Remember all those people celebrating the “death of capitalism” and saying how the world would be a much better place because of the economic troubles? Well, one of the effects of those troubles has been a massive collapse in the prices paid for recycled materials. As a result the recycling industry in the USA is being pretty much wiped out. This, I suggest, is probably not a good thing.
9 thoughts on “It’s a Global Economy”
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How’s recycling of copper going, I wonder.
How about gold? Are they still recycling gold?
Oh, the metals markets are still humming along. But that doesn’t exactly help the landfill issue. I also wonder what is happening with IT recycling. In theory the metals are still worth something, but if the recycling business is going down the tubes the people who do electronics might not be able to survive on that alone.
The last I heard the metals markets haven’t crashed, but they’ve dropped enough that the incentive to go and steal scrap metal isn’t as good as it was.
I’d been wondering why all the recycling bins in my residential area had just disappeared. Hmmm.
I wonder, therefore, if there might not be a comparison between the Recycling market and the currently-collapsed Invisible Money market, then…
A little cooling off of the metals markets is probably a good thing. It will discourage people from stealing signaling systems from railways.
Those who say such things have probably forgotten the self-evident truth that capitalism will not die willingly and will do its best to take everything else with it. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and the path of least horribleness will always be to continue to prop up the current system.
Reducing and reusing was always better than recycling anyway.
Simon:
It is, but it is a harder sell. Also way too many goods still come with masses of packaging that is difficult to re-use. If we can’t make things perfect we should still want to make them better.