19 Replies to “We Don’t Need No Stinking Recycling Trucks”

  1. In Ontario, the recycling industry is largely a segemnt of the trucking industry. Trucks driving up and down the streets, emptying blue boxes, and haulingaway the contents: plastic containers full of air. Hardly anybody ‘reduces’ the size of the containers.
    If you took the roadside contents of the average blue box, you could probably reduce the volume down to one-tenth the size.
    It’s just been a huge make-believe/make-work project in this area.

  2. kate,did you read the article..
    lots of phoney complanits ,and the best one is toxic pollution by a nuclear plant spewing deadly water vapor into the air..

  3. Again, all this expensive (and obviously counter productive) recycling problem could vanish tomorrow in a way that would reduce air and earth bound toxins and as a side benefit produce cheap energy.
    high temp incineration with multi-stage exhaust scrubbing produces water vapor, plant food (CO2), electricity and revenues. High temp. incinerator technology has been available for at least 2 decades (Swan Hills AB is an example of a small efficient and revenue making high temp incinerator/power plant) which can then divert the heat made from trash incineration to high temp steam electricity generation. A win – win solution for getting rid of undesirable recyclables and items too toxic or too resistant for the environment to break down.
    Of course the green hucksters and their insane lefty enablers have had to let inefficient/faulty green tech alternatives run their course and put governments in vast debt before this resident technology makes fiscal and environmental sense.
    I see this is becoming a popular option with European governments which are now as budget conscious as environmentally responsible. Maybe it will catch on here (where the technology originated) someday, but for that to happen we will have to see the incestuous relationship between left wing governments and huckster green tech con men dissolve in a public way – Torstar/G&M/FP/CBC are you listening? Nawwww didn’t think so, go back to sleep.

  4. We used to have recycling trucks manned by two guys,driver and picker-upper,and the PU checked your can to see if you had any products in there that didn’t belong. If you did,he rejected the load,put a sticker on it,and you’d have to take out the offending items and wait until the next week to put the bin out again.
    Now,they have these one-man trucks with can pickup machinery,and a mirror the driver is supposed to check as the load is dumped. I watch the driver,he never even looks as he dumps the can, probably couldn’t see anything if he did.You can put anything in there now,might as well just eliminate the recycling truck and haul it to the dump.
    But everyone FEELS good about recycling.

  5. The writer uses some ill-chosen stock photos to illustrate his points. Not all recycling is necessarily bad, but often the way it is implemented is foolish.
    Consider plastics. Nearly all plastics are made from feedstock derived from crude oil or natural gas (the big one), so they are essentially composed of embodied energy. Instead of trying to “recycle” plastic into unattractive and expensive “products” that nobody buys, like those park benches and deck boards, why not simply pelletize it and blend it into the stream of coal feeding a power plant? You wouldn’t have to bother with separating plastics by type, either. So you would wind up with a situation wherein you “borrow” some units of energy from the natural gas stream, use them in the form of plastic until they cease to be useful, and return those units of energy to the electric power stream.
    Metals are already profitably recycled. As far as the in-place system for beverage container recycling goes, I’m mostly OK with it, as long as it’s understood that the only real benefit is less litter on the roadsides, which is worthy enough.

  6. one problem is that it is largely a “government ” initiative in stead of private business. I was reading along until I hit the part about plastics, and realized that there is a lot of bullshit in that article, as, I started up and ran a plastic recycling company, and most plastics CAN be recycled, but there needs to be classification of these probucts, and the gov’t and some unscrupialist bus ppl cheat a little, nuf said!!!!

  7. Gaia worship needed rituals and sacred objects. ‘Recycling’ is the ritual and garbage becomes the sacred object. Secular liberals need something in their hollow and meaningless lives.
    A large municipal bureaucracy driving big trucks down little streets picking up pop cans isn’t ‘kind to the environment’? Golly! Who knew! No one could have guessed that!
    A 5 cent deposit on cans in New York City seems to sort them out very efficiently according to a recent New York Daily News article, no bureaucracy or trucks required on that end.

