Waste management in California

recycling San Diego
A good example of over regulation in this country is waste management.

Waste management regulations

The new waste management rules are so vague it could be said that they are responsible for ensuring their customers put the waste packaging in the recycle bin, perhaps they should then fine the customer unless they can produce a certificate from the customers local council showing the box was put in the bin.

Still it helps keep more civil servants in jobs with their lovely pensions and other benefits. But what they will do when there are no more tax payers left as all the local companies have gone out of business. Yes, it seems that previous posters have failed to understand that they were fined for failing to register, not for failing to recycle.

How can waste recycling be regulated in the way you would like … paying most attention to “the mountain of plastic milk/coke bottles that supermarkets sell” or other more extreme waste… unless the people who are supposed to regulate recycling know who, what and where the biggest problems arise.

Part of the reason for a registration process is to avoid problems similar to fly tipping in the building waste situation.

Many will have spotted, when they take their personal waste paper/bottles for recycling, other who are dumping what is obviously waste from commercial/business work and which they should be paying to dispose of commercially, rather than off-loading their costs onto the council-tax payer. How do you “just spot” something like this!

Thanks for the general view that it’s just bureaucracy, the real issue is why didn’t they just charge us the £4,328 instead of mounting a criminal prosecution in court. We obviously would have paid it – it’s like a back tax. We were basically not aware of the regulation, our fault, but as has been mentioned there is a lot of stuff to comply with these days.

It is indeed only packaging, not a safety issue, and indeed, were we to try and recover packaging from users, they probably would not want to release it.

The regulations in California and in San Diego in particular are all but impossible for your type of company to apply in the way they were originally intended.

Recycling regulations

Unfortunately people in your position usually end up signing up with a 3rd party who has some collection of sorts already in place, using a 20yd dumpster rental when necessary to discard a good amount of junk. Of course, you have to pay a “Registration fee” which is just more expense added to Climate Change Levy, tax on the dividends of pension schemes etc.

What is really needed for more of the waste originating from companies to be recycled are some coherent policies on collecting household waste. The CA government doesn’t want this, because demand goes up and down like a fiddler’s elbow for most types of waste and the merchants simply stop collecting when the price is too low. Witness the local authorities who simply stopped collecting waste when it became uneconomical.

We offer a very unusual house plant we call “The Recycling Plant.” The Recycling Plant is an unusual variety of tropical flora called the Kalanchoe, which propagates by means of discarded plant material; when the plant loses a leaf, the fallen leaf becomes an entirely new plant!

The Kalanchoe is quite special in that nature has found a way for the plant to make use of its trash – in this case its fallen leaves; by making a whole new Kalanchoe plant, it ensures the survival of its species. You can grow an entire jungle in your home with just one leaf!

The forums introduce selected private recycling companies seeking additional equity capital to investors and economic developers. They feature keynote speakers trends and opportunities for investment and entrepreneurship in the recycling industry.

Recycling improvements

Does anyone know what happens to the contents of the red boxes that we residents so dutifully put out once a fortnight?

It is difficult to anything useful with a mixture of wet cardboard metal and plastic. Reading folk put things out separately but the council scheme just takes everything from one box (once it’s been out in the rain for 24 hours since they collect it a day later than the calendar in my street at least).

RBC has an army of otherwise unemployable yoofs scrabbling around huge mountains of recyclable stuff transforming it into smaller piles of sorted stuff. Probably for about 50 quid a week. They then pay someone to cart it away and sling it in a landfill site somewhere out of the area.

Reading was woefully below target for recycling. The Small mead site will be filled within five years at the present rate, and RBC have certain problems. San Diego’s waste (i.e. the non-recycled stuff) can disappear to a landfill anywhere in the country, it’s totally up to the contractors (STA Waste?) where it goes, although most does still disappear to Braincell apparently. Although Wokingham’s level of recycling is somewhat higher that Reading Borough’s!

The primary goal of our waste management research is to identify and pin-point cost determining factors in automobile recycling. This proceeds as follows: first, using a status quo analysis, the current cost structure will be explored. Second, forecasts of possible system behaviours will be attempted making use of the scenario technique. In a third step, this information will be combined in a system dynamics model. This allows to calculate recycling costs and material flow.

The automobile recycling initiative is part of a larger effort by the government that requires manufacturers to establish take-back programs. This policy initiative for automobiles is being driven by concerns about the scarcity of landfill space, toxicity of waste, and the need for resource conservation. These concerns are heightened by the fact that the number of automobiles produced is growing every year.

Total ownership of automobiles has more than doubled over the past twenty years, from 114.4 mil. in 1990 to 349.1 mil. vehicles in 2012, with a yearly increase of 7.4% from 1994. The expanding vehicle fleet has resulted in a growth in scrapped vehicle numbers from 3.931 mil. in 1990 to 9.413 mil. in 2012.

The draft policy entitled “The Federal Government’s Policy on the Reduction of Scrapped Vehicle Wastes” is the framework for the establishment of a recycling system. This law will have a large impact on the recycling and reuse of materials, as well as on the costs of recycling. The California government is under pressure to implement this environmental law before the general elections.

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