[howmayiannoyyou]

No. Its a mixed bag.

Metals, eWaste, Batteries ... all profitable to recycle.

Paper & cardboard ... depends on market price.

Plastics ... depends on oil prices, market price and type of plastic.

Tires ... usually profitable, usually involves a hauling fee.

AMP's robotic solution is going to face immense competition from general edge models, probably very soon. The mechanical piece is simple engineering. All the magic is (was) recognition.

[phil21]

Everything here other than Metals and Tires are basically only useful in the extremes where your inputs are exceedingly clean.

Sure, if you somehow have 99.9% cleaned and sorted plastic it can be maybe worth recycling at the margins. Same with paper and cardboard. The quality of these input streams needs to be so good it basically is nonexistent.

This might work somewhere like Japan, but in a major US city with "single stream" recycling it's a joke. One person tossing a bag of fast food trash into a recycling bin ruins the entire thing. Or a pizza box. You name it.

I'd be surprised if even 10% of the stuff put into the "blue bin" recycling bins here in Chicago actually makes it to recycling. The metals are near 100% since scrappers drive the alleys and scavenge anything of value before it even makes it to the recycling truck.

The amount of human labor to make recycling "worth it" makes it uneconomical. Either that labor can be done on the consumer side (like Japan seems to do) - or centralized - but most things only pencil out when you assume this cleaning and sorting labor is effectively free.

[infecto]

It is a mixed bag but the way it’s handled and marketed in the US is absolutely a sham. Consumers are led to feel good that they are recycling when often that item is getting tossed in the landfill.

But your callouts don’t make sense to me. Paper is rarely economical. We were mostly shipping it to China for the longest time. Only like 8% of plastics in the US are recycled. Most local waste systems don’t bother because the cost to sort far exceeds the value of the plastic. That’s the sham part and it’s prevalent across the country. The only reason tires work is because of government programs.

Again I am not saying recycling is bad but I wish in the US it was clearer and more strict. I would rather my local trash pickup tell me exactly what they want instead of following the propaganda that I can throw in paper and plastics when I know they are mostly throwing those in the dump.