Is recycling a huge fucking scam?

recycling violates basic entropy. it takes energy every time u change the state of matter. put in 100 cans use 10 gallons of fuel and and 100KWH and you end up getting 60 cans worth of pure recycled metal.

So, under gommunism most things were packed in paper and sold by weight. A plastic bag was a rarity and it was kept until the print went off.

Just sayin.

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Here in Sweden we burn a shitload of trash for basically the reasons you outlined, so much so that we get paid by other European countries to take their trash and burn in.

One of the biggest criticism of the system though is that burning obviously release pollutants right now, but if just leave trash in landfills new technology might be invented in the future that allows us to burn or recycle that trash while releasing less pollutants.

Obviously doing it that way is basically kicking the can down the road and hoping for the best.

I was told cocoa cola start a campaign to get people to recycle because they didnt want to pay for trucks shipping glass bottles back to them. Now our tax dollars do.

China isn't accepting our taste anymore.

I recycle my aluminum but that's just for pocket change, not because I'm some soiboy commie.

>trash based economy

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>Is it all just being dumped in china or burned?

Both. And also probably being dropped off into the ocean on the way. Or ground up into smaller pieces and dumped into the sea when the tide starts to go out.

It's deeply ironic that these recycling schemes are actually causing plastic to be dumped into the oceans. People diligently seperating and putting things into recycle bins etc, believing they are doing the right thing. But if they were really environmentally concious, they would stamp it flat and put it into the general refuse bin instead.

Recycling is like socialism: it can only work when people stop acting like human beings (ie, never). When there is such a massive incentive not to actually recycle, you can't expect people not to dump it, and the ocean currents and tides do all the covering up work for you (it's not just like dumping on some piece of ground down the road somewhere).

The UK government fines local councils, if they don't recycle. Most local councils would be bankrupt if they had genuine recycle schemes (which are expensive). If a local council had to pay for a real recycling scheme, they would have to put the coucil tax up, and therefore not be elected again at the next local elections. So they opt for the cheapest recycling schemes they can.

>China isn't accepting our taste anymore.
I'm aware but OP was asking what usually happens to US recycle trash, and until recently it was shipped to Asia as I explained.

>government orders us to recycle
>shady companies just export trash
>literally just pay Chinese to dump our trash in the ocean
>we could do it ourselves, for free

Also, depending on the type of trash, it produces huge amounts of methane gasses which are worse for the environment than co2 from an incinerator.

The idea is that you'd spend less energy than making the same amount of cans from scratch

Basically the same principle as AI cars: they kill less people than manual driving

Whether those arguments justify anything in the first place is another question

They make a profit from the sale of the panel itself.
The point is that the people often forget the environmental impact that goes into making renewables, from getting the raw materials to installation.
And that's not even talking about the environmental impact caused by fixing the inherent issues with renewables i.e: lithium batteries.

I was into it for a while until I read an article in the local paper telling everyone that they won’t accept bottles or plastics. Cardboard and newspaper shit only AND it better be clean because China might not like it when we sell it to them.

After that I was like fuck that. Now I throw dog turds, beer bottles and all kinds of shit into the recycle bin.
Fuck China

Depends where you take your electricity from, in Quebec most of it is Hydro. The hydro bassins destroy native territory but we don't really care about that.

Recycling is less trying to save the earth and more about trying to be a bit more efficient with our trash. If they burn it, no big deal. Saves them from having to burn something else, barring stuff that gets more toxic when burnt.

How are you gonna recycle anything locally when everything is produced in China? Idiot

China is in the right, here, though. They export so much to us that it is super cheap to ship recyclables back to them-- the ships would be returning empty otherwise. What was happening is that only a small portion of our 'recyclables' were clean and reasonably sorted. So much (most?) of what was shipped to China to be processed was unusable and added to Chinese landfills. The gov't decided that accepting shiploads of American garbage is bullshit, and it is. If China were shipping trash over here, only a small portion of which was usable, we'd tell them to fuck off, too.

