Viability of Recycling

A lunch a few days ago, a co-worker mentioned watching a show that discussed the viability of recycling from both an economic and environmental standpoint. The show reported that excluding aluminium recycling was neither economically or environmentally viable for any other material. Quite a bit surprised I did some research of my own and found out that the show is working from a lot of factual data (couple of quick links below).

• http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Recycling.html
• http://www.stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XXXIV/...

Recycling in a vacuum is obviously good for the environment. But the focus of the show is that most people don’t consider the cost of what happens behind the scenes of recycling. The major factors are ...

• Cost of gathering the recycled goods
• Amount of polution created by gathering the recycled goods
• Viability of recycling individual materials. For intstance, plastic is a tricky product to recycle and can only be mixed in certain ways
• Several types of recycling, i.e. paper, create new forms of waste that also must be transported and disposed of
• The overall percentage of consumers willing to take the time to properly sort out their recycling is too low

Aluminum recyling does seem to be a huge win for both parties. For instance it is a relatively light material that does not have to be separated as carefully other materials (say plastic). Also their is a huge cost savings to the manufactures because they can create a recycled aluminum can for less than 10% of a new can. The first link above stastes that 95% of all cans are now made from recycled material

Interesting research topic to say the least.