Our town is covered by a "for profit" company who does general trash and separate, single stream recycling. I've toured their facility, which is only a mile from my house and they do, indeed sell everything they can. They tell me that the Chinese change in % pure has dropped them out of the buying market but India will take anything. They simply pay less.
Personally, I keep steel and aluminum and when I have enough, go to the scrapyard and actually get cash. I have a small trailer and load up with steel...mostly desktop cases as I eScrap for profit and fun. (fun for me)
As for plastics, I've watched a number of videos and learned that the little recycling symbol started as a way to identify what each plastic material was. That's all well and good, but not all numbers can be recycled and many can only be burned. We do have a trash burning facility maybe 15 miles away and they generate electricity, but of course it's very inefficient as they have to add a lot of natural gas. In any case, on the plastic side, there were early proposals to change the little recycle triangle so only materials that are actually recyclable get it and the plastics industry opposed this and eventually got their way. The strategy was that consumers don't look at the number and know whether or not it's recyclable. They see the triangle and feel like it must be fine to throw into the recycling bin. You really need to know what numbers recycle and which don't.
Another fun fact......there's actually nothing wrong with landfills and a lot of trash really should go into them. Modern landfills are properly designed with methane catching pipework installed in layers as trash and dirt are filled. What's done with the methane...I don't know. It's not a great heating gas, but I do know that some landfills in my state do use it for things like highway department garages.....along with waste oil heaters. The last glass recycling facility in my state closed. One point made was that glass isn't far removed from sand. So simply putting it into a landfill really isn't a bad thing. Heck.....half of Boston is built on landfill and is full of glass and pottery. Dig into Back Bay and you end up with tons of colonial era trash.
I'm a big proponent of reusing. I worked decades ago as a volunteer at the town's voluntary recycling center before curbside was being done. Half of trash generated is paper. Paper does have a market. No, it doesn't pay much, but it's better than just throwing it out. For the town, getting paper out of the trash stream saved on tipping charges as the town had no landfill and shipped trash a half hour away on the interstate. These days, when grocery shopping, I bring my own paper bags and since these days, paper bags are wicked thin, I triple or even quadruple the bags so they can actually hold the bottles of soda or cans of vegetables without breaking. I reuse them till they're hopelessly ripped and then use those to line other bags for my paper recycling which I bring to the recycling center on the weekend. In the winter, I use a wood fired furnace to heat the house, so the paper bag becomes an "anything burnable" bag which I use to get the furnace going in the morning. Bag of paper....bag of twigs and sticks....small wood kindling and light it off. The saving of heating oil is pretty dramatic. We have oil for backup heat and for water heating.
