whatever happened to REAL RECYCLING?

[Silver_civic]

Hello again and please BITOG members here that are older than 30; let me know what happened to real RECYCLING like people taking old oil filters, coffee cans, steel products, iron potbelly stoves, etc and recycling, re using or taking them to steel mills to make new things out of them instead of sending them to CHINA, INDIA, and god knows where. I am only 30, and I remember very well helping my grandfather re use old pieces of steel as he was a life long farmer and he made a ton from scrap pieces. I remember in our town, they used to take every piece of glass, steel and aluminum they could find and make new cans, bottles etc from it.



sorry for the rant, but let me hear your stories of how you recycled and re used things. My grandmother Vasbinder, still takes old clothes and makes "HAPS" (huge blanket thats very warm) and gives to us grandkids.



adam vasbinder

 

[John_K]

Originally Posted By: Silver_civic
Hello again and please BITOG members here that are older than 30; let me know what happened to real RECYCLING like people taking old oil filters, coffee cans, steel products, iron potbelly stoves, etc and recycling, re using or taking them to steel mills to make new things out of them instead of sending them to CHINA, INDIA, and god knows where. I am only 30, and I remember very well helping my grandfather re use old pieces of steel as he was a life long farmer and he made a ton from scrap pieces. I remember in our town, they used to take every piece of glass, steel and aluminum they could find and make new cans, bottles etc from it.



sorry for the rant, but let me hear your stories of how you recycled and re used things. My grandmother Vasbinder, still takes old clothes and makes "HAPS" (huge blanket thats very warm) and gives to us grandkids.

adam vasbinder


When I was a kid there were 5 of us living in the house and we had one little trash bag each week. Now I see houses with 3-4 living there with MOUNTAINS of trash out front each week. How did we get to this? When I was a kid on the first Earth Day (1970 I think) they talked about how in the "future" we would recycle everything. 40 years later hardly anything has changed.

John

 

[Silver_civic]

Thanks for the reply John K. Did they take peoples old coal and wood ashes that you didnt use when you were young? They quit doin this in the mid 90's where I grew up. I would rather have hot coal/wood ashes instead of calcium chloride/salt on roads. There is a older woman in town that I take my old beat to heck jeans, denim coats to and she makes rugs and haps out of also. My dads mother or grandma vasbinder I think still re soles peoples shoes and work boots to this day.

adam

 

[Panzerman]

We definetely exsist in a disposable world. It really hit me when I went to buy a flashlight bulb and found out a whole another flaslight was cheaper. I wouldnt worry about the Earth filling up with trash though. As far as I know, we havent exported anything in from other planets, so we are sort of in a big recycling loop where we just change the shape of it for awhile, think of it that way. By the way, I have now started saving my scrap metal and aluminum from all my atv projects and found it quite profitable. I may even root through a dumpster or two.

 

[spasm3]

There's more recycling than ever. As a kid we had no recycling of anything other than glass drink bottles, I would scour the roadsides to collect them for the deposit money!. Now we recycle plastic, paper and cardboard, motor oil. Every two weeks we can set out our recycling can to be picked up!! nothing like that was around here in the 60's or 70's!!!

 

[Silver_civic]

Hey and thanks guys for the replies. What I mean, is nowadays we send so much metal, aluminum and whole cars for example to china. Do we even recycle any lead here in the us at all?! When I was younger and helped the grandparents my grandfather used old steel to fix farm equipment and make things out of it. Old oil he gave to his neighbor that had a couple dodge diesel pickups with the 2 valve cummins. How much of what we actually recycle i.e. glass, styrofoam, cardboard goes overseas or to the landfill? Gotta remember guys, landfills cant hold everything and the kitchen sink. I remember my grandpa vasbinder(he died in easter 05' while I was in the persian gulf for 9 months) telling me he didnt get drafted to ww2 as his job as coal miner/coke oven helper was too important. He told me that back then even before ww2 even nylon stockings and grease/animal fats were recycled. You wont see that today.


adam

thought I read a old post here bout a member here that works for a steel company in OH that they use a ton of old oil filters for raw steel instead of coke.

