Over The Years,

the general public have often been conned,

the latest as far as I can see? recycling, I have never understood the economics of it, I always seem to find that the cost of moving the rubbish to be recycled by far outweighs the cost of using new raw materials, unless the waste is shipped to a nation that has the wages infrastructure to keep labour costs low, but even then that is now getting to be less of an option, if this report from America is anything to go by, it appears that for recyclables they have nowhere else to go, mixed paper and plastic exports to China plunged more than 90 percent between January 2017 and January 2018, according to data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. International Trade Commission. As the industry scrambled to find new buyers, prices went through the floor. Anne Germain, Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Affairs at the National Waste and Recycling Association, an industry trade group, stated that mixed paper went from selling for about $100 a ton to a high of about $3 a ton,

as Scott McGrath, Environmental Planning Director at the City of Philadelphia Streets Department explained, the city was recently making good money selling its recyclables to processors, with the price peaking at $67 a ton in 2012. By January 2018, Philly was paying its contractor, Republic Services, $20 a ton to continue taking recycling. By the summer, that figure had jumped to $40 a ton. When the city started trying to renegotiate its contract, which expired in September, Republic Services asked for $170 a ton to keep recycling, and the worst byproduct of recycling? the bins making Great Britain look like a huge rubbish dump, I have got used to seeing wonderful streets and houses with massed bins outside them, but when we first came back to the UK last year I was shocked at how horrible the bins looked, but there it is.