Does Recycling and Junk Removal Service Mean Free?

I have been in the recycling business for close to 10 years now and it's always amazing to me the different ways people view recycling from a monetary basis. There are basically three views points out there:

1. "If you are recycling my junk, electronic waste, light bulbs or anything else, you should be paying me for it.”
2. "If you are recycling my junk, pick up stuff and computers then, it should be for free."
3. "How much does it cost to get this stuff recycled?"

There are not that many services or products that have such a varied perception on cost so I am writing this blog to try and shed some insight on how the recycling business works. 

I believe what leads to the first two perceptions of recycling is that there is metal in the objects that's worth some money. What needs to be understood is that clean steel (this means no plastic, textiles or wood on it) can trade anywhere from $100 - $200 per every 2200 lbs (or per ton) depending on the commodities market. So if someone has a junk removal service come to their residence and pick up a couch, that person is thinking the old couch has some metal inside of it. The amount of labor cost there will be to get that 10 lbs pounds of metal out of the couch will probably be $20. The metal is going to be worth somewhere between $1 - $2 when it is recycled.  We are also leaving out the transportation cost to get the couch to the recycling facility. 

Some people also believe that there is some kind of money to be made from textiles. This simply is not the case. Textiles are not worth any money. They cost money to recycle. The same goes for wood. These materials can be recycled and reused as something else but it costs money to convert them into a different object. There is no capital gain in the wood and textiles recycling process.

The “couch” example pretty much goes for any type of product. Money made from recyclable materials comes down to huge volumes of material. It also comes down to how clean the material is. If you have a bunch of plastic toys to be recycled, guess what? There are metal screws that hold the plastic together that have to be taken and sorted to get a clean plastic for recycling. Also there are probably a couple of different types of plastics making up the toy that need to be separated per plastic type.

The final item that leads to the misconception for free or paying recycling services are precious metals. A person hears that computers have copper and gold in them. Guess what...they are correct. However, there are just trace amounts of gold and copper and labor needs to be used to get the gold and copper off the circuit boards followed up with a high-end smelting process. This all has to be done per OSHA and EPA standards (unless you are exporting to China which is illegal). This goes on and on. 

Again it comes down to having a clean stream of recyclable material in a large volume. This is rare. Most of our materials from junk, computers, light bulbs, batteries and other electronics have so many different components. All of these components are made of different types of commodities.

The good news is that recycling still saves money. It may cost money in most cases but it can cost less than throwing it into landfill. That is the exciting thing! This applies to any kind of junk.  A junk removal service that recycles will save you 25 percent  compared to a regular junk hauler.

When it comes to recycling things like universal wastes, it will cost more than throwing it into the trash. However we are saving us all a lot of money in the long run. Light bulbs, batteries and computers all contain toxic wastes that cannot end up in the landfill. We risk contaminating our water table if we continued to do such things. 

Hopefully, this post has shed some light on the inner workings of the recycling business and the costs that are involved, thus helping answer questions surrounding recycling and junk removal services.