"Recycling was supposed to be one of the few positive environmental legacies bequeathed by the boomers"

Slate:

Your 2011-era empty Coke bottle wasn’t just worth a lot because of high oil prices—it was worth a lot because Pakistan had suffered devastating monsoons in the summer of 2010. Flooding in the Indus River was one of a cascading series of events that sent cotton, in April 2011, to its highest nominal price since records began in 1870. Jeans were going to be more expensive, Levi’s announced. And so, it turned out, was recycled PET plastic, because for Chinese manufacturers of articles like teddy bears and blue jeans, polyester fibers made from old plastic bottles were a cost-effective replacement for cotton. Cotton was up; plastic was up; recycled PET prices went up. As when cotton hit its previous high price in 1995, the scramble was on for old bottles. Which you, American reader, the world’s leading consumer of soda and bottled water, had in spades.

...

Relatedly, the explosion in Chinese exports meant that ports like Los Angeles (the nation’s largest) were always stacked with containers that arrived full of new sneakers and televisions but often had to return empty. Which meant shippers would basically take old paper and cardboard back to China for free—it functions as ballast. As a result, shipping a ton of old boxes from Los Angeles to Hong Kong was often cheaper than shipping it to a recycled paper mill in eastern Washington.

...

Then came National Sword. It didn’t come out of nowhere. In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced Operation Green Fence, a crackdown on poorly sorted shipments of used paper and plastic that arrived from America contaminated with trash. The work of sorting those bales had fallen to Chinese families whose impoverishment and appalling working conditions were the subject of the 2016 documentary Plastic China.

"Activists and news media often claim that Americans use 500 million plastic straws per day, for example, which sounds awful"

Bloomberg:

But the source of this figure turns out to be a survey conducted by a nine-year-old. Similarly, two Australian scientists estimate that there are up to 8.3 billion plastic straws scattered on global coastlines. Yet even if all those straws were suddenly washed into the sea, they'd account for about .03 percent of the 8 million metric tons of plastics estimated to enter the oceans in a given year.

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at least 46 percent of the plastic in the garbage patch by weight comes from a single product: fishing nets. Other fishing gear makes up a good chunk of the rest.

"Environmentally minded Californians love to recycle — but it's no longer doing any good"

LAT:

there’s no longer a recycling market for a lot of the paper, cardboard, plastic and other junk that’s left curbside.

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“A year ago...we were getting $100 a ton for newsprint. Now we’re getting an average $5…. Revenue has fallen off the cliff.”

Related: "In Moradabad, whole communities subsist by processing waste created by the world’s love affair with electronic goods."

Link roundup

1.  Grantland looks at how so many scouts missed on Mike Trout:

OK, but did you think he'd be this good, this fast? 

"We didn't think the power would come this quickly, for sure. We thought it would be over time, rather than doing the kind of stuff he'd do immediately. But then you consider his physique. You look back at reports, and you'd always see something like 'Looks like a safety in the SEC.' That grabs you, that and the intensity.

2.  Recycling smartphones:

One cell phone can yield up to 20 milligrams of gold; that may seem minuscule, but consider this: A ton of phones can provide 20 times more gold than a ton of gold ore.

3.  "China's Replica of Paris Is Now an Eerily Depressing Ghost Town."