Fire in Brijest - a predictable result of recycling stupidity?

[The Grand Nudger]

Globally, private recycling is a $50 billion industry.

And I assume the vast majority of that money comes from recycling metal, and maybe some from recycling glass. Recycling glass, while probably not profitable in a free market, is still not as ridiculous as recycling plastics.

Neither.  It comes from fees. It's not that recycling business don't...well, recycle, or that they don't provide any valuable product to any industrial partners (and yes, metal and glass are the real winners, for what that's worth), it's just that that's not why those businesses even start. It's always on the backs of fees (or, if you prefer, fees paid by subsidy), and then they work out what they can do with the piles. Plenty of the companies that do this aren't total cynics and they really do want it to be the thing advertised, by they have to partner with people who can secure the funding and permitting...and those guys aren't looking at recycling as the metric, they're looking at the finance end.

This repeats itself in big and small ways up and down every single industry or business model in the green periphery. When I was a kid, recycling was the thing we did when we crushed soda cans for a few months until we had bags of them and we took them to a center and got a little coin becuase mcdonalds had a plain burger deal on tuesdays. Now it's something I pay for. The second thing is a better business, a better investment. The trouble with the first model was that they actually had to pay for their inventory.