Does Recycling Work? (greenthatlife.com) 239
"It's a complicated question," admits a New York sustainability advocate:
If an item in a bin of recyclable materials is greasy, covered in food or, in the case of paper goods, soaking wet, the entire bin is typically rejected and sent to the landfill or incinerated... While we want to do the right thing, most of us don't know all the rules. Can you recycle that greasy pizza box? (No.) Plastic bottle caps? (It depends on the municipality.) Cereal boxes? (It depends.) The list of questions goes on... And many times it's difficult to find the correct answer. So, while we're throwing items in the recycling bin or diligently bringing them to a recycling center, we may be merely "wish-cycling" -- hoping that these items will somehow be recycled. Wish-cycled items eventually get sent to the landfill or clog recycling plant machinery...
Remember -- Recycling is a business. Your recyclables are typically collected and processed by a private waste management company looking to make a profit. The materials are then assembled into massive bundles (bales) for sale. For many years, China was the main buyer of recyclable material. In 2018, however, China passed its National Sword policy that sets impossibly low contamination standards on 24 types of imported waste material. These new standards have caused a drastic decline in the market for recyclable materials. According to the New York Times, plastic scrap exports "valued at more than $300 million in 2015, totaled just $7.6 million in the first quarter of [2018], down 90% from a year earlier."
What does all this mean? Facing increased prices to haul recyclables, some cities and towns have drastically scaled back or even stopped their services. And yes, you guessed it: bales of recyclable materials are ending up in landfills or being incinerated.
The article urges readers to educate themselves about "how to recycle properly and responsibly," noting that currently only 9% of all plastic is ever recovered and recycled, so "over 90% is lost to the landfill, incinerated or, worst, pollutes our environment for hundreds of years."
It also suggests reducing food waste, finding reusable alternatives to "single-use disposables" -- and re-purposing things rather than throwing them away in the first place.
Remember -- Recycling is a business. Your recyclables are typically collected and processed by a private waste management company looking to make a profit. The materials are then assembled into massive bundles (bales) for sale. For many years, China was the main buyer of recyclable material. In 2018, however, China passed its National Sword policy that sets impossibly low contamination standards on 24 types of imported waste material. These new standards have caused a drastic decline in the market for recyclable materials. According to the New York Times, plastic scrap exports "valued at more than $300 million in 2015, totaled just $7.6 million in the first quarter of [2018], down 90% from a year earlier."
What does all this mean? Facing increased prices to haul recyclables, some cities and towns have drastically scaled back or even stopped their services. And yes, you guessed it: bales of recyclable materials are ending up in landfills or being incinerated.
The article urges readers to educate themselves about "how to recycle properly and responsibly," noting that currently only 9% of all plastic is ever recovered and recycled, so "over 90% is lost to the landfill, incinerated or, worst, pollutes our environment for hundreds of years."
It also suggests reducing food waste, finding reusable alternatives to "single-use disposables" -- and re-purposing things rather than throwing them away in the first place.
Recycling is another job (Score:5, Insightful)
There are so many rules to learn, and so much time spent sorting through and cleaning your trash (with fresh water that could have been used for other things) that it amounts to a part time job for every single household.
This is why we tend to gather things up for one person or place to do - because everyone doing the same thing is inefficient as hell. It is why we don't all grow and hunt our own food, make our own clothes etc., so why should recycling be any different? Obviously proper recycling is to everyone's benefit, so some proper funding for the recycling plants so they can do the final sorting and cleaning in a far more efficient way should be what we aim towards, NOT making everyone have ten different trash cans and wasting gallons of water on cleaning out milk cartons and used tin cans.
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Recycling is a good habit to get into, but people need to be educated on a few basic rules: clean items only, wash only containers that can be cleaned without using too much water, include caps only when they are made of the same material as the container, and so on.
Recyclable items tend to be bulky, so even a little recycling can significantly reduce the volume of your trash.
Re:Recycling is another job (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see why I should clean it, when the truck that picks up the recycling containers is going to dump all the contents together anyway. Unless 100% of the people clean all their items, there's going to be dirty stuff in there, and the recycling company needs to be able to deal with it.
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Trash trucks in my area have separate compartments for trash and for recyclables. Though actually, the trash truck doesn't come up the road as far as where I live, so I have to take the trash to the transfer center myself. I only go once every other month or so, with one bag (can) of trash and two of "recyclables". And I reuse the bags, too. I live in Mendocino county right now, and there is no landfill. We pay to send all our trash somewhere else, which is expensive, and also doesn't solve anything except
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Do the trucks have separate compartments for each house they visit, otherwise OP's point stands - if ONE house doesn't bother to clean the recyclable waste, then the entire truck counts as contaminated if there's no sorting at the plant.
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You're just being petty and lazy. Every item being fully covered in food bits is far harder to clean than only a few items covered in food bits. Yes they need to deal with it, but dealing with mostly clean or only slightly dirty items is far easier and cheaper with than dealing with heavily soiled recycles.
