{"id":16625,"date":"2016-01-18T11:49:29","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T16:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16625"},"modified":"2016-01-18T11:51:19","modified_gmt":"2016-01-18T16:51:19","slug":"low-oil-prices-take-their-toll-on-recycling-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=16625","title":{"rendered":"Low Oil Prices Take Their Toll On Recycling Sector"},"content":{"rendered":"

Low Oil Prices Take Their Toll On Recycling Sector<\/a><\/h3>\n
\u201cPlastics,\u201d Mr. McGuire tells Ben Braddock in the 1967 film \u201cThe Graduate.\u201d He was impressing on the young man the importance of one of the chief branches of the oil industry: Virtually every item available at the time contained plastic, or was packaged in it. So a career in plastics meant you always had something to sell.<\/div>\n
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That\u2019s just as true today, despite many changes in societal priorities. Plastics are still ubiquitous, whether they\u2019re made from oil or recycled from scrap. But a major change has come over the past 19 months, and there\u2019s no telling how long it will be with us: The price of oil has fallen so low that it\u2019s now less expensive to make plastic than to recycle it.<\/p>\n

And this is hurting recycling, which is more than a social movement, it\u2019s a\u00a0$100 billion-a-year business<\/a>\u00a0in the United States. And it\u2019s a complex one. One company sorts and cleans items such as used water bottles and food containers, then sells them to other companies that melt them down to make new items ranging from grocery bags to more water bottles.<\/p>\n

Related:\u00a0Cheap Oil Hits Housing In North Dakota, Texas, and Others<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Now with the price of oil below $40 per barrel \u2013 down dramatically from more than $110 per barrel in June 2014 \u2013 it\u2019s gotten to the point where making new plastic from oil makes more sense because there\u2019s no additional process of cleaning and sorting, according to Tom Outerbridge, the general manager of Sims Municipal Recycling in Brooklyn, N.Y.<\/p>\n

In an interview with National Public Radio, Outerbridge said negotiating with other companies over the price of cleaned and sorted plastics had become brutal over the past year. \u201cYou\u2019re negotiating around a penny or a half-penny a pound,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Low Oil Prices Take Their Toll On Recycling Sector \u201cPlastics,\u201d Mr. McGuire tells Ben Braddock in the 1967 film \u201cThe Graduate.\u201d He was impressing on the young man the importance of one of the chief branches of the oil industry: Virtually every item available at the time contained plastic, or was packaged in it. So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4],"tags":[7818,592,5332,1857,671],"class_list":["post-16625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","category-environment","tag-andy-tully","tag-oil-price","tag-oilprice-com","tag-plastics","tag-recycling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16625"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16627,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16625\/revisions\/16627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}