Recycle or Not? (1 Viewer)

[Chris]

BTW, many communities provide paper recycling, even though it loses money with few benefits because tax dollars support it (#1) and (#2) because public fundraising for it is incredible.

While some lose money hand over fist, all of them get solid tax breaks for being involved in it, and tax dollars pay greater then cost to do it..

A community is a fool not to take one of the many federal grants out their to be involved in the project.. but just because their are tons of federal grants and state offerings for it doesn't make it good science

China's example works.. in a sense.. because of highly condensed population to the facilities that do the final work, and their use of non-printable paper.. in other words, they are taking mostly paper pulp and recycling it into shipping containers and even mesh that can be used for sheeting.

Meanwhile, in the US, the problem is that our starter paper isn't in as easily processable a format as China.. the thing that really hurts paper recycling here is that the paper we start with is coated with heavier dye ink or we use glossy sheeting.. a pracice that is very rare in China. But this process, which we've all become very familiar with here, makes recycling paper a beastie.

If all of the paper we were trying to recycle was notebook paper or brown sheet paper etc, then life would be good.. but look at your sunday paper at the glossy inserts, etc. and then you know why you have the hitch you do.

 

[Joe Szott]

They used to provide recycling for aluminum, glass, plastic, and paper here in Denver. They've now dropped the paper and will only take aluminum, glass, and plastic in the weekly bins. There are larger newspaper-only dropoffs I have seen around town, but virtually no way to recycle magazines that I know of.

Can't say I really care too much. I get my news online, we haven't gotten a paper delivered for years. We get a few magazines, but that's about it (except for the continous flow of paper junk mail.)

 

[Jay Taylor]

Unfortunately junk mail will be difficult to reduce for many reasons. I’ve heard news reports describing how the U.S. Postal Service has so much competition from e-mail and package shippers such as UPS that revenue from massive amounts of junk mail is the main thing keeping them afloat.