You're basically saying everyone should remove all the exhaust filters from their car because one idiot did so. If we're going to have to pull pollutants out of the air we might as well pollute as much
Re: Recycling is another job (Score:2)
I donâ(TM)t quite understand the need to clean containers. It seems that it would be simple enough to wash the plastic/metal containers after they are ground up and at least for metal containers, any contaminants would be burnt up during the melting process.
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The melting temperature of the plastics is well below even the cooking temperature of the foods in many cases.
The temperatures that would "burn up" the contaminants is the temperature that would burn the plastic.
So that only makes sense if you're incinerating it, not recycling it.
That "golly, you can recycle it without cleaning, right? Should be?" idiocy somehow managed to get into people heads, and now most recycling stopped. Fucking assholes. When I was a kid, only people willing to do the work got to rec
Re:Recycling is another job (Score:5, Insightful)
I bring this up surprisingly often, but generally the worst way to try to solve a technical problem is with a social solution. Getting people to consistently do something because you don't have the technology needed almost never works. Recycling is a fantastic example of this.
Technical problems require technical solutions. You can't currently sort efficiently enough. Sounds like more R&D and engineering is needed. Maybe we need to revisit the source materials and fix the problem further upstream. Asking people nicely to learn a complicated process which doesn't immediately benefit them isn't the solution.
Re: Recycling is another job (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Recycling is another job (Score:4, Insightful)
That may be the case, but it's not the case here. There's very few people who find the act of recycling tedious. Most contamination is born out of pure ignorance. I still remember the educative campaign in my city to get people to stop dropping thin HDPE bags in the recycling bin as it caused issues with the sorting machines and was therefore considered contamination. After a few months contamination dropped significantly to the point where all recycling centers ended up being overloaded.
This is *not* rocketsurgery.
Re: Recycling is another job (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the pizza box with a few grease stains and a single spot of stuck cheese waste or paper?
Is the plastic ketchup bottle with ketchup stuck in the bottom waste or plastic? Can you get the lid off to get the last of the ketchup out? How clean does it have to be, can you just rinse it in cold water or do you need hot water, soap and a brush?
Can of dog food, is that waste or metal? How much rinsing? Do you need to peel off the paper that shows what is/was in the can?
Napkin you used a lot as you ate a greasy dinner, is that paper or waste?
It ends up being rocket surgery if you need to consult a flow chart for every single item you're throwing out.
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For that to work, you need to be living somewhere that has municipal composting (or be composting it yourself)-- there are many places that have not gotten the word on that, as of yet.
For example, the high-tech paradise of Sunnyvale down in Silicon Valley doesn't do composting at all. Instead they run a growing mountain of garbage down on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, which on a bad day stinks up the coast line for miles.
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So for the sake of recycling everyone gets to spend hot water, which requires extra energy for heating, and soap that more likely than not releases microplastics into the water. At least if it all got cleaned centrally at the recycling plant there would be some amount of energy saved on heating the water.
This is a no-win situation.
Re:Recycling is another job (Score:4, Interesting)
There are so many rules to learn, and so much time spent sorting through and cleaning your trash (with fresh water that could have been used for other things) that it amounts to a part time job for every single household.
Oh come on. It’s pretty simple, and if you have a question about an item just throw that one out. And if you take care of stuff as you use it, you’re not sorting though trash to pick out recyclables.
This doesn’t take much time at all. Sheesh, when you have to pee you don’t go In the corner of the living room because of the extra time it takes to get up and walk to the bathroom...
Re:Recycling is another job (Score:4, Insightful)
There are so many rules to learn, and so much time spent sorting through and cleaning your trash
The worst part is the rules are different in every locale, confusing, and contradictory.
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And they change randomly. As what happened in my city a few years ago.
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Just because there's lots of rules and exceptions for people who really want to know this stuff doesn't mean the recycling police will arrest you if you put the wrong kind of plastic in the plastic bin. Many things are simply small habits, when I empty a can I pour some water in and give it a shake. If I let it dry out I'd need warm water, soap and a scrub but if I take five seconds to clean it immediately I'm done. If I empty a cardboard box, I flatten it and put it in the stack. Those small adjustments me
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Why are you dumping the plastic bag in the 'plastics' bin?
First, why not reuse the plastic bag until it's too dilapidated to function.
Second, everywhere I've ever lived "plastic bags, wraps, and films" are not to be put in standard recycle bins (some can be recycled by taking to a specialized drop off location - such as those by the front door of some supermarkets).
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If it's a plastic trash bag that has only held clean plastic in it, why throw that out instead of emptying it into the bigger outside trash can, then putting said still clean trash bag back into the smaller inside trash can?
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You may be part of one of the very problems this article addresses -- putting stuff in the wrong recycle stream or in the recycle stream when it should be in the trash.
