Round and Round

I recently moved to a new home (the reason why posting has been so uneven recently), and yesterday, I spent a few hours in the Zen pursuit of baling sheets of bubble wrap back into large rolls, so that I could more efficiently pack them into empty moving boxes. The original plan had been to offer them as recycling, but it turns out that the city in which I now live considers bubble wrap to be trash. And I'm sure that plenty of people would agree with them in that assessment.

It is possible to have bubble wrap recycled, but that means taking it a good distance to one of the places that will accept it, and then paying for the privilege. And what this tells me is that bubble wrap is, in fact, trash. Or, to be more precise, it lacks economic value as a material with which to make other things. Like, for example, more bubble wrap.

And this, I think, is part of the reason why recycling is not really a worthwhile strategy, from an environmental standpoint. New materials are still cheap enough that it's less expensive to extract them, and use the pristine resource for manufacturing. And so there isn't a workable reverse logistics chain to have items returned for processing. And if people are going to have to pay to return items to be reused, most of them aren't going to bother. Personally, I haven't made up my mind if it's worth it to me to go through the work to offer the materials for recycling. And the main reason I'm considering it isn't the environment; it's that I'm not really in the mood to sit on the stuff until I manage to throw it all away piecemeal. I could get rid of it all at once, by driving it to a dump and paying the facility to take it, but if I'm going to do that, why not have it recycled? Of course, the most likely answer to that question is that it won't be recycled no matter where I take it. The only question is whether anyone pretends that they're going to do something other than drop it into a landfill.

And this has always been the problem with recycling broadly. Certain resources are valuable enough and/or easy enough to work with that reclaimed materials will result in a clear cost saving. For everything else, it takes some sort of intervention to make the numbers work out, and those interventions pretty much always result in an increase in prices that otherwise brings no immediate value to anyone. Without a way to change those economics, it seems unlikely that recycling will ever be as ubiquitous as some people would like.