My new county makes it a crime to throw recyclables out in the trash. Supposedly they have people come around and pick through your garbage, fining folks who have plastic bottles or whatever in their normal garbage.
How can you not make a profit on recycling?
Oh, yeah, Forgot. It's the government.
Recycling is actually pretty unprofitable.
A few years ago I ran across a study comparing the cost of recycling a given material vs producing that material new. For many materials, it actually costs more (consumes more resources) to recycle the stuff than to just throw the old stuff out and produce that material new.
The most easily recycled materials tend to be industrial in nature. Architectural steel and asphalt stand out in my memory as being good products to recycle, in terms of net resources saved vs consumed. The common household recyclables like milk jugs and tin cans tended to be a losing proposition, consuming more resources to reprocess than to produce new.
I really wish I had saved a copy of that study, because it does a great job of shooting holes in the notion that recycling is always a good idea. But nevermind that. Bottom line is that it would be pretty easy for a business to lose money trying to reprocess household "recyclables" for profit. It simply costs too much to reprocess most of this stuff.
