Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, “Recycling Is Not Dead!”
calgary has “elevated” the garbage routine from 2 guys-one truck (landfill)
to two guys-two trucks (landfill-recycle)
coming soon, 3 guys-3 trucks (landfill-recycle-compost)
and the fees keeps going up too….
not like we are short of area for landfill…
The inevitable glut of recyclable waste and the assured failure of the recycling industry (it was all just a placebo any way) will give rise to stage 2 of politicizing waste management – stigmatizing municipal then personal waste output (soon, personal carbon output) – it sets the stage for individual waste taxation and fines and per-use levies on waste removal.
This is agenda 21 in action – remember it takes root at a municipal level and Calgary has the perfect UN flunkie to pimp UN green austerity/tyranny.
Read, learn, act accordingly – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0615494544?*Version*=1&*entries*=0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gevwmUoEpyI
“Recycling is Bullshit” – Penn & Teller
A devastating video in case you’ve never seen it. Send it to all your lefty friends/enemies.
Aluminum is the only thing worth recycling in house hold waste.
Our recycling here in the Comox Valley is picked up every two weeks. The trucks drive 50-100 feet and stop, load recylables, accelerate 50-100 feet and stop, for 8-10 hours a day. How much pollution are the diesel engines putting out, and how much fuel is being burned at what is the most inefficient use of the engines; constant accelerating. Plus two municipal worker with union pay, benefits and pensions. doesn’t make sense on any level.
mid island mike
Household wastes recycled into what? You mean Leftovers again?
I’ve always been of the opinion that recycling is mostly a form of “feel good” for affluent hippies. Turns out my opinion is validated from an economic and ecological perspective. Ha!
s.I’ve thought the same thing about the low fat BS and climate change/warming. All of these movements are a form of religion founded on deception and outright lies.
Saskatoon recycling.
Expectation: to save 7.5 tonnes/yr of garbage from the landfill (above and beyond what was already being diverted by voluntary recycling).
Space saved in landfill: 10,000 cu. meters based on compaction factor of .75 tonne/ cu. meter of material. (landfill is reported to be proud of their compation factor)
Landfill value: $90/cu. meter (based on a report from an independent assessor out of Ontario).
Landfile value saved each year: $900,000
Charge to residents: $60/year/household (16.16 cents/day)
Number of households: approx 100,000
Total cost/year $6,000,000
Just another example of how ideology trumps proper money management.
Recycling – like Globull Warming, is just another way for red fascists to
keep the sheeple in “obey orders and pay tax mode” from cradle to grave.
Has anyone ever received official word from their fine city on the costs and
“revenue” associated with this obvious to anyone with a brain boondoggle?
Just think how much recycling adds to our carbon footprint. Alberta taxes sales of electronics so they can be sent back to Asia for recycling. Recycling electronic? How do you recycle a heterogeneous pile of components? You don’t. It’s a feel good exercise.
Scar – that’s a point I try to raise with some of my greener co-workers. I asked one if we need to sequester carbon. Vigorous head nod. I asked if we need to reduce fossil fuel use. Vigorous head nod. I asked if we need to recycle paper to keep it out of the landfill. Vigorous head nod. I asked why it makes sense to use more fossil fuels to recycle paper and not sequester it in the landfill. Puzzled expression.
Well, that’s not strictly true. There are very good reasons to recycle (actually, specially process) electronics.
A lot of the components in electronics are extremely toxic and you don’t want them leaching into the environment. There’s a lot of lathanide and heavy metals in there. Also, there are trace amounts of gold and other precious metals in electronics, enough that if you can scale up to processing tons of the stuff you can make a tidy little profit.
So overall, electronics are one of the few waste streams where you really do want to divert them from the general landfills. But the best approach to that is to just let the precious metal recyclers pick up people’s electronics and worry about the safe processing themselves.
Talking to a neighbor (here in Calgary) who has a little hobby-job collecting and selling scrap metal. He’s stopping because he said the price is down to $10/tonne from $200/tonne. Hello landfill.
I’m glad you are raising awareness of UN Agenda 21. I have been trying to explain this to people with little success. People do not want hear about it.
Calgary has been a member of ICEI since 1995 yet nobody seems to know much about it. ICEI has a Canadian web site – google it. Shocking stuff actually!
Cheers
Lorenzo
Very much like glass bottles for milk, real recycling is killed by government help and regulation.
The landfill was our most efficient means of disposing of organic waste while stockpiling scrap metals for future mining, when doing so would benefit us.
Now we are being forced to sort and fondle our garbage.Which is then compacted and buried or sold at a loss.
So who works for who?
If it is garbage to me, that means I consider it worth less than the effort required to sort, save and salvage.
If I am forced by council edict to do so, well now it has value and I demand payment for my time and these “resources”.
As a former insider, in the municipal cabal, I’ve been saying for years, CUPE, in BC anyways, literally runs the municipalities.
The unions get their vote out to ensure control of municipal coffers, and influence. Its a very closed shop, “hands in their pockets”
Tell Penn and Teller they are not always right. Commercially produced cartridges in .303British typically costs over a dollar a round at retail. By neck-sizing only I can reload cases eight to ten times, with ordinary powders and bullets like Sierra ProHunter or Hornady Interlock the savings recovered the cost of a press and dies, etc. years ago and I’m now shooting for half the cost of factory ammo. And the Lee-Enfield rifles I’m using are WWII surplus so they are recycled, too.
I’ve just sent the NYT article to my mayor and councillors – who are about to make a decision on new, $400,000 ‘self-loading’ trucks for garbage/re-cycling. Meanwhile, the old trucks which were special ordered to meet the specifications of the prior council, will likely be scrapped or at best, sold for pennies on the dollar.
Seems like twice a year they change the regs on what can/cannot be re-cycled. Styrofoam packaging trays used to be a yes, while glass was a ‘no’. Now it’s reversed.
I’ve said p*ss on em’ and now put everything in the trash except for newspaper and the veggie scraps that go into my own compost bin.
As per the NYT article, I REALLY resent the re-cycling commercials that say “how you re-cycle says something about you” – suggesting that if you don’t, you’re de facto a bad person.
“A lot of the components in electronics are extremely toxic and you don’t want them leaching into the environment.”
You really should look into how landfills are constructed these days.
The garbage in them does not leach into the environment.
Modern landfills are constructed with a flexible geomembrane liner including a leachate collection system at bottom over a clay foundation.
I lived in Saskatoon for a while.
I hated SARCAN with a passion.
Bankers hours for recycling.
Just resting? More like pining for the fjords.
A good article except for two things: (1) the author is a true believer that greenhouse gases are somehow evil and (2) the “problem” can be solved by yet another tax.
Hey, mid-island Mike, we’re neighbours.
Save the planet, always compost your environmentalists!
Like this stupid TV ad for Enviromental Defense Fuld(EDF)showing someone crumbling up a picture of the earth and the jerk saying IF YOUR NOT RECYCLING YOUR THROWING IS ALL AWAY frankly the EDF needs to be thrown away into the garbage dump of stupid organizations