Well, hopefully, this is correct. It certainly will help with the unemployment. As for any one presidential candidate being able to create more green jobs, unless those jobs are in the government sector, he’s just blowing smoke. And if they are in the government sector, I would rather save the taxpayer money for something else other than building bigger government.

In case you haven’t noticed, scrap prices of every material are down dramatically. The economic slowdown has reduced demand of pretty much every single scrap commodity. That, of course, is starting to impact recycling rates on some items. One in particular is paper and cardboard products.

International Paper just recently had to shut down one of its paper machines that makes cardboard due to decreased demand. This has in turn reduced the price on recycled paper products and recycling yards will now find it harder to secure a buyer for those products and lowers the price they pay for the material. All of this results in less recycling of paper.

We seem to become more and more aware of things we used to take for granted the longer the economy continues to struggle. Hopefully we won’t see any permanent reduction in recycling rates.