Here's a funny one.
>be me
>manager at coca cola plant
>separate recycle bins for paper / glass / plastic etc. in every hallway, office, area, everywhere
>big signs touting the benefits of recycling and generic 'green' shit
>only the managers and a single union level employee know the truth
>ALL divided trash is put into same dumpster, compacted onsite, and sent to incinerator
>nothing is recycled

also bonus
>coke wants to offset carbon footprint
>instead of actually reducing carbon at the plant level, they pay contractors to do projects that are carbon-negative
>for instance, one of the projects was hiring a firm to plant a bunch of trees in Montana, saplings, thousands of them
>they then project, over the lifetime of the trees, how much carbon they *might* sequester
>is tens of thousands of pounds per tree
>they then use this number as a reduction in carbon emissions (sort of like the trade part of cap and trade)

also
>ceiling in plant is lead paint, flaking. heavily hushed by admin
>significant mold in several (can warmer) machines, very difficult to remove, regrows (looks like purple bacon when scraped off, no kidding)
>since early 00s, entire heirarchy of coca cola has been almost completely replaced by diversity hires

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Our town is at the point where we could dispose of most recyclables more cheaply as plain trash. Many local recycling places have closed, and those that remain aren't paying reasonable prices for materials anymore. Except metals, I reckon.

Basically everything in the vein of "do this, because it's good and it makes you a good person" is a scam. It exists to make people feel good about themselves (no matter whether their "contribution" has any value, if not negative one) and to keep them distracted from the real problems that we either don't have "feel good" solutions or don't want the masses to be aware of. Happy, oblivious sheeple = easier life for the shepherds, easier to manipulate and abuse.

Worked on a large construction project, we legally had to repurpose more than 80% of the shit we tore down, ended up nearly tripling the price of the project. Most of the time we would tear down shit as we pleased and buy second hand materials elsewhere for full price, actual tons of money were wasted hiring lawyers and other cucks to navite loopholes and generally walk around the place slowing down the progress because of made up feelgood rules and shit like that.

I'm in NYC. We get big fines when the trash kikes find cans and bottles mixed in with our regular garbage.

For the sake of being "Green" or "Ecologically Friendly", a longterm business practice has been to just ship plastics and papers to China/India for them to process and then shipping the re-refined material back. This dumps the energy infrastructure, hazardous byproduct, and various other burdens onto them. This probably substantially cuts costs while also creating an actual business rather than an ecological initiative like it was originally intended. This also creates a fake economic aspect in these countries that relies solely on others and creates a false sense of economic growth as these economic aspects grow to meet foreign output.

Theoretically it would be better to just have something akin to a coalplant that burns applicable trash to create energy to meet higher demand or even create surplus to lower consumer costs... but that doesn't let the government/companies extract money and (((dubious individuals))) tax people for things outside of their control. We also run into the issue that in a world with finite resources, destroying them for electricity probably isn't the "wisest" use when they can be reused, which in itself creates a system of forced dependency on the above since (((globalism))) allows even the most dubious business practices thrive if it makes a few more cents on the dollar with no real repercussions.

>People swear electricity is Magic and clean. No it comes burning from coal or gas or whatever.

A lot comes from nuclear power silly boy. You can argue Nuclear waste is bad for the environment as well, but it's getting better and better, and you just need to bury it in a desert and forget about it

>The machines that clean solar panels at solar farms takes more energy to run than the panels generate.

This is flat earther tier right wing conspiracy theory. Doesn't even make sense.

Just tell them someone mixed it up? My old neighbour stashed drugs in the shed out back and when the police found it they had to drop charges because it wasn't locked, literally anyone could have stashed drugs there

yeah,greenwashing, and it's prevented actually useful technologies from improving our lives, because faggots want to make money on solar panels and CO2 emission reduction bullshit

capitalism's fault again

Yeah.

If you worked in a job that actually dealt with the crap China sends us, you would know just how stupid you sound.

The shit they send us, is in fact shit. We just are assholes enough to polish it up, maybe perfume it a bit and sell it to other Americans for a profit...

The only item that makes economic sense to recycle is aluminum.
Everything else is virtue signaling on a culture wide basis.
Carpool lanes are another 'green' scam.

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Very well stated. So this shit isn't being just dumped there. They're actually processing it over there and hopefully suffering from all sorts of nastiness from the byproducts. I like it.

I only recycle so my garbage doesn't get filled up with milk jugs and cardboard boxes. I don't care if it's a scam.

what makes aluminum special?

Everyone knows recycling is a scam. Well anyone who thinks about it for more than 2 seconds. You don't really think people wash out old Coke cans or scrape the cheese off of pizza boxes?

Most stuff cannot be recycled and reused in any sort of form you'd expect.

Unless it's metal, it basically gets shredded up and turned into cheap tires, rubber mats for wiping feet or insulation for buildings.

Cheap to recycle, expensive to produce.
They zap eet with elektricity and sheeit and dat shits expensive.

cool, thanks.
*aluminum superiority intensifies*

The west dumps its trash in China and then whines why China so shitty
China is right to refuse to take western garbage

Speak up, we do not understand your Amish gibberish.

