Bottom falls out of recycling market....
Recycling was never economical - municipalities spent more money on it than they received....but now that the bottom has fallen out of the market - will cities give up on recycling???
Norm Steenstra's budgeting worries mount with each new load of cardboard, aluminum cans and plastics jugs dumped at West Virginia's largest county recycling center.
Faced with a dramatic slump in the recycling market, the director of the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority has cut 20 of his 24 employees' work week to four days from five, shuttered six of the authority's drop-off stations and is urging residents to hoard their recyclables after informing municipalities with curbside recycling programs that the center will accept only paper until further notice.
"The market is just not there anymore," Steenstra said.
Just months after riding an incredible high, the recycling market has tanked almost in lockstep with the global economic meltdown. As consumer demand for autos, appliances and new homes dropped, so did the steel and pulp mills' demand for scrap, paper and other recyclables.
Cardboard that sold for about $135 a ton in September is now going for $35 a ton. Plastic bottles have fallen from 25 cents to 2 cents a pound. Aluminum cans dropped nearly half to about 40 cents a pound, and scrap metal tumbled from $525 a gross ton to about $100.
It's getting more difficult to find buyers in some markets, Streenstra said.
posted by GayandRight @ 9:13 PM
4 Comments:
I'm as conservative as they come (even more so given some of the "so-called "conservatives" in the CPC) but still I think we should be selling this crap even if we sell it at a loss.
Given the numerous ways governments can dream up to piss away taxpayers money, this way is less of a waste and a whole lot more productive than most.
Don't agree with you completly anon.If everyone recylced as we are told, what would we do with it?
Store it?How?
We can burn most garbage and create electricity.Metals like aluminum are still ok to recycle though.
IMO
Anon 1.
Yeah, Anon 2 storing it might not be feasible. (Mind you landfills can be thought of as a type of permanent storage)
But still I think some attempt must be made. The processing of garbage is a civic government responsibility in any case. By recycling we involve the private sector to a degree and at least do some good for the money we're spending anyway.
As far as burning garbage for electricity? That's a good idea I could support. Better to burn a dumpster of garbage to make a kilowatt than burn a barrle of oil.
The way I see it every barrel of oil we don't burn is one more we sell to the Americans and one less dollar in some Arab dick's pocket.
I've been working on my own Invention that is a ECO-friendly product , I'm using my money so the Government keeps the hell away from it.
If you need a good laugh, check out the Innovation cebtre in Guelph that boasts about helping Inventor.
One of their "Claim to fame" itmes is the Blue-Box scam that placated us and absolved the actual container makers for any responsibility in adding to the land-fill crisis.
BUT..take a look at the "Invention" help program because it has a Chart that shows their 7-step program at $500.00 a month , then they have an example for about 6000 Items where only about 3 make it to step-7 and maybe to the Market.
I've done my own research and modified my product to fill a larger Consumer base which improves my success rate .
Why the hell would I give $6000.00 a year to some Government assisted group of paper-Pushers in Guelph just to learn what i did for $17.00 a month with a AOL internet service and my $8.95 a month WebHosting Account to monitor the Global searches on Google to view Consumer demands for new ideas and products?
I don't want to use "Plastics" , and the Fire-resistant materials and stronger construction should give my Product a 400% increase in the Life-Cycle before it scrapped for the metal parts and copper wiring.
Toronto paid almost 1/4 Billion for a hole in the ground as a lad-fill dumping area , how sad....for $30 million he could have bought the Sky Dome and filled it with garbage and made it a Tourism attraction for 20th century Stupidity .
Or at least kept it for the Homeless beds at Night rather than the $150 million a year he spends now.
I predicted that Miller would drive Toronto into bankruptcy when Miller expected PM Martin to bail him out the first time at bat, Martin lost the Election and Miller keeps raising taxes and adding User-Fees .
Good Luck arguing with a idiot that still thinks the reCycling is too big to let fail and that we can't afford to NOT waste more money.
Another Ponze scam that would make AmWay and Enron proud.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home