The economics of it show why recycling is utterly pointless

I remember visiting my parents in the early 1990s one day, and seeing that they'd started sorting their refuse by material type.
"Yeah, we decided to get with the recycling thing," my dad said.
"What?" I replied. "Exactly why are you spending any moments of the rest of your earthly existence on such an activity?"
My dad, the guy who had introduced me to the thought and works of Adam Smith, Frederick Hayek and Leonard "I, Pencil" Read, the founder of a manufacturing company and former head of its trade association, the guy who, in that capacity, had been to Washington numerous times to try to get Congress to understand that all business needed from government was to remove its boot from the private sector's neck, the guy who had spent his career looking at the costs of everything involved in making a widget, and, more basically, a guy who was driven by purpose in the way he spent his time, had succumbed to a do-gooder fad.
There he was at the kitchen counter, separating plastic wrap and paper into distinct little piles.
It was one of the strongest indicators I'd had to date that the dark forces rotting our culture had the upper hand. They'd gotten to my parents.
Cut to the spring of 2016. Our city had, some years earlier, issued trash totes to all homes and then started offering recycling totes as well.
My wife and I had moved into a new home and, in the course of setting things up, we had to decide how many totes we wanted to deal with. We opted to stick with one, the one for trash, a term we, by virtue of our way of proceeding, we defined pretty broadly.
A few months later, our granddaughter came to visit from Colorado and one morning, while helping us tidy up the kitchen, asked where our recycling tote was. I explained that we didn't have one, that everything went in the trash container.
She said that there's a real social cost to not recycling in Colorado, that neighbors look askance at you if you don't dutifully get with the program.
Because I enjoy her company and set high priority on good family relations, I didn't pursue that line of conversation.
Now, cut to yesterday.
I have a new gig, in addition to my magazine work. I'm a freelance news stringer for an array of radio stations - and the news website of the company that owns them. My beat is local-government meetings. And, yes, as you're already concluding, the sex-appeal factor is pretty low. Board of Zoning Appeals, Parks & Rec, County Council work sessions. (The human-rights commission's meetings are pretty dull affairs, too, but I may indeed have some reflections on that after attending a few.)
Yesterday was the monthly gathering of the board of our county's Solid Waste Management District. It actually got pretty interesting. It had a global-scope component. The district director reported that, due to China's newly stringent requirements for accepting recyclables from other elsewhere, such as the US, a lot of stuff we were ready to send couldn't make the grade and is languishing stateside. She said that, to be honest, a lot of it winds up in landfills anyway.
Prices for a lot of it have plummeted.
My ears perked up, having recently read a news item about this.
Aluminum, paper and cardboard can find takers pretty readily, but the rest of it, not so much.
And for public (read government-owned) as well as private-sector recycling operations, the costs of reducing a recyclable object back to its basic materials are not covered.
Our city has bucked the national trend in the sense that its economy is still driven by manufacturing, and the big companies in town pride themselves on internal zero-waste programs, but the fact of the matter is that it eats up a big portion of operating capital that is not going to more profitable uses.
There it is, people: there's no money in recycling. It is not a profitable activity.
The materials that come closest to having the possibility of being profitably recycled are the aforementioned aluminum, paper and cardboard. The rest of it quickly gets mired in the tedium, arcana and costliness of separating it out into undefiled groupings,
I'll make a prediction. As with pretty much anything, eventually the market tells us what societal trends are on their way up or on their way out. And if my county in the nation's hinterland is realizing that recyling is a money-bleeder, that activity ain't on the list of hot fashions to watch.