Approximately 3.5 million tons of electronics were recycled by the domestic recycling industry in 2010, a report from the International Data Corporation said.

The e-waste recycling industry employs more than 30,000 workers and has an estimated revenue of more than $5 billion, said David Daoud, the company’s research director.

“This survey shows a booming electronics recycling industry and prescribes a clear path for even more growth,” said Robin Wiener, president of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, in a statement. “Electronics recyclers are creating American jobs, adopting an industry standard that will help sustain growth and are recycling electronics here at home.”

The survey points to growth in the market, because American households account for most of the new electronics market, but only contribute to 26% of the recycling market.

- Alan Liss
Founder and CEO

ALA delivers total scrap recycling solutions for companies that are producing scrap plastic, waste paper, books, electronic, and textile scrap and related materials. ALA reclaims the costs of your scrap materials and we make the recycling process efficient, productive, and profitable.

Saint Consulting Group each year surveys Americans about their property development preferences.

And every time in the survey´s first five years, landfills come out as public enemy No. 1.

Make that six years.

Landfills once again top the list of unwanted projects.

It´s a Who´s Who of unwelcome development – power plants, Wal-Marts, casinos and quarries all join landfills on the list.

But landfills, with a 76% opposition rate, consistently rank first.

“It is the most opposed land use in the United States,” said Patrick Fox, president of Saint Consulting, a land use consulting company that specializes in controversial projects. “It is difficult to come up with reasons to give abutters for why they should want to support a landfill.

“There are great cases you can make for what it´s going to look like in 20 or 30 years. It´s going to be a great park. There are great things we´re going to do with it. We´re really going to benefit and enhance the community. But during the period that it´s a landfill, it´s not helping your real estate values. The truck traffic isn´t helping. It´s a problem,” Fox said.

While more than three out of every four people surveyed say they are opposed to landfills, the number isn´t as high as what was posted during the first two years of the survey.

In both 2006 and 2007, more than 80% of those participating in the survey opposed landfills in their hometowns – 82% in 2006 and 87% in 2007.

Will Flower, a spokesman for Republic Services Inc., figures he´s been directly involved in promoting 20 or so landfill projects over the course of his career.

“I´m not surprised the public opinion is that landfills are difficult to site, having spent a career working in the trenches trying to convince communities that there are benefits associated with landfills,” he said. “People need to understand that landfills serve as a vital component of the infrastructure of any municipality.”

Those most likely to oppose a landfill are those who have the most to lose by living near a disposal site, Fox said.

“All of that just comes down to the more affluent the community, the more opposition you are going to get. The more education, the more value in the home, the more they have to protect,” Fox said.

Interestingly, landfill opposition is most likely to occur in the Northeast.

Those most likely to support a landfill development rent their homes and have a lower household income, Fox said. “They have less to lose. They are concerned about jobs,” he said.

While landfills rank first again this year, casinos are not far behind with a 74% opposition rate in 2010. Comparatively, 72% of Americans were opposed to landfills last year and 77% were opposed to them in 2008.

Development opponents have become more vocal and sophisticated over the years and now have the ear of politicians.

The annual survey interviews 1,000 adults across the country to track attitudes about development and the politics of land use, according to Saint Consulting.

By SUSAN FREINKEL

Published: March 17, 2011

The urge to avoid plastic is understandable, given reports of toxic toys and baby bottles, seabirds choking on bottle caps and vast patches of ocean swirling with everlasting synthetic debris. Countless bloggers write about striving — in vain, most discover — to eradicate plastic from their lives. “Eliminating plastic is one of the greenest actions you can do to lower your eco-footprint,” one noted while participating in a recent online challenge to be plastic-free.

Is this true? Shunning plastic may seem key to the ethic of living lightly, but the environmental reality is more complex.

Originally, plastic was hailed for its potential to reduce humankind’s heavy environmental footprint. The earliest plastics were invented as substitutes for dwindling supplies of natural materials like ivory or tortoiseshell. When the American John Wesley Hyatt patented celluloid in 1869, his company pledged that the new manmade material, used in jewelry, combs, buttons and other items, would bring “respite” to the elephant and tortoise because it would “no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.” Bakelite, the first true synthetic plastic, was developed a few decades later to replace shellac, then in high demand as an electrical insulator. The lac bugs that produced the sticky resin couldn’t keep up with the country’s rapid electrification.

Today, plastic is perceived as nature’s nemesis. But a generic distaste for plastic can muddy our thinking about the trade-offs involved when we replace plastic with other materials. Take plastic bags, the emblem for all bad things plastic. They clog storm drains, tangle up recycling equipment, litter parks and beaches and threaten wildlife on land and at sea. A recent expedition researching plastic pollution in the South Atlantic reported that its ship had trouble setting anchor in one site off Brazil because the ocean floor was coated with plastic bags.

Such problems have fueled bans on bags around the world and in more than a dozen American cities. Unfortunately, as the plastics industry incessantly points out, the bans typically lead to a huge increase in the use of paper bags, which also have environmental drawbacks. But the bigger issue is not what the bags are made from, but what they are made for. Both are designed, absurdly, for that brief one-time trip from the store to the front door.

In other words, plastics aren’t necessarily bad for the environment; it’s the way we tend to make and use them that’s the problem.

It’s estimated that half of the nearly 600 billion pounds of plastics produced each year go into single-use products. Some are indisputably valuable, like disposable syringes, which have been a great ally in preventing the spread of infectious diseases like H.I.V., and even plastic water bottles, which, after disasters like the Japanese tsunami, are critical to saving lives. Yet many disposables, like the bags, drinking straws, packaging and lighters commonly found in beach clean-ups, are essentially prefab litter with a heavy environmental cost.

And there’s another cost. Pouring so much plastic into disposable conveniences has helped to diminish our view of a family of materials we once held in high esteem. Plastic has become synonymous with cheap and worthless, when in fact those chains of hydrocarbons ought to be regarded as among the most valuable substances on the planet. If we understood plastic’s true worth, we would stop wasting it on trivial throwaways and take better advantage of what this versatile material can do for us.

In a world of nearly seven billion souls and counting, we are not going to feed, clothe and house ourselves solely from wood, ore and stone; we need plastics. And in an era when we’re concerned about our carbon footprint, we can appreciate that lightweight plastics take less energy to produce and transport than many other materials. Plastics also make possible green technology like solar panels and lighter cars and planes that burn less fuel. These “unnatural” synthetics, intelligently deployed, could turn out be nature’s best ally.

Yet we can’t hope to achieve plastic’s promise for the 21st century if we stick with wasteful 20th-century habits of plastic production and consumption. We have the technology to make better, safer plastics — forged from renewable sources, rather than finite fossil fuels, using chemicals that inflict minimal or no harm on the planet and our health. We have the public policy tools to build better recycling systems and to hold businesses accountable for the products they put into the market. And we can also take a cue from the plastic purgers about how to cut wasteful plastic out of our daily lives.

We need to rethink plastic. The boar’s-hair toothbrush is not our only alternative.