When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades long contracts with municipalities.
This is the opposite of my experience. When I was a kid (80s and 90s) every place I lived made you separate your recyclables. It's only been relatively recently (maybe 10ish years or so?) that I've seen single-stream recycling become the norm. I'd also point out that a ton of plastics recycling and e-waste was never really recycled - we just shipped it to China to sort-of-recycle it, but they stopped being the world's dumping ground a few years ago.
I think its less anti-competitive corporations and more that recycling most things just isnt cost effective. I find it hard to believe someone in the supply chain is making a killing by amassing large quantities of cheap plastic or lithium batteries.
It's because they saw short term gains. Corruption, maybe, but not that I'm aware of.
The big haulers here were all established parties that got to bid on these contracts and they played a very smart game but given the various downsides for society and the municipalities themselves in the longer term I can't rule it out either. It certainly doesn't make a whole pile of sense. One day glass was a valuable resource, the next you had to pay someone to get rid of it. Likewise for paper, compostables etc. This all happened in the 80's or so and recycling was the nominal driver. It outright ignored that we were already recycling. The big killer was to package everything in plastic and with plastic liners, even things that look like paper are often coated with plastic on the inside. So now we have two problems: the valuables are recycled and create a profit twice for the haulers and they charge real money for the ever increasing mountain of plastic.
People harp a lot on the straw ban, I get it, it is symbolic. But I would have gone much further: anything perishable that can be packaged in paper should be packaged in paper, and the paper industry should be incentivized to recycle as much as possible with the least energy as possible. Because right now recycling paper often gets skipped on account of the energy requirements (because we like our paper to be white). Instead it gets lumped in with the compostables or biomass and burned for electricity.
There is a ton of information on all this and it is obviously very variable from one locality to another but in the end resource extraction, energy use and leftover waste are the killers, those need to be curbed and far more drastically than we are doing right now. So much stuff is single use it is just terrible, and there are no real alternatives either. If you shop at a normal supermarket for a family of four at the end of the week you'll have a small mountain of packaging.
I've often wondered how different things would be if producers and manufacturers were required to pay for any waste they generated from their products, at no additional cost to the consumer.
Individually wrapped candies in a plastic sleeve? Landfills will send you a invoice based on the volume that enters their site.
Phones designed to be replaced every two-years? You might be able to save money by making the original container a prepaid shipping box to cut back on sending out new ones for proper disposal.
Fruits and vegetables? That's bio-degradable and people will pay to have it in their soil. Make a deal with some local group to set up compost bins charging $1/scoop, and its like a built-in subsidy for farmers.
Have a novel solution that's 100% re-useable/recyclable? Enjoy the good times while entrepreneurs offer to pick that up for you to sell back to recyclers themselves.
EPA discovers that by "recycle" you meant "throw it in the ocean when no one's looking"? If you can't pivot quickly enough to cover both the new disposal fees and clean-up fines you'll be a good case-study for others who want to take shortcuts.
Sure, companies would absolutely pass the cost straight into the purchase price, but a company that wraps your sandwich in plastic and adds a $5 disposal markup won't last long when someone starts wrapping theirs in paper and only charging $1 more.
I know it's not that simple, but a man can dream, eh?
I agree with you on a lot of this, but I don't think it matters if we get better at recycling paper because paper is renewable and the more paper we need, the more trees are farmed, that wouldn't be farmed otherwise. It seems like people believe that paper comes from unspoiled ancient rainforests, when really it comes from rotated tree farms in Canada as far as I know. If we recycled paper so well that our demand halved, a lot of those tree farms wouldn't be planted anymore. It seems to me like if paper is dumped in the landfill the carbon those trees capture gets buried underground. Big win.
Also, I'm maybe a monster environmentally thinks utility needs to factor in. Straws are made of plastic because straws are useful and because plastic makes a very good straw. Paper makes a useless one, so they're pointless to even make. So many things use a lot more plastic than straws do, so I sincerely think straws should be the last to go after we've ended plastic water bottles, takeout clamshells, milk cartons, etc. Put all that crap in reusable glass or recyclable aluminum.
The problem with reusable glass is that it's heavy and transporting it back to the factory to be washed and refilled takes a lot of effort and energy on it's own.
