Recycling News

Industry has made more than 9.1 billion tons of plastic since 1950 and there's enough left over to bury Manhattan under more than two miles of trash, according to a new cradle-to-grave global study. Plastics don't break down like other man-made materials, so three-quarters of the stuff ends up as waste in landfills, littered on land and floating in oceans, lakes and rivers, according to the research reported in Wednesday's journal Science Advances.

Cars, Boats, Plants, Financial Products and now Recycling Bins! The new Hexcycle® Max hybrid bin from Recyclingbin.com is a super-efficient blend of Aluminum, Polypropylene, and Carbon Steel providing less weight with higher performance.

Recently, the EPA released its bi-annual Municipal Solid Waste Report with a new name, “Advancing Sustainable Materials Management”. The EPA’s intent is to promote the practice of sustainable product and waste program design. This report, “emphasizes the importance of reducing the amount of waste created, reusing whenever possible, and then recycling whatever is left.” .¹ According to the report, “source reduction is the most preferred materials management approach.”

With the news media covering world economics recently in Davos, I couldn’t help but ponder how technology, markets, and economics affect the development of recycling in the America.

As many cities brought in 2010 under bursts of confetti made from virgin paper, I wondered what this new decade may have in store for recycling. Are we finally getting waste disposal under control? Although the total number of landfills nationwide has decreased, todayÕs landfills are larger and continue to grow in size. Over the past ten years, Òthe amount of trash being sent to landfills has remained fairly consistentÓ.

I hope this America Recycles Day is laden with WILL DO spirit. Over the past several years, recycling initiatives have spanned the gamut from reducing disposable plastic bag use to implementing single stream collection. So, how is recycling progressing?

Must recycling go backwards in order to move forward? On Earth Day 1971, a poignant public service message The Crying Indian spurred our nation to stop littering. Environmentally conscious communities picked up discarded bottles, cans, and papers from our roads and streams and local governments imposed fines for littering.

As an avid recycler with a scientific background, this latest posting is in response to an article I recently read in; The Atlantic, by Caitlin Flanagan titled, "Cultivating Failure - How School Gardens are cheating our most vulnerable students". Basically, the article expounds that by having middle school children (especially immigrant and minority kids) participate in school garden activities or learn from curricula built around such endeavors we are "robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might otherwise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt)". To top off the insult, Ms. Flanagan even implies that "garden loving, home-cooking, and recycling" aficionados caught up in "organic food, nutrition and sustainability" are ultimately behind the demise of public education.

Since the 1960s, plastics have gradually become the materials of choice for industrial applications that once demanded the use of glass, metal, or wood. Salad dressing bottles, car bumpers, and even toothpicks are now made of plastic. Left to their own demise, these chemically, synthesized materials never totally go away but breakdown into smaller and smaller polluting bits called microplastics.