Who makes money on recycling?
Many years ago the most commonly recycled materials were newspaper and aluminum cans. Frequently churches, scout troops and other not-for-profit organizations used can or paper drives as a way of making money for their organizations. Of course, the labor of collecting these materials was all provided by the not-for-profit organizations at no charge. Today, recycling is a big business and because so many different types of materials are recycled and must be separately sorted, baled and processed, there are significant costs in the process. The out-of-pocket costs include the cost of collecting the materials at the community recycling centers or in curbside recycling programs; the cost of sorting the materials at a material recovery facility, baling and transporting the materials to a broker or mill; the cost of processing the materials in such a manner as to make them reusable or convert them to a reusable form. Each participant in the process is a business, government or not-for-profit
