Recycle Smarter than a Third Grader!

We often associate recycling with curbside pickup operated by the local municipality. But can it possibly be a better environmental option for every recycled component picked up? It's true, many items are worth recycling from environmental perspective. And typically, environmental impact and costs correlate with each other most of the time due to the nature of energy.

Daniel Benjamin is a scholar at PERC. You can watch and read about his research below.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdV3zxoe8aA

For related resources, Design for Disassembly, Eco-Design, Environment and AD Technology guidelines related to this can be downloaded for free at:

http://www.activedisassembly.com/strategy

Recycle Smarter than a Third Grader! | Learn Liberty - YouTube
► 3:35	www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdV3zxoe8aA9 Apr 2014 - 4 min - Uploaded by Learn Liberty Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! All right? Maybe — maybe not, says scholar Daniel K. Benjamin ...

http://www.learnliberty.org/videos/recycle-smarter-than-a-third-grader/?utm_source=Video+Viewers&utm_medium=video+annotation&utm_content=Recycle+Smarter+Than+A+Third+Grader!+|+YT+Learn+More&utm_campaign=+General

OR

http://perc.org/articles/recycle-smarter-third-grader-learn-liberty

Daniel K. Benjamin: I’ve got a Kleenex in my hand — which is now a used Kleenex — and I’ve got to decide: should I put it in the trash, or should I recycle it? I’m going to put it in the trash. I’ve also got an aluminum beverage can here — which is now an empty aluminum beverage can — and again I’ve got the same choice: into the trash, or into the recycle bin? I’m gonna recycle it.

My name’s Dan Benjamin and I’ve been studying recycling since the 1980s, both as a college professor and as a senior fellow at PERC, in Bozeman, Montana. So why did I make the choice that I made with that piece of paper? If I had thrown it into the recycle bin, turning that piece of paper into new paper would have used up an enormous amount of resources and would have conferred very little environmental benefits. Hence, because I like to protect the environment and conserve resources, I put it in the trash.

With the can, on the other hand, by recycling it, when that can gets turned into a fresh new aluminum can, 95 percent of the energy used to make aluminum cans will have been saved, and as a result of that, I will have protected the environment and conserved resources. So, for me, the choice was easy: recycle that can.

Now you’ve probably always been told: recycling always conserves resources, that italways protects the environment. Which probably started with your third-grade teacher, is generally wrong.

Now, it is true that with large-scale industrial processes — for example, making frozen pizza or making aluminum cans — the firms recycle all the scraps that happen along the way of the production process. The pizza company takes the scrap dough, puts it back in the next mix, the aluminum company takes the scrap, puts it back into the next batch of aluminum. It conserves resources to do this, and it protects the environment.

It’s even true that for large household items such as refrigerators, stoves, microwaves, dishwashers, there’s enough recoverable material in there so that it conserves resources and protects the environment to recycle those items.

But what applies to refrigerators doesn’t necessarily apply to ordinary household trash — the sort of stuff that I was tossing in these bins here. How can you decide what to recycle? Well, here’s an experiment — I’ve done it myself — you can try it. The night before your trash is due to be picked up, put some items out by the trash can with a sign on them that says “free.” Try it with a bag of aluminum cans, a bag of plastic bottles, a bag of glass, a bag of paper. You might even put out there a lamp that no longer works or a small appliance like a toaster oven that doesn’t work.

Then, the next morning, go out there and see what’s still out there in the alley. During the night, someone has come through the alley, and without any direction from you, they’ve figured out, they know that given current market conditions and where you’re located, what makes sense to recycle and what doesn’t.

Now, however this experiment works out in your community, I’ll ask you to do one thing: whatever you find out, be sure you pass it on to your third-grade teacher.

If you’d like to learn more, please click here. You can read my policy series called Recycling Myths Revisited. Now you’ll have a choice: either read the paper version or the electronic version. The advantage of reading the paper version is that it increases the demand for trees and so more trees will be planted. On the other hand, if you use the electronic version, then you won’t have to make the tough choice: should I put it in the trash, or should I recycle it?

Why plastic is still 'the last frontier' of recycling

Mike This articles explains some of the implications of plastics and recycling and how it effects the potential for jobs in the USA.

Mike Biddle: Why plastic is still 'the last frontier' of recycling

The former CEO discusses his frustration with the recycling movement, his hatred of waste and how the US can grow jobs

Marc Gunther

theguardian.com, Wednesday 26 February 2014

www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/circular-economy-environment

Mike Biddle has stepped down as MBA Polymers CEO. Photograph: MBA Polymers

This month, Mike Biddle, the founder and longtime CEO of a pioneering plastics-recycling company called MBA Polymers, stepped down as an executive at the firm, ending more than two decades of unrelenting effort to reduce plastic waste.

