Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
Recycling is only profitable when there is a low cost of labor and a wide enough spread between scrap and output product to pay for that labor. When demand falls off a cliff, prices for all outputs drop, killing recycling industries...
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That could change if laws are rewritten to force manufacturers to pay for the "hidden costs" of manufacturing, which can include environmental damage done not only by initial drilling/mining/milling, etc, but by recovery down the line, all of which would force the cost of materials to go up.
If that were to happen, the cost of recycled materials would certainly be much lower than that of new materials, making recycling even more profitable than it is now.
Of course, efforts to force manufacturers to absorb these hidden costs have been proposed, and shot down, for years.