 

[Pop_Rivit]

Adam, I take it you've never toured one of the steel mini mills that have replaced the huge old fashioned steel production facilities. There are acres of scrap stacked and waiting to be devoured by the electric arc furnace.

The gigantic steel mills from the 30's, 40's and 50's were too big and not very efficient, and were not able to compete in the global marketplace after about 1960. People like F. Kenneth Iverson (look him up) started building much smaller, much more efficient CSP (Compact Strip Production) mills. The CSP's devour tons of cars, trucks, washing machines, scrap stampings and other recycled metals every day. Since Iverson's first mini mill there have been a number of CSP's built, and they produce huge amounts of steel from scrap every day.

And in case you didn't notice, we simply don't "send" that junk steel overseas, we sell that junk steel overseas. It's a huge export market that creates a lot of jobs right here. We don't have the capacity to use it all-if we didn't sell the scrap we'd have it piled everywhere.

And it's a slightly different world than it was in the World War II era.

 

[Silver_civic]

Have never been to the new smaller mini mills but would love to. Yeah the old steel mills I would bet are so inefficient these days.


adam

 

[Silk]

We only have 2 steel mills in New Zealand - one uses iron sand,and the other scrap steel.I used to work next to the scrap steel mill,not only do they recycle the steel,but they recover all the other metals too.

 

[PandaBear]

What you said about making stuff out of old stuff, is reusing, not recycling. It is no longer done because time and labor in the US is too expensive. There has been more recycling than before in reality:

1) Old clothes are sold oversea to the 3rd world or locally in thrift store. Those that are too worn are shredded into rags for cleaning and industrial use. My dad used to use tons of those when he was a machinist.

2) Metal recycling are done more efficiently. What was sold to China and India are the finished result, the raw material to be made into new products.

3) Paper is probably the most recycled stuff out there, almost all packaging nowadays come with some recycled paper. 1/6 of them are lost due to the pulp fiber length, and recycle paper generate more dioxin (additional bleaching).

4) Glass are recycled, but those colored glasses are always a problem if they were mixed in with the cleared one. Why can't they use clear glass for everything?

5) Plastic bottles, well, that's the biggest problem as you can only use 10-25% of recycled plastic in new containers. What are they going to do with the rest of the plastics?



The biggest problems about recycling is just that the labor to do so is so expensive nowadays, and a lot of people have the "I'm not getting money back myself so why should I do it" mentality. People who preach more recycling effort were labeled as "hippies" that "waste government money" in the process.

Plus the "design for limited life" mentality doesn't help either, as things are hard to fix nowadays and it is commonly cheaper to throw away a poorly designed product that doesn't last than to repair it.

 

[bradepb]

When I was growing up we threw everything in the garbage, and dad dumped the old motor oil in the alley behind the house!
Now we have a big blue container with plastic,metal,and paper in front of the house every week,deposit cans and bottles are returned, and old oil is put in the waste tank at work .. So for me things are much better than they used to be

 

[kb01]

Originally Posted By: Silver_civic
let me know what happened to real RECYCLING like people taking old oil filters, coffee cans, steel products, iron potbelly stoves, etc and recycling, re using or taking them to steel mills to make new things out of them instead of sending them to CHINA, INDIA, and god knows where.


This must be a regional thing. This is still a fairly common activity where I live.

If I'm not feeling lazy, I'll drive old metal from the garage or attic down to the scrap yard and they'll buy it by the pound.

It's very common to see people driving up and down our alleys the night before trash pick up looking for any metal. They also scour dumpsters doing the same thing. Copper is a hot commodity but any old appliance, rusty old bike, wagon, etc. will get picked up by somebody in a pick up within hours of putting it out. They either fix it up (and use it or sell it) or strip it for scrap.

