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Where Waste Goes. Recycling is a commodity business.
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When It BreaksGL-00148
Where Waste Goes
Recycling is a commodity business
The global trade that handles what everyone throws away.
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Back
GL-00148Idea
A bottle in a recycling bin is not recycled by good intentions. It is sorted, baled, priced, shipped, and remelted, and every step only happens while the material is worth more than the handling costs. When commodity prices fall, recycling stops paying and the same bottle goes to landfill.
- Contamination is the enemy. One greasy container can downgrade an entire bale, which is why sorting rules are so strict and so boring.
- Digging up old landfills showed that paper and food waste rot far more slowly than anyone expected. Buried rubbish is closer to an archive than a compost heap.
SourceRathje and Murphy, Rubbish! (1992)
Minter, Junkyard Planet (2013)
Minter, Junkyard Planet (2013)
Keep exploring
Because you read Where Waste Goes.
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The Container
The box that made distance cheap
The standard steel box that reorganised how the world trades.
GeekLibraryIdea
How Things Get MadeGL-00118
Six Materials
Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, lithium
The handful of raw materials that everything else is built from.
GeekLibraryMechanism
When It BreaksGL-00147
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Pricing a disaster before it happens
The business of putting a number on rare, enormous losses.
GeekLibraryMechanism