>had roommates who were those kind of soccermom losers who read newspapers and watch the msm news in 2018
>they would wash their recyclables before tossing them in the bin
>mfw thinking of all that water and the energy to pump and clean that water
>wondering if it's worth it
>they said if there's a single dirty bottle in the whole recycling lot it all gets thrown out
>doubt.jpg
>i never wash my shit, fuck them
>dad said he saw the city collecting garbage and recycles in different trucks and then dumping them all into the same place (forget how he phrased it)
>personally witnessed my high school take the garbage and the recycle bins and dump them into the same dumpster (back in the day)
I seriously have doubts about recycling. We should be reducing the amount of plastic packaging and disposables we produce. REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE. It's that way because recycling should be the LAST effort you make, reduce is the FIRST thing you want to do. But it would kill people to wash a dish or bring their own containers places so that will never work, people are too fucking lazy.
I'm for biodegradeable packaging materials. It's the only sane method. Just ban non-biodegradeable plastics and whatever shit and bam, the free market will fix that shit. we'll have an affordable replacement within 3 months.

I just saw this on Penn and Teller: Bullshit
They said recycling costs more and uses more resources than just using a landfill; beurocracy I surmise. I will no longer use a recycle bin.

Yeah, I saw something similar a couple years ago. I lived across from a city park, and the city wanted to expand the parking lot, so they purchased and tore down a house so they could pave over the property.
This was a normal, maybe 1600 sq. ft. house, older. Nothing special at all. A single man with a back-hoe could have demolished it and removed all the rubble in probably two workdays. What happened however, is that this man with a back-hoe came out, and with precision I have never before seen, dismantled the house piece by piece, stacking like with like. Piles of wood, of siding, of pipes, wires, insulation etc. He was there for a couple weeks, and trucks would come and take single piles very carefully. Took him about two weeks.
That the city is willing to waste that type of money on saving this shit for recycling is truly sickening. Man, that guy was really impressive with the back-hoe though. Truly a master of his craft.

>Is recycling a huge fucking scam?
Yes

Recycling was done to try and divert from the amount of stuff factories going china tier

>2019
>people still drink coke/pepsi
what kind of white trash and spics are keeping you in business? water comes out of my faucet for nearly free. Also tree planting is based. It is actually possible to reduce desertification by establishing a forest at the outskirts and slowly expanding it. the roots hold enough moisture to support other life, it's self sustaining, and you slowly advance the tree line towards the desert. it's a huge job and takes a decade or two but it's possible. iirc china was doing it, not sure if they still are. there are small time permaculturists making their own mini-ecosystems in former deserts that are self sustaining and moisture retaining. in theory all of australia could be reverted back to forest like it was before abbos abb'ed. the american southwest also used to all be forest, until "peaceful" natives logged it all and never replanted. same thing in the middle east, used to be a forest of eden before human caused desertification from deforestation. it could all be 100% reversed.

The good ones can open a bottle of beer with one of those

I work at a plant. Answer: Yes.
We're also doing some retarded shit where we're installing loud fuckheug machines for recycling plastic bags. All of it is being payed for by bollegraaf (some dutch assholes who have a near-monopoly on the equipment) and there's no doubt that the plant's getting some kind of tax break from the state for doing this.
As a result, we've been running at 50 tons per hour (we should be running in the mid 30s) 9.5 hours per shift (should be 8.5) when we AREN'T down because the equipment's fucked from running it too hard. Since October. Just an utterly backbreaking rate nonstop forever.
Oh, and the equipment doesn't even actually work.
Oh, and if it did, it'd only be used for collecting clear & white bags. That's literally it. You could run this shit forever and it'd never pay for itself even if it worked.

at my plant we do a shitload of products
>coke and all variants (vanilla, cherry, diets, caff-free etc)
>powerade
>dasani water
>vitaminwater
>nestea
>etc

but yeah, I drink none of it. the only thing I would drink is the dasani water but it isnt safe to drink here at the plant when its fresh because we use ozone to sterilize the bottles/unfilled portion of the bottle and it takes about a week for it to degrade. if you drink it with the ozone in it you get sick and have liquid poop etc.
its a trash company but i get paid six figs and play video games for a lot of my day

The only thing worth recycling is metals, due to the high initial cost of extracting and refining them the first time. Copper recycling is probably the best example of useful metal recycling since it's so necessary for electroplating.

Paper recycling is a meme but supposedly works well enough to be worth it. Pulp the paper, wash it of ink and redo the process.

