As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling
It makes me wonder if we were ever really recycling, or if "recycling" was a marketing buzzword for "cheaply dumping your trash in China".<p>I seem to remember a lot of controversy over recycling in the 80s and early 90s, with my local town government insisting it was too expensive.  Suddenly everything changed in the late 90s, right around the time that globalization took off, and recycle bins took off everywhere.  By the late 2000s everything was moving to "single stream recycling", where you just throw all your trash, cardboard, plastic, etc. in one bin and somehow it'd magically get sorted at the facility.  That frankly seemed a little too good to be true to me, but everybody was buying into it.<p>Suddenly Plastic China comes out, China stops accepting recyclables, and we're back to where we were in the early 90s.  What if all the "progress" was just an illusion where companies figured they could brand trash-hauling as recycling for eco-friendly customers, charge more for it, and then dump the trash on an unregulated Chinese buyer who could do whatever they want with it?