Why Canada’s recycling industry is in crisis mode

[timun]

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

I suppose I should have phrased it as 'have continued to find ways to provide' water for their huge populations. It would be interesting to know more about the financial costs involved (let alone ecological costs), and whether they are really being paid by residents - evidently not as it has not been a factor in stemming population growth.

Here's a high-level map of where LA get their water from:



This is what Owens Lake, the lake in the middle of the Los Angeles Aqueduct line on the map above, actually looks like:



They sucked the entire Owens Valley dry. With respect to cost water prices in LA have almost doubled since 2010. They're screwed.


Phoenix's prices haven't soared like LA's but they're in for a shocker. Most of their water comes from the Salt River watershed, which is pretty much tapped out. Future water is planned to be drawn from the Colorado River (which parts of Nevada and California already overdraw). This is what the river looks like by the time it gets to the Gulf of California:




New York City has the benefit of drawing water from a watershed that naturally replenishes and filters itself, and therefore they don't spend anywhere near the amount of money we do—proportionally—on water treatment. Still, they opened a $3.2 billion treatment plant in the Bronx in 2015 to help filter the 10% or so of the billion+ gallons of water they use every day, and last year they announced they'd be spending $1 billion on programs to maintain their water quality.

Which isn't to say it isn't something we should be working on, but my point is that it will be hard to view it locally as a 'crisis'. It will be an uphill battle in terms of individual behaviour when you can look at any number of bigger cities in the world with more difficult situations who haven't really had to turn off the taps...

I agree that it will be an uphill battle. People really are quite ignorant of precarious our water supply is in southern Alberta.

[bizaro86]

California still seems to have enough water to irrigate alfalfa and export it. That's a pretty low value use of water, so if they're still doing that they have lEvers they haven't needed yet.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

California still seems to have enough water to irrigate alfalfa and export it. That's a pretty low value use of water, so if they're still doing that they have lEvers they haven't needed yet.

I believe that's because they have private water rights for wells. So as long as the value of the crop is more than the drilling costs producers are incentivised to produce

[CaptainYooh]

What? 4 pages into recycling crisis thread and nobody posted Penn & Teller's video yet??? We are getting sloppy, people.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6klo0p

[timun]

Originally Posted by bizaro86

California still seems to have enough water to irrigate alfalfa and export it. That's a pretty low value use of water, so if they're still doing that they have levers they haven't needed yet.

Sure, they're irrigating crops—five hundred kilometres north of LA. That's how far the tentacles of LA reach to get drinking water. Imagine if Calgary got its water from Slave Lake, or Lake Okanagan; that's how ridiculously far LA goes to get drinking water.

Bitching about farmers in California would be like us drawing water from the Okanagan Valley and saying "well they have enough water out there to still be growing squash and eggplant, so there are levers we haven't used yet".

[blankall]

Was China actually recycling or just burying in their own landfills? It just seems baffling that we are wasting all these resources to gather and ship plastics to China in the name of environmental conservation.

[Fuzz]

I think China was using lots of cardboard, given all the export goods. Not sure about the plastics, I'd imagine a lot of it got burned.


Malaysia now sending some back....


https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/we-are...stic-1.5152274


I'd need more details about this one...it looks like clean plastic bags. If we legitimately exported this to a company there, I don't really see why we should take it back. If it was to one of the unlicensed operators, is that still on us? Or is that more of a problem of their governance allowing them to exist?

[Fuzz]

There are some interesting developments to turn plastic back into oil, this one looks to work well:


https://energyindustryreview.com/oil...back-into-oil/


This Canadian Company mentioned in the article looks not be moving to fast, since they have been at it for a decade, and their stock is worth 2 cents.


I've read a few of these over the years, but I never see any reason why they aren't being used more. Seems like a no-brainier, since they generate their own fuel to run, and output useful product.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

I think China was using lots of cardboard, given all the export goods. Not sure about the plastics, I'd imagine a lot of it got burned.


Malaysia now sending some back....

?

Can anyone here on the industry elaborate?

I knew this was going on, but didn't realize it was that bad. Cleaning and then shipping bottles to Asia to be burned? Wouldn't throwing them into the garbage be several degrees of magnitude better for the environment?

