Title Recycling Is Broken. Should I Even Bother? ✅

The Nework Times Naomi Anderson-Subryan ASK NYT CLIMATE Recycling Is Broken. Should IEven Bother? Every little bit helps. But doing it wrongcan actually make matters worse.
By Winston Choi-Schagrin June 17, 2024 Recycling can have big environmental benefits. For onething,it keeps unwanted objects out of landfillsorincinerators, where they can produce potent greenhouse gasses and potentially hazardous pollutants. Even more important, recycling allows usto extract fewer resources. The amount of energy required to recycle aluminum,for example, is less than 5percent of the energy needed to mine new ore from the ground. Similarly, the more paper we recycle, the fewer trees we cut down. But recycling rates in the United States have remained stubbornly flat foryears. And,in some cases, they're dismal. Just 10percent of plastics are actually recycled.Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of tons of recyclable waste are exported, often to developing countries. It's nowonder alot of readers have asked uswhetherindividual effortsmakeany difference at all. To answer that question, it helps tounderstand how the system works and how people use it. Why is recycling struggling? The waythe system is set up, recycling isabusiness. And our recyclables metals, paper, and plastics are commodities. When you throw something into the blue bin, whether it's recyclable ornot, it gets carted off to a sorting plant where it runs along a conveyor belt and gets grouped with similaritems. Then, the recyclable stuff isbundled. The process is labor-intensive. One of the biggest challenges is that companiesdon't want their material contaminated with things they don't recycle orcan't recycle. The more random stuff that goesinto a sorting plant, the more work facilities need to doto weed it out. Andthat increases costs.
Once that'sdone,if the plant can find abuyer at aprice that makes sense, the bundles will be shipped off to arecycling plant. Sometimes alocalone, and sometimes one asfar awayas Africa or Southeast Asia.If they can't,everything goesinto a landfillor gets incinerated. Someitemsare easy. Others,notso much. Recycling metals makes alot of sensefrom an economic perspective, for the reasons outlined above. It's just alotcheaper than scraping ore from the ground.And, metals like aluminum can be endlessly recycled. It also makes environmental sense. Mining contaminates soil and waterways.Recycling aluminum cans requiresjustasmall fraction ofthe energy and water that mining does. And recycling paper helps keep forests intact.Paper packaging accounts for around 10 percent of global logging, according to the forest conservation group Canopy. We save water, energy and greenhousegasemissions when we recycle compared with oducts nmade from new pulp.