You can’t spell California without “can”, but it’s running out of cans because scrap recycling is no basis for a first-world manufacturing program.
Cans are in short supply nationally, creating an unforeseen headache for brewers and driving up prices for drinkers. A variety of factors are driving the shortage, including pandemic lockdowns that curtailed manufacturing, supplier upheavals and a canned cocktail boom that increased demand for aluminum.
Another reason: California’s creaking recycling system can’t collect enough cans, one consequence of a program that has been crippled by redemption center closures and out-of-date policies that have made it harder for people to recycle effectively.
The chronic shortage highlights how an overlooked link in the supply chain — trash — can hamstring a beloved, and booming, industry.
Or, maybe, building manufacturing around the availability of trash was never a good plan.
What the LA Times leaves out is that recycling became much thornier after China decided it didn’t want to be our trash heap. As I reported in 2018, “The recycling scam used to be an easy trade. China shipped its cheap products made from recycled American junk and scrap here. The empty vessels used to dump Chinese junk products on America were then filled up with tons of recycling for the return trip back to China at a minimal cost.”
“But China is out of the recycling dump business. And the recycling business depended on it. No other market pays what it did. And no other country has the industrial scale to handle this much recycled trash. The American market is flooded with recycling that no one wants and trash prices have imploded.”
California’s trash ended up in landfills. A year later, The Atlantic called it the End of Recycling. But scams die slowly. And recycling keeps on chugging along.
“The problem that we have, particularly in the United States on cans, is that we don’t recycle them enough,” said Matt Meenan, vice president of external affairs at the Aluminum Assn. The overall can recycling rate in the U.S. is 45%, meaning that more than half of the cans wind up in landfills.
We don’t recycle aluminum. China does. Recently it announced that it’s more open to aluminum trash dumping which means more “recycling”, if you can call shipping used beer cans around the world “sustainable” or “environmentally friendly” or green.
At the same time, the biggest source of supply, California’s recycling system, was breaking down.
In 2015, there were 2,245 buyback centers, or places where consumers could go to claim their nickel deposit on a bottle or can in the California Refund Value program. Those centers make their money by selling aluminum — as well as paper, glass and some plastic — on the scrap market. The price of scrap metals caved that year, falling 30.8%, and the centers began to close en masse.
Some 420 centers couldn’t pay their bills and closed. An additional 600 shuttered during the next five years. CalRecycle, the state agency in charge, did little to stem the tide, according to critics.
When there are no redemption centers nearby, California’s “Bottle Bill,” AB 2020, requires that grocery stores and supermarkets step in and offer customers a nickel for every can they turn in. But few retailers are willing to accept them, and enforcement is lax.
That’s because bringing used cans in for a nickel is a hobo hobby. Consumers are stuck with paying a fee and then having hobos dig through their trash to get cans to recycle so we can send them to China… to save the planet.
Hell of a plan. Can’t imagine why it’s not working out.
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