Burn or recycle?

Through the winter our wood fire is going in the living room practically every evening. We have a recycling service that collects cardboard, paper, plastic etc... every two weeks.

I tend to separate out burnables, and they get chucked into a wicker basket by the fire for an appropriate time to burn them. I mentioned this to a friend who was horrified that I wasn't recycling the cardboard and stuff.

Now I don't have any particularly detailed understanding of what our local recycling system does with cardboard and paper, but my presumption is that it is either burned in power generation, or recycled. If the former, I would rather offset my own heat needs and burn it in the home for heat. If the latter, recycling lightweight  bulk like cardboard takes fossil fuels etc... and the produced product isn't particularly high value. So again, it feels like burning it (cleanly!) in my own fire feels like a valid approach.

Any thoughts?

You raise an interesting issue.  Do follow up on what happens to the recycling.  In one case I found out that the elaborate recycling bins were for PR.   All the contents ended up in the landfill.

Michael Cox wrote:I tend to separate out burnables, and they get chucked into a wicker basket by the fire for an appropriate time to burn them. I mentioned this to a friend who was horrified that I wasn't recycling the cardboard and stuff.

I would have said to the friend, "I am recycling ... because I use the ashes in my garden..."

And there is a PEP BB (Badge Bit) for that:

https://permies.com/wiki/119012/pep-nest/Set-system-collecting-burnables-PEP

There is no recycling almost anywhere in the world today.

There was a tiny domestic market, but the vast majority was just sent back to China who kind of took it because the world was buying so much of their stuff. Even then it was seldom recycled but burned to get rid of it. Then their economy fell and they just flat out refused to take it anymore.

For awhile Vietnam took it, burning it in open pits, but then they too tired of the game. The same goes for Europe in sending a lot of their recyclables to Turkey where it was burned in open pits.

Today about 95% of “recyclables” is burned in open pits, in trash to energy plants or buried in landfills sadly. There is just too much supply and no demand.

When I worked at a trash to energy facility we kind of chuckled watching the recyclable trucks pull in and dump it with the regular garbage as it was just sad, people sorted out that stuff diligently and no one told them where it was really going. For us it went into our boilers to make electricity which is good, it had at least one use before it was gone. But even more sadly, if our boilers were down for repair, all garbage bypassed, including recyclables and went to the landfill.

When I worked there I took a picture after a recyclable truck came in because no one believed me. But look close and you can see the bales of recycled paper, stark white mixed with the trash.

Here is that photo of recycling mixed with garbage…

The haze is not steam vapor, it is smoke because the composting garbage gets so hot it catches on fire.

Worse yet, in Maine we were duped by a scam company out of UK promising us that they could turn garbage into fuel. It sounded good, and works on a micro scale, but not in real life.

They cost tax payers 90 million dollars and the new owners wanting more now to “ get the plant working”

Maine should have done our research. Iowa gave the company 140 million before they realized it was a scam and never would work.

Now the same company is in California getting a place going there.

In the end I actually wrote a whole novel based on the recycling scam of the Maine the last few years. It is really a sad story because it forced the closure of some great places and now sends every pound of garbage in Maine to landfills.

Europe is better than us, they are building many new trash to energy facilities rather than send their garbage to Turkey to burn it in open pits