Recycling waste piles up as prices collapse
by Michael Smith
Thousands of tonnes of rubbish collected from household recycling bins may have to be stored in warehouses and former military bases to save them from being dumped after a collapse in prices.
Once again the bottom has dropped out of the market for recyclables and we have problems. Whoever said that it was supposed to be profitable selling the stuff – just joking. However, shipping the stuff 10,000 miles across the world definitely does not make sense to me and I am sure to very few readers either.
We have been here before a number of years back when the price for recyclables collapsed and the likes of the Scouts stopped collecting waste newspapers and such because they could not sell the stuff, and glass from recycling containers was actually put into landfill.
The well-meaning Joe Public and his wife studiously put those glass bottles, separated by colors, into the separate containers only for the council collectors to come along and empty all containers into one truck to go to the dump to have the broken glass landfilled.
The problem is that we look to make money out of the recyclables rather than to make something for sale out of the recyclables. Instead of recycling the councils actually just collect what in the German Democratic Republic was referred to as “secondary raw materials”, whether that was waste paper, tin cans, glass jars, bottles.
Then again, in the then German Democratic Republic, the country which the West called “East Germany”, glass jars and bottles, more often that not collected by the Young Pioneers, were simply returned to the factories and reused. Something that should be done again also in Britain and other countries of the developed world, instead of sending the collected glass, broken by then, off to be melted down again and turned into something else. What a waste. Only glass that has finally broken, after thousand of times refilling should, in the end, go to be recycled, say, into new bottles and jars or even into bricks, paving slabs or even kitchen counter tops. But that should only happen after the bottle or jar has finally come to the end of its life; not before, after one single use often, as is the case today.
Can we not develop a proper recycling industry in our own countries, be this the United Kingdom or the USA?
Also, how come that the bottom has dropped out of the market, supposedly, for so we are being told, when the prices for metals are at an all time high, including here aluminium – or aluminum as our American cousins say; the very metal soda and beer cans are made from.
The local municipalities are trying to claim that with the economic crunch, the price for recycled good has dropped, and that now they and collection companies have tons of worthless recyclables that they cannot do anything with.
Collection companies and councils are running out of space to store paper, plastic bottles and steel cans because prices are so low that the materials cannot be shifted. Collections of mixed plastics, mixed paper and steel reached record levels in the summer but the “bottom fell out of the market” and they are now worthless. The plunge in prices was caused by a sudden fall in demand for recycled materials, especially from China, as manufacturers reduced their output in line with the global economic downturn.
In an effort to store them, they are requesting for less strict storage regulations to try and keep the recyclables from being dumped while they ride out the economic crisis, and what a surprise – NOT!
Much of the recyclables in the UK are sold to China for the manufacturing of goods. However, as the economy sinks, so too does production, even in the cheap labor countries such as China, and therefore so too does the demand for recyclables. Plastics and metals that were once valuable have sunk to practically worthless. But it does not mean they should get dumped. We cannot, despite what so many Brits think, continue using landfill – there are no more holes in the ground into which to dump thinks. And this aside from the fact that landfill can and does also cause contamination of soil and water.
Authorities are hoping to store the materials in warehouses and former military bases until the slump passes, but that means lighter regulations on how much waste can be stored for how long.
Officials from the Environment Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are considering changing the regulations on the storage of recycled waste and are expected to issue new guidelines next week. They have been urged to relax the rules limiting the quantity of waste that can be stored and to allow it to be kept in secure warehouses or abandoned military bases and former airfields.
They expect the situation to worsen before it gets better, since the holidays produce so much paper and plastic waste with parties and gifts. But they do see a light at the end of the tunnel, since new recycling plants will be opening soon and the dependence on China for purchasing recyclables will be lessened, so we are told.
It is about time that we did the recycling itself and in fact, in my opinion, recycling plants should be operated locally by the individual municipalities so that the recyclables do not need to get shipped over long distance, unless we can use the canals and inland waterways that the government recently discovered can be used for transporting of freight. The fact that they were designed and build for just that task some 200 years or so ago totally escaped them.
It is really wonderful to hear that people are doing so well at recycling that it is rapidly piling up, but hopefully the piles will begin to be processed soon. Perhaps pileup will help to get more products made from recycled materials, proving we don’t need new raw materials to make new products.
Maybe also one day we will get it past certain groups and organizations of the what can but be called eco-fascists and actually will have, just like some other European countries, waste incinerating power plants where energy and heat is produced for the local community. There is always some waste that simply cannot be recycled and it has to go somewhere and it is better for it to go up in smoke – we can clean that smoke also without problems; the technology does exist – than to go into holes in the ground which we are getting rather short of.
First of all we must, however, have our own, ideally local, recycling plants where the material is sorted and then, ideally also, made into new products.
The real truth, to sum it up again, is that recycling should not be price based. It is an essential process to reduce the rate and then eventually stop resource depletion. Government legislation is required to ensure that all materials available for recycling are recycled. Recycling is not an economic exercise, it is a survival system.
© M Smith (Veshengro), November 2008
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UK Looks for Storage for Piles of Worthless Recycling Waste
