I see where you're coming from, but some of the things you said don't gel with the state of recycling pre-Plastic China:
1. Waste management companies charge less for recycling to incentivize separating trash and because it was profitable to sell.
2. Single-Stream recycling programs still require consumer separation of non-recyclable trash from potentially recyclable material.
It's all about capital investment. It is expensive to develop and buy machines that specialize in sorting massive amounts of trash at a high throughput. Globalization allowed us to export that to places where labor was cheap enough that real humans would actually sift through the stuff.
The thought process is: why make the investment in specialized machines when there's human labor cheap enough to do it by hand, land cheap enough to store it in perpetuity, or environment regs lax enough to openly burn it and all that’s preventing these alternatives is government regulation?
In places where there’s strong faith in government like Europe you see many companies investing the R&D dollars in these machines. They also have strict packaging requirements that limit the number of inputs that these machines can expect to handle.
Here, the EPA and Dept of Interior can change hands every four years to people wholly uninterested in preserving our commons for the next generation. This administration is selling off pieces of National Parks for oil exploration, to name just one of many examples. It’s no wonder no one wants to actually put dollars towards green R&D.
1. Waste management companies charge less for recycling to incentivize separating trash and because it was profitable to sell.
2. Single-Stream recycling programs still require consumer separation of non-recyclable trash from potentially recyclable material.
It's all about capital investment. It is expensive to develop and buy machines that specialize in sorting massive amounts of trash at a high throughput. Globalization allowed us to export that to places where labor was cheap enough that real humans would actually sift through the stuff.
The thought process is: why make the investment in specialized machines when there's human labor cheap enough to do it by hand, land cheap enough to store it in perpetuity, or environment regs lax enough to openly burn it and all that’s preventing these alternatives is government regulation?
In places where there’s strong faith in government like Europe you see many companies investing the R&D dollars in these machines. They also have strict packaging requirements that limit the number of inputs that these machines can expect to handle.
Here, the EPA and Dept of Interior can change hands every four years to people wholly uninterested in preserving our commons for the next generation. This administration is selling off pieces of National Parks for oil exploration, to name just one of many examples. It’s no wonder no one wants to actually put dollars towards green R&D.