Bad economy results in... less paper recycling?

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Ironically, a Treehugger article points out that because of the present economic downturn/crash/meltdown, waste paper that used to go to China for recycling is no longer wanted there... which may result in tons of waste paper being landfilled or burned, instead of being recycled. Other scrap materials are no longer in demand... they are not considered financially viable to recycle.

I confess I didn't realize how much of the world's waste was apparently being recycled by China, but I also find it hard to believe that recycling cannot be economically viable everywhere...

What does it mean for the e-book industry when paper is not considered a resource worth recycling? Could paper producers be forced to dispose of their own trash... and thereby encourage them to cut back on paper production? Will we end up burning waste paper for fuel? Or maybe we have "Soylent Pulp" to look forward to...

[DixieGal]

Deleted: I was joking inappropriately in a non-Lounge thread.

[HarryT]

Why do you say "China of all places"? Lots of waste material gets shipped around the world for recycling.

[jljones]

i gather it's due to the recession. We aren't buying as many manufactured goods from China now, which come in cardboard packing. In normal times, we send cardboard and paper to China to be recycled to make more packaging for more Chinese products.

[pshrynk]

Burning paper just to dispose f it would be a shame. We could stockpile it somewhere and then when the pulp fuel breaktrhoughs come on line, use the depositories as "mines." But there'd probably be a lot of environmental impact from just letting the stuff lie around, too.

[Greg Anos]

Recycling is only profitable when there is a low cost of labor and a wide enough spread between scrap and output product to pay for that labor. When demand falls off a cliff, prices for all outputs drop, killing recycling industries...

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Recycling is only profitable when there is a low cost of labor and a wide enough spread between scrap and output product to pay for that labor. When demand falls off a cliff, prices for all outputs drop, killing recycling industries...

That could change if laws are rewritten to force manufacturers to pay for the "hidden costs" of manufacturing, which can include environmental damage done not only by initial drilling/mining/milling, etc, but by recovery down the line, all of which would force the cost of materials to go up.

If that were to happen, the cost of recycled materials would certainly be much lower than that of new materials, making recycling even more profitable than it is now.

Of course, efforts to force manufacturers to absorb these hidden costs have been proposed, and shot down, for years.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

That could change if laws are rewritten to force manufacturers to pay for the "hidden costs" of manufacturing, which can include environmental damage done not only by initial drilling/mining/milling, etc, but by recovery down the line, all of which would force the cost of materials to go up.

If that were to happen, the cost of recycled materials would certainly be much lower than that of new materials, making recycling even more profitable than it is now.

Of course, efforts to force manufacturers to absorb these hidden costs have been proposed, and shot down, for years.

Can we hold politicians to account (including their personal fortunes and retirements) to the downstream costs of their laws?

Right, I thought not..... (Look, there goes Al Gore's private jet!)