Modern Life: Demand and Supply — the Recycling Dilemma

Our local municipality, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to discontinue glass recycling as of December 1st.

Now, recycling has always made sense to me, and I grew up with it in my native Denmark before I moved to the USA. Here in this country, however, it seems to be far more complicated to recycle than I have ever experienced before.

I thought the idea was to reduce waste and use fewer resources to create new basic materials to "make stuff" from. But evidently I'm delusional!

Back when I had an art gallery and we carried lots of hand blown glass I know that glass recycling was a pretty common thing because even glassblowers I got to know used broken glass — also known as "cullet" — as part of glass formula they would produce for their art glass.

That's for the bottles and jars, while steel and aluminum are also largely reclaimable. I regularly hand off giant garbage bags full of empty aluminum cans to a friend who melts them down and uses the reclaimed metal for "sculptural stuff.

I realize that plastics are a little more complicated, because they need to be sorted to some degree, but there are many ways of plastic can be ground up and turned into things like siding for houses and even long-life decking planks that look like wood but is actually far more durable. I even watched a YouTube clip about someone grinding up plastic bottles and adding them to the "goo" that comes out of the nozzle used to create 3D printed houses.

Likewise, broken down paper pulp is also reusable — maybe not as the same virgin white sheets of paper you need to use for your laser printer — but certainly good enough you can turn them into cardboard boxes. We all know how many of those we use these days because of things like Amazon and all the mail order we do these days!

So what gives?

Here in the USA, recycling seems to carry with it a certain subtext that if you're into recycling you must be some kind of hairy tree-hugging liberal.

I can't help but think that some of the both local and national level problem results from the fact that recycling isn't a "maximizing profit" venture. To fill in a bit more, the reason the glass recycling is ending here is because the company the local recycle center sold the recycled glass to is shutting down because "it wasn't profitable enough."

Something fairly similar holds true when it comes to the plastic recycling. The reason we can only recycle a few of our plastic items is that the venture is not profitable enough.

If you read between the lines, it makes sense on some level. After all, reducing the use of resources and raw materials flies in the face of the foundations of capitalism. Recycling is designed to save resources rather than use them, so it makes sense.

I have had this discussion with with several friends now and then, some of whom even point out that I am "not supporting the system" by the fact that I typically go and buy my clothes from a second hand shop rather than a regular clothing store or a department store. Used clothes, which I find to be perfectly adequate, aren't being made or produced, they're simply being reused. The result of buying from second hand stores is that there is no machinery in a factory that "turns on" in order to produce something.

Of course — as many will probably point out — we don't have true free market capitalism here in the USA — we have a strange and twisted form of "monopolistic capitalism." The problem we face is that large corporate manufacturers are not only producing and control manufacturing, they are also controlling the market by choosing to limit the choices we have available to us.

I've mentioned this before, concerning groceries. The "low end" brand is simply removed from the lineup of choices, and replaced with a new "luxury" brand.

I'll refer back to something I've spoken about here in the past, namely that Mrs. Denmarkguy and I want to move to a smaller less expensive house in a few years but one of the problems we face is that these simply aren't available on the market.

On the rare occasions that they are, they're being bought up by professional "house flippers" or corporate landlords who are renovating them and turning them into overpriced mini mansions. If they don't sell, they end up being rented out to people who can't really afford the rent.

So we end up with this strange situation in which the demand is there but nobody is willing to provide the supply. Why? Well, because providing the particular supply that's being demanded is not the proven path to maximize profits.

Meanwhile, it looks like our glass is going to end up back in the landfill, like it did 50 years ago!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2024.11.22 23:22 PST
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