Comment by synack
4 hours ago
I toured a sorting facility in Seattle recently. They said the only really profitable output is aluminum, everything else costs more than virgin material.
4 hours ago
I toured a sorting facility in Seattle recently. They said the only really profitable output is aluminum, everything else costs more than virgin material.
I worked at a plastic furniture manufacturer in Indiana for a few projects.
They got paid to accept bales of recycled "HDPE" that they could mix at between 10 and 30% into their virgin materials. They get paid to accept it! Negative profit for the waste management company, pure profit for the "user".
This worked best on black, coffee, slate grey, mahogany - you get the idea - the whites and tans and bright colors were basically pure virgin material (and their own internally-recycled offcuts of dyed virgin materials of matching colors) even though their FAQ states:
> What percentage of recycled materials are used?
> The percentage of recycled materials in our lumber can vary depending on the availability of post-consumer and post-industrial plastics. We continuously strive to maximize the use of recycled content in every piece of lumber.
Personally, I don't think that the fact that you started with pure virgin material, extruded some plastic, cut it up and used most of it, but put some of what was virgin material a few hours ago back into the grinder and extruder makes the resulting plastic "recycled".
That says a lot, doesn't it? HDPE is one of the most recyclable plastics and recycling feedstock still has a negative market value.
It's 100% recycling, if the alternative was just "throw away the excess". For all practical purposes, recycling just means "repurposing material that you would have otherwise sent to a landfill".
My understanding is that glass gets downcycled into a lot of products like concrete or asphalt or aggregates. It's not profitable, but it's really easy to provide at a low loss.