Glass is profitable to recycle. Glass recycling uses less energy than manufacturing it. Also glass does not biodegrade, so millions of tones of glass would accumulate over time.
I honestly forgot all about glass.
According the article you linked, it costs the city $30/ton to put waste into a dump or landfill. On the other hand, the city actually makes $26 (or maybe it was $28, can't remember) per ton of recycled material.
Now I realize there's much more to the economics of this than how much the city makes for turning in recyclables. But I just don't know enough about the national or global economics of recycling to say anything intelligent on the matter at all.
It's easy to say that a profit can made from recycling, but that's because any money loss is covered up and hidden by subsidies taken out of taxes. The price of any "green" product should reflect how expensive recycling is. Goods made from recycled products tend to be very expensive.
Paper is a joke to recycle. Sure, if you throw paper away, it will sit in a landfill, but it will degrade. Trees are a renewable resource, and we aren't running out of trees. In fact, the more paper you buy, the more demand there is for paper, which means the more demand in planting trees. If we stopped buying paper, then there would be less profit in growing trees, which in turn means we would actually see the number of trees decline.
To recycle paper, it must be sorted ($), shipped ($), blended ($), exposed to chemicals ($), and overall morphed into the new product ($). Is it really worth the fuel and resources to turn a box of paper into... paper?
Plastics and metals such as aluminum are worth recycling because it is cheaper, and easier, to reuse both of those resources than to dig for new ones. It's the reason you see people sorting their trash and picking out aluminum cans and glass bottles.
Plastics fall under the same line as paper. The only difference is that plastic doesn't degrade in the ground. Otherwise it's more costly to reuse it than it is to throw it away. The fuels and other chemical treatments costs money and also pollute the earth as well.
Landfills are only useful in the short to medium term. In any case, there is ample evidence to suggest that landfills cause environmental problems http://www.zerowasteamerica.org/Landfills.htm, in the short to medium term too.
Landfills are the number one reason why people recycle. The site you linked forgets to mention that multiple layers of liners are used and foot after foot of impermeable clay, gravel, and drainage systems are laid down.
To top it all off, you can gain energy from
landfills. Sure, it's a limited process, but at least we are taking advantage of what we can get. After a landfill is full, it is topped off and monitored. If you flew over a topped off landfill, you wouldn't even notice it was there.
I dislike the idea of trash sitting in our ground as much as anyone else. However, if you were to combine 1000 years worth of trash from all the landfills in the united states and put them in one huge landfill that was 100 yards deep, the landfill would only be 35 miles squared. I'm not suggesting we create one huge land fill, I'm just pointing out that we aren't on the edge of disaster. Who knows? We may find a way to decrease the amount of space used in landfills or a more reliable way to recycle by then.