  8. embutler @ 9:24;
    I’m with you – I stopped reading when I saw that picture under the heading of “pollution”.

  9. Recycling is like electric cars,without government subsidies, a company would go broke.
    I knew a guy who ran a private recycling depot. I noticed he had a huge mountain of plastic milk jugs. He said there was no market for them, and it cost more to ship them that they were worth.
    He had the same problem with several other “recyclables” and eventually went out of business.

  11. I make myself quite unpopular in certain circles just by observing that “recycling” collected in Haldimand county goes directly to the landfill. I’ve seen the blue truck backed up next to the white truck at the dump often enough to know.
    The reason of course is money. The lie they tell you is that selling the recycled plastics and glass reduces your tax bill. The truth is that the price per ton for rough sorted plastic and glass is quite a bit less than the cost of trucking one ton of material from Haldimand county to the recycling facility. So the county has a token amount of plastic etc. that they save up and ship, just to say they did, which satisfies the Queens Park apparatchiks and probably supplies a little grease for some local trucking guy. Not 100% sure about the grease, but small town politics usually includes small time corruption at some level.
    Not as big a scam as selling 52 cent kilowatts to NY for 10 cents, but of much longer standing.
    Trolls please feel free to rebut with actual -evidence- that what I’ve said above is factually incorrect, or admit you’ve got nothing by flaming.

  12. We live in a small prairie town that recently started a blue bin program. Great stuff. About 30% of our ‘garbage’ now goes into our new high-efficiency blue mini dumpster. I am happy as a clam in high tide. I should add that until the blue bins arrived we could go to the local recycle depot and put our presorted paper, glass, plastics and tin into bins there. Cost = $0. We probably did not recycle quite as much as now…but it was functional.
    THEN we learn that our blue bin plastic paper, tin cans and glass are trucked 250 km to a sorting facility. Whaaaaa?!?
    The town’s rationale was that by diverting this stuff, their landfill charges (at a neighboring city) would fall dramatically and cover the extra cost of the blue dumpsters (my guess is they cost taxpayers a quarter mill..town of 7,000), pickup costs and trucking. I bet within 6 months we are being charged more for this ‘warm fuzzy’ feel-good service than had we continued to put this stuff in the landfill garbage…or take to the depot.
    So at first I was all over the town’s wonderful initiative. Ask me next year when it’s costing me $250 a year to be green. No so happy.

  14. Recycling was a con first financed by Big Soda to get the greenies
    to let them drop glass returnable bottles. The main objective for the
    greenies was to get the teachers to boost the self esteem of their
    “young pioneers” so they would badger their dullard parents to get
    marching in thought free lockstep.

  15. Clive:
    I live in the same town. I was talking to a Town Councillor today (Family Day events). They have no clue what this service is going to cost us in several years when the contractor wants to re-negotiate and the town has no leverage. My guess is the costs will increase 5 fold.

  16. the only real benefit is less litter on the roadsides, which is worthy enough.
    …
    exactly !!
    If any of you think that recycling is somehow going to affect littering you’re crazy.
    There is no link between the two practices which are extreme opposites on the scale of human behaviour with regard to waste handling.

  17. Believe whatever makes you happy, however labeling those who don’t share your beliefs as ‘crazy’ is quite disingenuous.
    It’s what one expects from religious zealots, not rational adults.

  18. Great comeback and explanation for how litterbugs are going to start caring somehow and become recyclers, N of 60.
    You’re mature rationalism has floored me yet again!
    People who don’t even care enough to put garbage in a landfill are going to benefit the roadsides with less litter because why, RECYCLING?
    Explain how they get to there from where they are now and I’ll apologize for calling you and gordinkneehill crazy.
    What is the mechanism for making them care and changing their present behaviour?
    There are already hefty fines for littering, yes?

  19. Exactly! BS article full of childishly stupid phoney complaints. Author must have failed every class before dropping out of school.

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