When Recycling Fails: Home-Scale Solutions for Paper and Plastic Waste into Resources

For decades here in the USA, recycling was touted as one of the more easy environmental things you could do. I, like many others, assumed that local recycling facilities processed materials, they were sent to factories, and then later, re-integrated into various products.  Boy was I wrong!  Turns out that recycling is an industrialized business like any other, and part of the reason is that it was so promoted is that there was profit in waste.  In fact, from 1992 – late 2018, most recycling produced in the US shipped to China, who paid top dollar for recycled resources that were used to build their own economy. China had very lax environmental laws, and the more “dirty” recycling the US produced was sent to China for cheap sorting and processing.  While some of those materials were recycled, many of the recycled materials ended up unusable and were discarded, moving down…