Biddle's story is one of great success, as well as ongoing frustration. He sat down with me last week at the 2014 GreenBiz Forum in Phoenix to talk about MBA Polymers, the potential of the so-called circular economy, and why, despite all we know, the vast majority of plastics discarded in the US still wind up in incinerators, landfills or, worse, the ocean.

Plastics, he says, remains "the last frontier of recycling."

Biddle, who is 58 and has a PhD in chemical engineering from Case Western and an MBA from Stanford, left a good job at Dow Chemical in 1992 in the hope of solving the difficult puzzle of plastics recycling. During the next seven years, he attracted about $7m in grants and loans from the state of California, the Environmental Protection Agency and a plastics industry trade group.

The money enabled him to develop a set of technologies needed to make high-quality plastic pellets – which can be used to make new products – from big, messy and mixed post-consumer waste streams, particularly electronic waste and junked automobiles. He calls it "above-ground mining." (MBA Polymers doesn't bother with PET plastics, the type used to make soda bottles, leaving that particular waste stream to the beverage industry.)

MBA Polymers turns hard-to-recycle post-consumer plastics - such as those found in electronic waste and junked automobiles - into high-quality pellets like these, which are, in turn, used to make new products. Photograph: MBA Polymers

Since raising its first round of venture capital in 1999, MBA Polymers has attracted more than $150m from investors. Its latest round was a Series H. Now, the company, headquartered in Richmond, California, operates recycling plants in China, Austria and in the former coal-mining town of Worksop in the UK, which together process more than 300m pounds of plastic waste per year. It also won a 2013 Katerva Award for the materials and resources category, announced today.

The company has proven that the economics of plastics recycling can work, so long as there is an adequate supply of waste to be reprocessed. And closing the loop on plastics also delivers big environmental benefits. Recycling plastics not only keeps waste out of landfills and oceans, but also reduces the need for petroleum-based feedstocks, requires 80% less energy than making plastic from oil and dramatically reduces carbon emissions.

Of all this, Biddle is justly proud. He considers himself an environmentalist, as well as an entrepreneur. "I absolutely hate waste," he says.

But Biddle is disappointed that he has been unable to take the company further. He estimates that as much as 500bn pounds of plastics are thrown away every year, only a tiny fraction of which is captured by MBA Polymers.

He's especially frustrated that the company isn't operating in the US, the country that educated him and provided the seed money for his research. MBA Polymers employs about 300 people, and all but a handful of engineers work overseas. "I'd like to create jobs here," he says. Biddle himself had been commuting to the UK.

Why can't the company gain traction in the US? Building plants to reprocess plastics is expensive, and MBA Polymers cannot be sure it will get a large enough – and secure enough – supply of US plastic waste to justify the capital cost.

One way to secure a more predictable supply of e-waste would be to place some of the burden of collecting it on manufacturers. That's what the EU has done. Its "extended producer responsibility" laws, which require electronics to be collected and recycled, have created a robust collection system for used cell phones, tablets, computers and other e-waste. "They primed the pump with policy," Biddle says.

Besides that, Biddle would like to see the US follow other countries and require that e-waste exports to poor countries be handled responsibly. MBA Polymers cannot compete, he says, with cheap and irresponsible recyclers in places like China, Vietnam and West Africa.

"People, for as little as a dollar a day, dig through our stuff and extract what they can and leave behind what they can't, which is mostly the plastics," he says. "A lot of that winds up in rivers and oceans. … We need care about how we unmake our stuff as much as we do about it's made."

US recyclers, he says, could be required to audit the processing of the waste that they export. Today, "there's no downstream accountability," he says.

Biddle has testified in favor the regulation of e-waste exports before Congress. The stance didn't come easily to him because, he told me, he's believes in limited government and free markets. "But I can't compete if the rules aren't fair," he says.

MBA Polymers may get a big assist from China, which last year announced a crackdown on hazardous waste imports called Operation Green Fence. "They're trying clamp down as they should," Biddle says, "but enforcement is not what it should be."

Biddle isn't giving up. Even though he has left MBA Polymers, he expects to keep working on recycling policy – despite his libertarian instincts. He plans to encourage businesses with access to waste streams, such as auto shredders, to recognize their value. And he has taken on a new job as president of Waste Free Oceans America, a new subsidiary of a global non-profit called Waste Free Oceans.