Residents recycle, Baltimore throws it out
The fantasy world of environmentalism: For the last seven years Baltimore County in Maryland has been throwing out its recycled glass, even though it still demands its residents separate it and put it in their recycling bins.
Over the weekend, news broke that the county—which does not include the City of Baltimore—has not been recycling the glass it’s been collecting as part of its recycling program. For the past seven years, the jars and bottles that residents dutifully placed in their blue bins have been being junked instead. “There are numerous issues with glass recycling, including increased presence of shredded paper in recycling streams which contaminates materials and is difficult to separate from broken glass fragments, in addition to other limitations on providing quality material,” county spokesperson Sean Naron told The Baltimore Sun.
Glass recycling reportedly stopped in 2013, the same year the county opened a $23 million single-stream recycling facility, according to the Sun article.
Meanwhile, the rest of the recycled garbage is almost certainly being trashed as well, as China no longer takes recycled paper, plastic and other scrap materials. With no one else interested in recycling this material, municipalities across the U.S. just throw it out — after making their citizens separate it.
Sadly this is very typical. Too often environmental regulations are structured to satisfy shallow emotions to make its participants feel good, while failing to accomplish what they claim they are doing.
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The fantasy world of environmentalism: For the last seven years Baltimore County in Maryland has been throwing out its recycled glass, even though it still demands its residents separate it and put it in their recycling bins.
Over the weekend, news broke that the county—which does not include the City of Baltimore—has not been recycling the glass it’s been collecting as part of its recycling program. For the past seven years, the jars and bottles that residents dutifully placed in their blue bins have been being junked instead. “There are numerous issues with glass recycling, including increased presence of shredded paper in recycling streams which contaminates materials and is difficult to separate from broken glass fragments, in addition to other limitations on providing quality material,” county spokesperson Sean Naron told The Baltimore Sun.
Glass recycling reportedly stopped in 2013, the same year the county opened a $23 million single-stream recycling facility, according to the Sun article.
Meanwhile, the rest of the recycled garbage is almost certainly being trashed as well, as China no longer takes recycled paper, plastic and other scrap materials. With no one else interested in recycling this material, municipalities across the U.S. just throw it out — after making their citizens separate it.
Sadly this is very typical. Too often environmental regulations are structured to satisfy shallow emotions to make its participants feel good, while failing to accomplish what they claim they are doing.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
“Sadly this is very typical.”
A quarter century ago, there was a news item that noted that glass bottles and jars in California were also not being recycled. There were large mounds of three colors of glass in the Central Valley, just waiting for someone to recycle glass. The mounds were so large that they dwarfed the bulldozer that was creeping up one of them in order to keep their conical shape.
Recycling glass was much easier when it was just pop bottles.
I use recycled glass in a sandblaster.
Given that glass takes almost as much energy to recycle as it does to create from scratch I’m not surprised or outraged at this decision.
IMHO, probably the best thing to do in cases where it is too expensive to recycle now is to separate it roughly and cheaply into categories in different landfills and label them.
Then if at someone in the future wants to purchase a million tons of a certain of glass or plastic waste and try a new recycling process, they don’t have to wade through absolutely everything.