[CroFlames]

Originally Posted by blankall

Can anyone here on the industry elaborate?

I knew this was going on, but didn't realize it was that bad. Cleaning and then shipping bottles to Asia to be burned? Wouldn't throwing them into the garbage be several degrees of magnitude better for the environment?

Hint: no one gives a #### about the environment in business. Its all virtue signalling.

[Fuzz]

Once collected, recyclables are sold to workshops for reprocessing. While there are many large licensed reprocessing facilities, the industry is dominated by small family-run enterprises. The size of these smaller companies allows them to develop highly specialized, niche services, making them the go-to destination for specific recyclables. Further, their business costs are far lower than licensed facilities because they are often looser with safety and environmental concerns. Licensed companies must responsibly dispose of excess nonrecyclable waste, while unregulated firms burn anything that cannot be recycled or dump them in improvised landfills. These unregulated practices pollute heavily and often destroy local land and waterways while introducing serious health issues to workers and their communities.
China is turning to controversial incineration plants to deal with its enormous buildup of waste. According to the government, there is up to seven billion tons of waste buried around the country’s major cities. Shenzhen is tackling this problem by building the world’s largest waste-to-energy incineration plant. The plant is expected to burn 5,000 tons of waste a day, converting a third of that into useable electricity. Although the plant produces energy and adds a renewable component with its solar panel rooftop, incineration plants release vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere – and China plans to build 300 of them over the next three years.
Despite easing the burden, incinerators do not solve the root problem of inefficient recycling and waste management practices and continue to draw the ire of local populations worried about the environment. For example, plans to build an incinerator in Guangdong were scrapped after mass protests in April 2015. Nonetheless, Beijing seems to recognize the necessity to reduce waste, as it announced the creation of pilot urban mining facilities in dozens of cities to extract usable material from waste.

https://www.chinabusinessreview.com/...ling-industry/

[Mccree]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

What? 4 pages into recycling crisis thread and nobody posted Penn & Teller's video yet??? We are getting sloppy, people.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6klo0p

The John Wick ads very 5 minutes are annoying

[woob]

Sorry for posting a Forbes link. Their website is awful: https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevorn.../#43de9b58292c

[pepper24]

Need to get rid of bottle deposits now that we have blue cart recycling. Policy that worked well before full scale residential recycling but now outdated.

[bizaro86]

Originally Posted by pepper24

Need to get rid of bottle deposits now that we have blue cart recycling. Policy that worked well before full scale residential recycling but now outdated.

They're more costly but do a way better job. Example:

Sorted bottle depot glass is washed, crushed, and used to make fiberglass insulation. Using glass instead of sand for that saves a huge amount of energy/emissions. This actually helps the environment.

The glass from the blue carts is mixed up and useless. I believe it basically gets stored, or sometimes used for filler in road paving (as a gravel substitute). Not much ecological benefit there at all.

[Fuzz]

But they could still sort them at a central facility, like they sort all the other stuff. I agree that it is a waste now that we have blue bins. Basically duplicating efforts, facilities, trips to bottle depots...The whole point of a deposit is so you don't throw them out. Well no one is going to throw them in the black bin when they have a blue bin, so the existence of the deposit is pointless now.

[Mccree]

Originally Posted by pepper24

Need to get rid of bottle deposits now that we have blue cart recycling. Policy that worked well before full scale residential recycling but now outdated.

Speaking of bottle deposits, how do the depots make money?

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by Mccree

Speaking of bottle deposits, how do the depots make money?

By shorting you on your bottle return?

[CaptainYooh]

Originally Posted by Mccree

The John Wick ads very 5 minutes are annoying

How dare you! He lost his dog.

[habernac]

Originally Posted by pepper24

Need to get rid of bottle deposits now that we have blue cart recycling. Policy that worked well before full scale residential recycling but now outdated.

Originally Posted by Fuzz

But they could still sort them at a central facility, like they sort all the other stuff. I agree that it is a waste now that we have blue bins. Basically duplicating efforts, facilities, trips to bottle depots...The whole point of a deposit is so you don't throw them out. Well no one is going to throw them in the black bin when they have a blue bin, so the existence of the deposit is pointless now.

No. You get rid of this, half of that stuff goes in the garbage.