How much do recyclers pay for plastic

But recycling is a lot more complicated, and the process of recycling plastics is significantly less transparent than the much-Googled recipe for baking cookies. We consumers play a much more critical role than we might imagine— depending on how we use our products and in what shape we throw them away, determines their value and quality post-use. Think about it. Recycled goods have to compete with new products in the market; who wants to buy something of lower quality?

My hope is to bring more transparency to a system inseparable from our very existence, but whose visibility often starts and stops at the trash can. Your local government also plays an essential role. Government regulations create market opportunities for companies to recycle legally-mandated products. But every municipality is different. Before you throw something away, check what your city actually recycles. Public investment in recycling systems, moreover, is integral to their long-term sustainability and success.

Subsidies, investments and public support go a long way. They are differentiated by the temperature at which the material has been heated, and their numerical classification 1 — 7 only informs you what type of plastic it is. For example:. While its use is also associated with public hygiene and preventing bacteria contamination many Taiwanese, for example, use plastic straws to drink everything from beer to milk out of fear of a contaminated supply chain , consumers should be wary of chemicals leaching into food or drink products.

Only plastics labeled PLA are made from the sugars in corn or other plant-starches like cassava. Though once a serious concern, quality control is no longer an issue when considering recycled products. Office machinery experts now acknowledge that recycled-content paper performs better in modern copiers and laser printers because of improved conditioning of the paper fibers as well as better adjustment to humidity and temperature conditions.

In addition, many people who use recycled paper report that the reduced glare is less taxing on their eyes.

However, quality also involves aesthetic definitions of products, a factor difficult to quantify and impossible to keep constant. Aesthetic misperceptions still greatly influence purchasing decisions. Consider plastic lumber.

Plastic lumber picnic tables, benches, sheds, waste receptacles, retaining walls, and fences have all demonstrated immense savings over time due to low maintenance costs. Still, while plastic lumber represents a tremendous investment by the plastics industry and one of the best product applications for recycled plastics, the market has started to grow in only the last two years.

Although manufacturers have taken great pains to make their product look like wood, plastic lumber is still not wood. Both individual consumers and company purchasing managers think of wood as the material of choice because they are accustomed to it. In addition, wood has traditionally been associated with high quality.

And in a corporate setting, the buyer of wood products and materials is usually not the person responsible for maintenance and repair. Phoenix Recycled Plastics, a Pennsylvania-based company, finds that the specifications it receives from purchasers often break project cost proposals into two separate categories: lumber in one category and paint and labor in the other.

Indeed, plastic lumber has forced the issue of life-cycle cost considerations in purchasing. To a certain extent, it has forced managers to weigh their aesthetic principles against practicality. Overcoming these barriers takes time. In many cases, it also takes a management directive to place the principle of positive environmental ethics on equal footing with the aesthetics of wood or of office products made from other materials.

Quality control tests that were run products from and have little bearing products currently on the market. Consider the case of remanufactured toner cartridges.

In the late s, remanufacturers simply opened up old cartridges and repacked them with new toner. Now they strip down cartridges and refit them with long-lasting, high-quality drums and other components manufactured specifically to allow a toner to be recharged eight to ten times.

Remanufacturers offer free servicing of laser printers as part of their standard contracts, and responsible companies promise to repair at their own cost any printer that malfunctions due to a faulty cartridge. The increasingly good quality of recycled products points to another difficult issue. While restriction of trade is essentially illegal, recycled products, like any product substitute, call into question established markets.

Such restrictive contracts can also be found for car parts, computers, telecommunications equipment, and many other high-tech products and services. In addition, franchises and authorized service companies will sometimes use the name of the manufacturer as a front for their own restrictions.

Where necessary, buyers and purchasing managers should force competition on service contracts and demand that manufacturers put into writing any restrictions on the use of their products. The availability of recycled products was a real problem just a few years ago and still is when certain businesses, particularly publishers, require large amounts of materials to meet a hard deadline. But most standard business products are readily available today.

Major writing-paper companies like James River now carry numerous grades of quality paper stock in a variety of colors. Based on this early success in New York, the company saw the market potential for developing recycled versions of a number of its plastic products, including trash cans, buckets, liners, and wheeled carts.

Rubbermaid currently markets more than 70 products made from postconsumer plastic. Even in the case of newspaper and magazine publishers that require large quantities of recycled paper in a short time, planning and vigilance can overcome the availability problem. For example, Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, examined the feasibility of converting the paper its magazine was printed on to recycled content. The driving force behind the use of recycled paper was Rhoda H.

She believed that it was essential for her nonprofit organization to be sensitive to environmental considerations in its purchasing and publishing activities.

With a circulation of over five million, Consumer Reports is the eighth largest magazine in the United States. However, Karpatkin and others persisted in their efforts. Consumers Union identified opportunities for producing many of its publications with recycled paper. To compensate for the higher price, CR established a price preference fund that was partly fed by the savings from their in-house recycling program.

The recycled content of Consumer Reports continues to increase: half of the press run for Consumer Reports is now printed on recycled-content paper. In addition, more than half the books published by Consumers Union are currently printed on recycled paper.

