Everything here other than Metals and Tires are basically only useful in the extremes where your inputs are exceedingly clean.
Sure, if you somehow have 99.9% cleaned and sorted plastic it can be maybe worth recycling at the margins. Same with paper and cardboard. The quality of these input streams needs to be so good it basically is nonexistent.
This might work somewhere like Japan, but in a major US city with "single stream" recycling it's a joke. One person tossing a bag of fast food trash into a recycling bin ruins the entire thing. Or a pizza box. You name it.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of the stuff put into the "blue bin" recycling bins here in Chicago actually makes it to recycling. The metals are near 100% since scrappers drive the alleys and scavenge anything of value before it even makes it to the recycling truck.
The amount of human labor to make recycling "worth it" makes it uneconomical. Either that labor can be done on the consumer side (like Japan seems to do) - or centralized - but most things only pencil out when you assume this cleaning and sorting labor is effectively free.
Sure, if you somehow have 99.9% cleaned and sorted plastic it can be maybe worth recycling at the margins. Same with paper and cardboard. The quality of these input streams needs to be so good it basically is nonexistent.
This might work somewhere like Japan, but in a major US city with "single stream" recycling it's a joke. One person tossing a bag of fast food trash into a recycling bin ruins the entire thing. Or a pizza box. You name it.
I'd be surprised if even 10% of the stuff put into the "blue bin" recycling bins here in Chicago actually makes it to recycling. The metals are near 100% since scrappers drive the alleys and scavenge anything of value before it even makes it to the recycling truck.
The amount of human labor to make recycling "worth it" makes it uneconomical. Either that labor can be done on the consumer side (like Japan seems to do) - or centralized - but most things only pencil out when you assume this cleaning and sorting labor is effectively free.