daverea.com

Saw this on the news this morning:

Could $100 oil turn dumps into plastic mines?
Reuters
By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – Sparked by surging oil, a dramatic rise in the value of old plastic is encouraging waste companies across the world to dig for buried riches in rotting rubbish dumps.

[snip]

“By 2020 we might have nine billion people on the planet, we could have a very big middle class driving millions more cars, and we could be in a really resource-hungry world with the oil price climbing and a supply situation in Libya, Russia and Saudi where natural gas is limited,” said Peter Jones, one of Britain’s leading experts on waste management.

“It is those drivers, those conditions, which will encourage the possibility of landfill mining.”

In Britain alone, experts say landfill sites could offer up an estimated 200 million tonnes of old plastic — worth up to 60 billion pounds at current prices — to be recovered and recycled, or converted to liquid fuel.

[snip]

Prices for high quality plastics such as high-density polyethelenes (HDP) have more than doubled to between 200 and 300 pounds ($370-560) per tonne, from just above 100 pounds a year ago, according to experts in the waste industry.

OK. So they’re raiding landfills. To get scrap plastic goods. Which are then recycled. All well and good – but the next part is where it breaks down for me. I don’t know about the rest of you out there, but around here I pay to have my plastic waste carted off and recycled, not the other way ’round! I was under the impression that recycling plastics costs more than it nets. And maybe, after all the carting and sorting and paying-for-diesel, and paying-for-labor, it does.

But somewhere, according to this article, there’s somebody out there writing checks for scrap polyethylene. Granted, you’d need a lot of empty water bottles to get your piece of that market rate, but the fact that the economics of the situation are completely backwards from the service model we’ve all gotten accustomed-to has me wondering…