major cities with new laws on the books that make the provision of non reusable shopping bags for purchases of retail goods illegal. Other municipalities are considering similar laws. Most everybody thinks this is a good idea. When it becomes widespread enough the economies of scale that make it practical for the stores to buy shopping bags cheap and give them away will disappear. So durable bags will become "unobtanium"

I am one of the people that make use of paper shopping bags as well as plastic shopping bags to hold and separate recyclables. When the paper bags are no longer available I will have to revert to either tying up bundles with cord (a big effort when paper and cardboard are of widely varying size) or throwing them loose into the recycling bin. The latter approach leaves me with a weekly cleanup effort of stray paper that falls out of the receptacle while it is being unloaded.

It also degrades the commodity value of the recycled waste stream due to the additional labor and operations needed to separate the material. This requires the local sanitation department to either find scarce room in the landfill or sell it for disposal somewhere else. We have warehouses downtown that are filled with bundles of recycled cardboard for which the market has dried up even with the cost of trans-Pacific container shipment at rock bottom lows.

People need to put aside their ideology based on how things were last year and adopt an attitude of enlightened pragmatism. Some kind of identifiable standardized "retail" container, of whatever the best material is, perhaps even reusable itself, would be a very interesting path for improving the recycling process. Our local waste management system requirements to put drain oil in a standard 5 gallon container, which they send back empty to be used again, as well as the practice of packing dead small batteries in two clear ziplock bags suggest the path that I advocate.

Ideally we could come up with a way to manufacture these containers from the recycled plastic film for which there is no good current use other than as a fuel. I realize that this suggestion runs headlong into the realities of polyolefin technology and is likely unachievable with just a simple thermal fusing approach to reconstitute the material. But it is certainly a direction for research to explore.

Ed Weldon

We are fortunate in India that there is a thriving business in old paper. News papers and magazines are stored carefully and sold to a dealer when enough accumulates. In many towns the itinerant buyer comes on a bicycle along the street shouting 'old paper' at the top of the voice. Usually his scales are 10% off calibration. One can go to the main dealer and get a better deal. One may recover up to 20% of the subscription price as scrap. There are many charitable organization, who collect such waste for conversion to paper grocery bags and such by inmates of various 'homes'.

The general mindset here is; If it has the potential to be reused or re-purposed, you keep it. My coffee cans are all in the barn awaiting a new life or purpose.

Mandatory recycling has started in the area, with some localities separating by type and others just collecting mixed. The problem is that if demand for the material falls off, it gets buried or burned for power. And we are fast running out of paper mills in this corner of the country.

Plastic is oil and can be usefully burned. Paper likewise. Transportation of these goods over great distances to make people feel good about recycling is counterproductive to the stated goal.

Once various garbage streams become commingled (glass, aluminum, tin cans, n types of plastic, paper of maybe than more of one kind, etc.), it is difficult to sort them out. But preventing the commingling is difficult, too; it depends on many individuals to sort their trash appropriately. Not only will many people be too lazy to do this in the first place, almost as many will not understand how to sort junk properly. Moreover, many recycling points may not have a full spectrum of receptacles for receiving the various types. Regrettably, this is not an easy problem to solve.

Paper recycling is the greatest service humanity is doing currently.

It saves so many trees and ensures the real concept of sustainability.

In INDIA most of the paper mills are working on 100% recycled paper including craft and white.

Here the collection net work is more of manual nature from disposers to mill site. Hence there is good scope of cleaning out of alien materials like plastics.

Sorting aspects of white and craft, plastics, metals have good scope.

Even at the mills site, sorting labour ensures maximized checks and clean ups

The plastics even it happened to get ground are successfully expelled at screens meant for separation, prior to master batch preparation.

The only problem is the accumulation of this plastic garbage for which conversion solution is to be sorted out. Conversion feasibilities are there based on the initiatives of the respective units.

In view of the saving on cellulose green cover ,paper waste recycling is a boon to environment. The plastic part is negligible and scopeful for conversions.

Interesting. India may be handling this better than the US at present. Here in the US we have tried such things as individual consumers sorting their trash by glass/paper/plastic/aluminum/steel (or some like combination with separate boxes in the curbside trash), but many if not most such systems have been abandoned as uneconomical.

At least 30 years ago, a neighbor up the street tried to establish a recycling system. He placed about six totes in his yard, nicely landscaped and convenient. Various neighbors stupidly complained, and no doubt some discarders put wrong items into wrong totes. Thus what could have been an excellent idea died on the vine.

For all the good intentions that might be present, this is not an easy task--or sell. Alas. As for me, I am willing to exert some extra effort to sort and recycle my trash, but many people are not, and "the system," such that it is(n't), fails to help.

Man power availability is the only criteria. Lot of imported paper wastes are being included for blending on the basis of good quality original pulp present in imported waste papers. Hope and wish that the workability continues.

Here in America, the paper companies have tree farms. As you drive the highways through Maine, you pass signs through areas known as "the numbers". These are large tracts of land that are known by clever names like R4-B3. Nobody lives there except for bears, moose, deer, and the usual assortment of cute little bright-eyed fuzzies. The trees are harvested and new ones are planted. Many of these areas are open for recreational activities. For us, it's a win - win.

What remains to be seen is what becomes of these forests as the owing mills close.