{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Faith, Finances and F*Bombs","title":"Turning the Economy Around (Part 2)","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1484,"description":"Each suspicious about the integrity of their local recycling management, Hartley describes two world views, emphasizing God's economy, and Kevin details last month's view, summarizing the United States economy. This is part two, continuing their long conversation of the previous episode.Show Notes: Municipalities and counties pay for residential and commercial recyclables to be trucked to local and regional recycling plants for processing. Clean batches are sorted and/or compressed into bales of similar plastics, paper, aluminum or glass. The centers sell the cleaned recyclables on the open market to buyers who will process them into recycled materials like plastic pellets or post-consumer paper; these can be turned into new products. This entire process – the processing and creation of saleable recycled goods – costs money. As with any good, profitability requires selling for a higher price than it costs to make. Contaminated batches are harder to process into new products and therefore fetch a lower price on the market, if they can be sold at all. Currently, U.S. recyclables are no longer profitable, and no one wants to buy them.China used to buy the majority of the world’s plastics and paper for recycling. Starting Jan. 1, 2018, China banned imports of most scrap materials because shipments were too contaminated; the country no longer wanted to be the “world’s garbage dump.” As a result, the U.S. and other Western nations who had relied on China to offload their recyclables saw a “mounting crisis” of paper and plastic waste building up in ports and recycling facilities. Domestically, the closing of the Chinese market to U.S. recyclables bankrupted many domestic recycling programs because there was too much supply and no real demand. This left waste-management companies around the country with no market for recyclables. They’ve been forced to go back to cities and municipalities with two choices: pay a lot more to get rid of their recycling or throw it away....","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Cv6k80Di3EufJG_BEJs-8zBA6R1PhIhdMECYcuQmABI/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS85ZDAx/YTI5NmJmNmUyMzRk/ZGIxY2JkMDJlNTI5/NmFiNC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}