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global recycling industry collapse

PATXPATX 2,820 Posts
edited January 2009 in Strut Central
Wow, this is pretty big. Don't quite know what to make of it, but it means that from now on, we will be surrounded by much more of our own detritus as China is not longer buying it to process and sell back to us. Paper, Cardboard, Cans, Pastic sheeting, all that shit that we haven't managed to use less of despite 20 years of "we ought to consume less, recycle more" consensus.>>"It's a canary in the coalmine: it's the front and back end of industry," said Adam Minter, who runs the Shanghai Scrap blog and specialises in the metal trade. "Until about eight weeks ago, for example, the entire [US] west coast paper market was sent to China and most of it was sent south. It was processed and made into packaging for products that then shipped back to the US ... But when US consumer demand dropped off, that broke the cycle."Across the scrap trade, prices have halved or worse in a matter of months. Each link in the chain is disintegrating, from factories to scrapyards to collectors such as Wu, 56, a former farmer who now plans to return to Hubei province.Official media reported that four-fifths of China's recycling units had closed and that millions will eventually be left without employment. link>>In the long term Drake hopes the crisis will spur a home-grown solution, with US mills taking the place of foreign markets. But she is concerned that once recycling ceases to be profitable, it will not be practised with the alacrity that has seen California save half of its solid waste from landfill. "We don't want to create a panic and say this is the end of recycling," says Drake, "but we need to continue to educate people."Wes Muir of Waste Management, one of the US's biggest collection and recycling companies, believes recycling will weather a temporary dip in the commodities markets. "There's a strong commitment to recycling," he says. "People think it needs to be done and predicated on the belief that garbage is not a waste, it is a resource that reduces the need for the extraction of raw materials. We don't see a backpedalling ??? it's ingrained into the culture." link

  Comments

  • johmbolayajohmbolaya 4,472 Posts
    With what I recycle, it only results in loose change and not that I'm complaining, but I just dump it in the recycling bin and leave it at that. If it helps create more local/regional jobs with recycling plants that are here, even better. The U.S. seems to have forgotten how to be self-sufficient and independent like D-Dice.
  • MurdockMurdock 542 Posts
    My Homeboy buys recycled paper buy the shipload to send to Pakistan. He can't get enough of the stuff. He's had to fight to get every scrap of it. Just because China isn't playing the game doesn't mean that other countries are going to fusk with us. Don't let one reporter get to you because, they had to make up a problem to sell an article.
  • SnappingSnapping 995 Posts
    So messed up that its more economical to ship our recyclables around the world and then bring them back as shipping materials than to just reuse them here.
  • PATXPATX 2,820 Posts
    My Homeboy buys recycled paper buy the shipload to send to Pakistan. He can't get enough of the stuff. He's had to fight to get every scrap of it. Just because China isn't playing the game doesn't mean that other countries are going to fusk with us. Don't let one reporter get to you because, they had to make up a problem to sell an article.

    So what you are saying is that the average daily wage in Pakistan is even lower than China's and it's still profitable (for now). Yay for the market, it always finds a way.
  • MurdockMurdock 542 Posts
    My Homeboy buys recycled paper buy the shipload to send to Pakistan. He can't get enough of the stuff. He's had to fight to get every scrap of it. Just because China isn't playing the game doesn't mean that other countries are going to fusk with us. Don't let one reporter get to you because, they had to make up a problem to sell an article.

    So what you are saying is that the average daily wage in Pakistan is even lower than China's and it's still profitable (for now). Yay for the market, it always finds a way.
    You were worried over the collapse of the recycled goods market. I was trying to assure you that, the article you were reading was not a sign of the end of the world[/b]. But, of course it is.
  • Ex-BoyfriendEx-Boyfriend 795 Posts
    Not a big deal at all. If anything we've been recycling too much. That is recycling things we should never have bothered with because people don't seem to realize that recycling requires the use of resources, and depending on how much resources an individual item requires to recycle, it is less wasteful just to throw it in a hole in the ground.
  • mylatencymylatency 10,475 Posts
    Not a big deal at all. If anything we've been recycling too much. That is recycling things we should never have bothered with because people don't seem to realize that recycling requires the use of resources, and depending on how much resources an individual item requires to recycle, it is less wasteful just to throw it in a hole in the ground.


    GTFOOHWTBS!!!!!!!
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