Recycling is alive and well in poorer areas. We used to call it "hillbilly recycling" when I was a kid.

We don't have curbside recycling where I live. I'll keep steel cans in the garage and take them in for scrap every 5 years or so. Aluminum cans aren't really worth the effort but I'll bag them separately and leave them out in the alley for the homeless. I'll take glass bottles/jars to our glass factory about once a year. Other than that, everything gets pitched. If I know something will be of value to somebody else, I'll either freecycle it or leave it in the alley unbagged.

 

[Schmoe]

Attitudes need to change.

 

[The_Jeff]

My Grandpa worked for "Standard Slag" outside Youngstown OH during WWII. They recently fixed the steel making process so there was much less slag produced-- they used it as aggragate in concrete making. So they started mining gravel for the same purpose.

My town dump attendant was busted for stealing recyclables. My town is one of few around that doesn't make you spend $3 a bag for trash with free disposal of recyclables. Now the dump attendant will chew you a new one for grabbing a busted lawnmower etc. If he can't have it neither can you. Of course the recycling cuts down on what the town pays for incineration of solid waste. Yes they (an energy recovery company) get paid $40 a ton for feedstock that turns into electricity they sell back to us.

So I busted a snow shovel and could not find a handle of appropriate diameter to rebuild it. Been a hard winter and hardware stores are barren. Had this thing laying around and I had to patch weld my project car's subframe. Out comes the angle grinder and bzzzt... perfect!

 

[CivicFan]

http://www.freecycle.org/

 

[MNgopher]

I think as others have pointed out what the OP is talking about is more reusing than recycling.

Most scrap steel here ends up at a mini-mill, and gets turned into rebar and other steel products. Before prices dropped so much, they were doing a booming business.

There was also a question about lead recycling, and the short answer is that yes, there is lead recycling facilities in the US. There is a large one in a suburb of St. Paul that does a booming business recycling car batteries and the like. Also landed the area on the EPA lists for pollution problems with lead...

 

[Silver_civic]

Hello again and thank you guys for the replies, and MNgopher, I am trying to talk about recycling and re using. What happens to most of the used oil filters, trans filters and fuel filters and coolant filters? Yeah, it would be great if we could make most glass containers clear instead of green, orange and all sorts of dumb colors. I watch dirty jobs often and think thats a wonderful tv show as I learned a lot from that show that I wondered "what happens to this stuff".


adam

 

[MNgopher]

In MN, it is illegal to place oil filters and the like in the trash and they are required to be sent for recycling.

 

[Silver_civic]

I didnt know that, thanks for the info MNgopher.

 

[Shannow]

About 25 years ago, the main dump in Canberra was "nearly full", and had a couple of years to go.

The tip always had a used oil recycling area, which was really just a stainless steel school trough, pumped into a tank (10,000 gal ???). Evolved to a drum exchange, where you'd leave a 20L oil drum draining, and pick up an empty to take home.

They actually formed a strategy, and a good one.

They segregated off an area and leased it to a landscape supplier (sand, gravel, topsoil) etc. and make all timber and green waste go to him, to be processed and shipped back out at cost.

They gave a group of unemployed people a company called "Revolve". They have scavenger's rights to the dump, and have a store on site.

To get to the gate, you pass through :
* Waste oil dump (now 5 or 6 tanks, 90% of the retail oil sold is collected);
* Cardboard drop off;
* Paper drop off;
* Aluminium, copper bearing and steel drop off;
* Glass dropoff, clear, green and brown;
* Revolve (they will pick stuff out of your car/trailer/ute;
* Green waste depot.

By that stage, you get to the gate, and it's something like $10 to take a car through...if you actually need to go through the gate, you obviously don't get it...my parents at that stage have a small amount that they take back home and drop in their trash bin (collected fortnightly, recycling bin collected weekly).

25 years later, it's still going strong.

http://www.tams.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/196074/Final_version_brochure.pdf