Plastics recycling is 100% a scam due to the way plastic degrades and the various types requiring seperation. also

There is no use for plastic in the us because the us doesn't make anything.

With every recycle you end up with a lower grade plastic resin. For plastic you have a recyclability of 30% and for glass 60-90%

Have you ever looked in a recycle bin? You realize humans have to pick through that shit and sort it? Americans throw trash in recycle bins, they stuff plastic bottles with random stuff, you're even supposed to rinse out yogurt cups or else it's useless to the recycler. It's too expensive to sort out and then you still have to process it into useful products.

Incineration is necessary for plastics to prevent plastic pollution, the full extent of which is only now being detected. For everything else, landfills are wonderful and should be funded generously.

>Is it
Read the article faggot. Thats was half a decade ago.

Now China completely banned the trash import because that caused a significant part of "Chinas" pollution you faggots cried about and suddenly in every Anglomutt corner of the world news pours out about burning trash

The same shit is happening in Bongistan which is drowing in garbage and wants to burn it locally now.

>we use ozone to sterilize the bottles/unfilled portion of the bottle and it takes about a week for it to degrade
What in the bloody fuck? Bottled water faggots on suicide watch. Also all of those products are nasty. Nestea is practically "nasty". Worst iced tea I've ever had.
I don't buy any beverage packaged in plastic if I can help it. Cans and glass only. And I don't consume anything containing corn syrup.

Don't forget glass. You're just plain operating at a loss if you process glass. It's heavy as fuck, and the best thing it gets used for is pavement. And that shit gets everywhere. EVERYWHERE.

>fuck, and the best thing glass gets used for is pavement
forgot about that because it's so low-level it didn't even register as important.
"let's recycle silicon, the most common element on the planet... even though non-industrial goods made from it are useful forever and only need replacing when broken"

The solar scam explained:
>x can get tones of shitty panels from a sweatshop in china that also used 10x more energy making the panel than the panel will ever produce
>x also is good friends with people in the government
>government """subsidizes""" solar with tax payer money, go buy solar goy
>everyone involved fills their pockets
but wait there's more, they are even dirtier than you would imagine as there's even more money to be made
>you dump the little shit your panels produce at the peak hours into the grid for top $$$
>then comes the off-peak hours where energy is dirt cheap, that's when they fill their large battery banks
>as the next day comes they dump that cheap nuclear energy back into the grid for the peak electricity price and get the "green energy bonus" paid by tax money on top

Isn't solar beautiful, so clean and cost efficient. You should also get a solar farm user.

What if the US just built a really efficient plant to recycle all of its plastic waste? With scrubbers etc to catch the pollutants before they hit the atmosphere

Penn and Teller did a Bullshit! episode about it. Short version: recycling is a fucking scam.

Nothing wrong with recycling stuff into an incinerator to generate electricity.

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Its because the recycling contract company is fucking scamming. They taking far more than they can handle, then outsource the bulk to another company, which is owned by China, for pennies on the dollar.

Some companies would pay good money for the metal or nice fixtures in older houses, so could be a bit different.

it begins in 2070. we looked at the data

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Metal and glass are good for recycling.

Paper and plastic? Nope.

user, pizza boxes aren't recyclable. For that reason. Trash that shit.

Just compress it all into bullets and shoot it at rag heads in whatever next Middle East war occurs

The majority of the time 99% of everything is worthless at best when you deduct actually handling that shit before it's reused, it's very often a bad deal when you are legally forced to hire some college degree guy as a consultant.
My cousin makes a comfy 5000 usd a month working with how to optimise hospitals to make running them cheaper, she spend the first 30 years of her life backpacking through Europe repeatedly and have never actually worked a real job before, let alone worked in a hospital. She is also surprisingly open about how she has no fucking idea what she's doing while also rampaging into any conversation that doesn't glorify that kind of "work".

only glass and metal are really worth recycling, the rest is just a scam to make money without any constructive result

Penn and Teller did a show on Bullshit about this. Basically the only recycling that makes any economic sense outside of an industrial setting (buildings, ships, etc) is aluminum. And that doesn't really need any program to promote it since there are always homeless people scrounging for a few extra dollars. Everything else actually wastes more in energy, money, carbon emissions than it saves.

You'll never get environmentalists to admit it and close down the programs though. Recycling is like a holy fucking sacrament for them.

It's free on prime if anyone wants to watch

Any time the government or your television tell you to do something because it's good, it's bad.

Environmental Science and Sustainable Technology undergrad here, it isn't that simple. It depends mostly on the material you're recycling, and it's going out of style because of the increasing efficiency of production making it obsolete or redundant.