During the next several years, Consumers Union expects its suppliers to develop both a consistent feedstock and competitive prices. Ironically enough, while plenty of people dutifully bundle newspapers for recycling programs, a number of local recycling programs have stopped collecting them. While temporary, the glut in unprocessed newspapers highlights the problems caused by the time lag between collection and processing. In efficiently generating a supply of unprocessed newspaper, government programs have made a new resource available to industry.

Manufacturers, in turn, are now scrambling to catch up by upgrading processes and creating new uses for recycled newspapers. By the year , every U. A similar desire to outrun legislation moved Bell Atlantic Directory Services to research the use of recycled-content paper for its phone books. After extensive review of its options, the public utility learned that its only source of stock paper was a mill in Europe. The company has persisted in asking U.

And in the next several years, a plant will probably be built in North America that can provide Bell Atlantic with all the paper it needs. Ten years ago, small U. However, as recently as the late s, most large companies were still investing in plant upgrades for handling virgin natural resources.

Recycling is really just common sense, and until the "modern era," it was a common household activity. Because of concern for the environment, recycling is again on the upswing. The nation's composting and recycling rate rose from 7. The world has changed a lot in the past century. From individually packaged food servings to disposable diapers, more garbage is generated now than ever before.

The average American discards seven and a half pounds of garbage every day. This garbage, the solid waste stream, goes mostly to landfills, where it's compacted and buried. As the waste stream continues to grow, so will the pressures on our landfills, our resources, and our environment.

The more we recycle, the less garbage winds up in our landfills and incineration plants. By reusing aluminum, paper, glass, plastics, and other materials, we can save production and energy costs, and reduce the negative impacts that the extraction and processing of virgin materials has on the environment.

It all comes back to you. Recycling gets down to one person taking action. New products can be made from your recyclable waste material. Recycling is good for our environment, our communities, and our economy. Visit America Recycles website at www.

A: In a broad sense, recycling is part of an ethic of resource efficiency — of using products to their fullest potential. When a recycled material, rather than a raw material, is used to make a new product, natural resources and energy are conserved.

This is because recycled materials have already been refined and processed once; manufacturing the second time is much cleaner and less energy-intensive than the first.

For example, manufacturing with recycled aluminum cans uses 95 percent less energy than creating the same amount of aluminum with bauxite. Investments in recycling collection support a strong and diverse recycling manufacturing industry, which brings jobs and high wages to states and localities. The collection of recyclable materials is the first - the most critical link in a chain of economic activity.

Investment in local collection infrastructure pays great dividends in supporting significant downstream recycling economic activity. Importantly, many of these recycling manufacturers rely on a steady and consistent supply of recyclable materials generated from recycling programs. The National Recycling Coalition reports that the recycling industry in California is both diverse and significant. In California, for every job in recycling collection there are eight jobs created through manufacturing the recovered material into a new product.

Copper and brass are sold to small factories in the vicinity, which melt the metal and then remould them into utensils or motor parts. Another trader, M A Khan, who deals in all 3 items, says that his profit margin is 2 per cent and he saves about Rs 20, - Rs 30, a year. Glass and rubber are generally reused. Most of the glass bottles such as beer, juice and alcohol bottles are collected by the kabari and sold to small vendors who use these bottles for various purposes.

There are some bottles which have a high resale value because they belong to a popular brand. For instance, oil bottles belonging to Dabur Oil have a high price because these are then used by local manufactures to sell their spurious products. Another category of glass constitutes of broken bulbs, mirror strips and glass shards. Says Kulbhushan 13hatia, a rubber and glass trader, "These are generally sold back to glass factories, where broken strips of coloured glass are melted and then remoulded into marbles.

And though they Scrapped. The wholesale kabariwallah is a rich man. He lives in a posh colony and commutes by car. The money in this trade attracts some people to it.

For instance, Rajender Jaswal, 26, a graduate of Jawalapuri, got involved in this trade initially as a lark but when profits started pouring in, he stuck on. Says RaJender, "My family is always trying to persuade me to take a white-collar job, but I will continue in this trade because I earn much more than what I would get as somebody's employee.

But there is another side to this business which is perhaps of greater concern. And this is the appalling work environ- ment of those who are employed by these businessmen. Occupational hazards Those who collect, sort and carry the waste expose themselves to many diseases and hazards for which they get no compensation.

For instance, the whole area of Jawalapuri is like a big slum which turns into a slippery slush during the monsoons. There are hardly any pucca roads through the huge square. Even the fire department refuses to bring in their trucks in case of fire, which is a major occupational hazard in Jawalapuri's 80 plastic recycling units, where plastics are heated. According to Jasmehra, "A fraction of a highly inflammable material camphor in some plastic waste, is generally the cause of fire. Moreover, even though majority of the shops are pucca, most of the sorting is done in the open.

The same is the case with Lcoha Mandi. The shops-cum-godowns have poor ventilation. Labourers loading ane factory, Timarpur unloading trucks often suffer frorr. But the fear of tetanus do not bother them.

Says Lovesh Sharma, who is a broker, the workers take tetanus shots when they come to work here Though many of the dealers pay wiekly or daily wages tc their labourers, most of the labour is treated like bonded sla in absence of rules and regulations regaTding employment in these mandis.

Ironically, lack of governmental interference possibly a major reason behind this tl riving recycling trade. There are no welfare schemes for these people. A few NGos have tried to organise some kind o support for the ragpickers, but these labourers have yet to be noticed by authorities or welfare agencies.