Plastic down home on the farm

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Our friends in a small town used to separate all their garbage since the transfer station had separate bins for everything and said everything would be recycled. Then one day the garbage truck showed up while they were there and just went down the line of dumpster bins including plain old garbage and put it all in the truck. They asked the driver where he was off to next and he said “Ryley” which is a huge landfill east of Edmonton. They become skeptics after that for some reason.

That is the case most places now. There is a full blown crisis in the recycling industry in recent years, as China no longer wants to take any of it, and there is no economic market for it locally. It nearly all ends up in a land fill now. For whatever reason no one wants to tell the consumer, who is diligently sorting and separating garbage from other garbage for absolutely no reason. Not sure how long we need to keep this charade going, just more virtue signalling.


Most of recycling never did make any sense, economically, or environmentally. Burning large amounts of non-renewable fossil fuels to recycle renewable products such as paper and cardboard is the definition of lunacy. The full life cycle of plastic recycling easily consumes more fossil fuels than what is contained in them to start with. How ridiculous to send multiple trucks out to haul all these separate products which end up in the same place. In our case we have to haul recyclables to different locations than where we haul garbage, burning extra fuel. How many idling vehicles driving from bin to bin to bin?

About the only products that make any sense to recycle are metals, but a life cycle analysis on the total energy consumed really needs to be done even then.