First off, the reason you separate your trash is a) they don't have to spend so much energy sorting it themselves, because that takes a long time and a lot of machinery, b) because some shit like aluminum and copper reacts very badly to even a tiny sliver of impurities, c) they aren't all processed in the same way/place, and D) not all trash is created equally, even though it might look like it. Bottles, for instance, still have to be sorted after you put them in the bottle section because there's like 10 different types of plastic and not many of them mix well.

As for the things being recycled, there's a sharp decline in the amount, but that's mostly due to paper/plastic being so cheap it's easier and cheaper to just pump out more than to recycle what you have. The paper meme has been over since 2011 when they bioengineered a tree that basically grows in a year and makes fuck tons of paper. There's just no point recycling anymore.

Even after all the gas/coal/oil for energy in the plant is accounted for, electric is still more clean than regular gas cars.... Until you consider the batteries, which are filled with fuck tons of Hazardous materials and can't be recycled or just tossed out. Gas is also easier to maintain, and a hell of a lot less stress on the user. Electric cars are the future, the future isn't now. When we get WAY more efficient batteries, sure, but for now Hybrid is our best bet.

What the fuck is prime

This is apparently an old story op
npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/28/623972937/china-has-refused-to-recycle-the-wests-plastics-what-now
Also I'm pretty sure recycling is not as effective as they tell us it is.

the greatest marketing scheme by these soda companies was to convince amerilards that gatorade and other "sports drinks" are healthy instead of just sugar water w/o carbonation.

Subsidized television in the US, not worth investigating further for you

The reason for China banning recycling is people don't know what can be recycled and what can't be. People mix in there soft plastics which can only be recycled by special facilities, and even then it is costly (if you want to be good for the environment use paper bags), I have seen people put fucking nappies in their recycle bin, food in cardboard boxs, etc. So once you take out the recyclable components you are left with a heap of waste that has to be landfilled or burnt. China has billions of slave class gooks to sort it and no one gives a shit about the environment since most of them are subhuman bugmen - so in China it is worth the trouble to get the valuable parts of the recycling, at the moment that is the paper to make corrugating medium (the middle part of cardboard boxes).

Chinese government realized they were making their shithole country shittier with all the extra waste and banned these exports - cutting of the gook supply of recycled aluminum and paper.

US, AUS, NZ, etc, depended on China taking their crappy recycling so now have no where to send it. The problem will gradually fix itself though, paper mills outside of China are now changing their fibre source to this dirty recycling since prices are so low. They can either make their own products or sell the pulp into China. The waste is still a problem but some places are building cogen boilers to handle it and extract energy from it.

China realized their dirty country was getting even dirtier so banned this type of imports.

Overall, is a good thing. Rather than sending resources to China because local governments and recycling companies were too fucking lazy to think of anything, we are using the resources in our own countries... Or just burning it if the local government is completely retarded.

Source: I work in this industry.

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Ignore this

>Chinese government realized they were making their shithole country shittier with all the extra waste and banned these exports - cutting of the gook supply of recycled aluminum and paper.

Reply to thread box is too small for my 30yr old boomer eyes so I can't see what I wrote above.

What tree is this

Amazon jew streaming.

If you aren't engaged in strenuous activity, sports drinks are worse than regular sodas due to the added salt.

The city sels certain products to the recycling plant so they can sell it back to you.
The big scam is that they convinced the people to neatly separate it so their employees do less work.
Same with the compost bins, they just wake all that compost, and resell it to you or use it at a massive upcost in city projects.
Its all a fucken scam

Found somethingwith the same name on a website that still has popups with "2017" in the header. Is it the one where they line up 25 different recycling bins on the street?

Restaurants often do the same thing with the seperate garbages. It all goes in the same dumpster and you get all the virtue signalling.

It's season 2 episode 5. It's probably on YouTube

Not too sure about the name, but whatever it was it basically collapsed the paper recycling industry overnight since you didn't need to cut down huge forests anymore to get tons of paper, you could just have a 100 acre farm and pump out enough to make a lot of farmers really, really rich.

Recycling uses more resources than it saves. That's a quantifiable fact.

But people don't like looking at trash. So the carbon usage is worth it.

This is insanely moronic.
It's pretty easy to lookup how much a solar panel or wind turbine takes to make in terms of energy.
Current turbines usually take about 9 months to produce what it took to make them for instance.

and if you are actually dehydrated, they lack a lot of the minerals that you need.

pedialyte is miles better than gatoraide

>he doesn't know that butcher shops still use paper