Many municipal recycling schemes don't want plastic bags or films in the recycle stream -- of course they tolerate it because people do it, but then they have to pick it out and send it to a landfill. Of those that do accept them, they often want a "bag full of bags" - not single loose bags. For example, San Mateo, California does NOT want p
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As I pointed out, it varies in the US, from municipality to municipality. There seemed to be a trend towards dealing with plastic bags in the standard recycle stream, but I suspect as more and more states and municipalities effectively ban single use plastic bags for retail, that trend will reverse.
Probably, now, those plastic bags, even when accepted, end up in landfills after China cut off imports of so much recycling waste.
Wasted time, your bin goes to trash (Score:2)
> If I let it dry out I'd need warm water, soap and a scrub but if I take five seconds to clean it immediately I'm done. If I empty a cardboard box, I flatten it and put it in the stack. Those small adjustments means my recycling is basically just to fill up a plastic bag and dump the contents in the right bin, then the *plastic bag in the plastic bin*
Sorry to tell you, but you've been wasting your time and water - your plastics don't get recycled. When they see a bag in your plastics bin they send your
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and used tin cans
This is why everyone needs an evil mother-in-law; you keep the ole' c-word in a cage and occasionally toss in your recyclables to be licked clean.
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There are so many rules to learn,
Moreover, even if you know the rules, it's not always clear which applies to the item you're trying to recycle.
What should be done is standardize on a few recycling categories, and have manufacturers add the category on simple and visible labels on recyclable products. For example, in my area the city provides 3 garbage bins: green for landfill, blue for recyclables, gray for compostables. If a plastic box had a blue dot if it's recyclable, a grey dot if biodegradable and a green dot if neither, it would be
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And the rules vary more than you'd expect.
OP said "pizza box .. no".
That's not always true.
I've lived in places where "pizza box was OK because cardboard went to something that could handle it". I think in some places cardboard goes to green waste, and others it goes to energy producing incinerators.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Are you trying to say none of those containers used to be glass? Because they did. You can still get glass versions of many of them today if you go for specific brands. Otherwise I have no clue what you're trying to say there.
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Many people don't have space for multiple recycling bins for different types of material...
And yes, packaging is excessive and stupid, 99% of my trash every week is empty packaging.
Glass bottle used to be cleaned and refilled, now they are at best smashed into a generic glass recycling bin and melted down which is quite an energy intensive process.
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In Canada, the only categories you need to care about are compost, paper, glass, plastic, and maaaaybe metal, and everything goes under "waste." Is that really so hard?
So pizza boxes go under paper, plastic bags go under plastic, and tomato juice cans go under metal.
Got it. Thanks.
My garburetor takes care of the compost part.
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I live in Winnipeg, and greasy pizza boxes are not allowed. Everything has to be clean.
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Best case, you replace some breakaway pins.
Worst case, you bent the auger to hell and maybe the PTO shaft. Full replacement of the front half of the machine
Incineration (Score:5, Interesting)
it works - only you're not recycling plastic into more plastic, you're recycling it into energy.
The alternative is to spend a lot of energy converting that plastic into another form of plastic, but even more fossil fuel to perform the conversion process.
Its more efficient to cut out the middle man and make plastic from the fossil fuels and make energy from the old plastic. Until one day we get better at recycling and energy generation, this shouldn't be an issue, but it will always be while idiots who care more about soundbites and social media virtue signalling are in charge of policy.
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it works - only you're not recycling plastic into more plastic, you're recycling it into energy.
The problem is that it is marketed as if you could easily choose the first option.
This is especially true for so called renewable energy: solar panel are not recyclable right now. When recycling a PV solar panel you do not get back the materials for a new solar panel, but just a few of metal and glass (usually of worse quality than the original). PV panels are 90-95% "recyclable" because their weight is made mostly by glass and by the metal frame. In value, they are really 5% recyclable at most.
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I agree there - plastic needs to be 1 or 2 types for retail. If a milk bottle can be made out of 1 type of plastic, why does it need a totally different cap? Why do yoghurt pots need to be made out of a different type too?
Fix that, and most of the problems go away, you're left with black plastic and films that cannot be recycled - and they can be easily burned instead.
This is why composting is better (Score:5, Interesting)
If the trash is all compostable, then — wait for it — it can be composted instead of recycled. We should mandate compostable packaging. Biodegradable only means it breaks down, it doesn't specify into what.
There are lots of packaging options which are compostable which hold up just fine so long as they aren't out in the direct sunlight, or left out in the rain. Habits can change very little.
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A lot of the changes to non-resuable packaging was because of either direct or partial benefits in stopping disease transfer on mediums that could carry it. It's why you don't see people buying hacks of meat and wrapping it in cloth anymore, as an example. "Mandating" means the creation of a bureaucracy to oversee it, the best option is public pressure. But the moment that becomes an emotional plea it's screwed anyway. Just think of paper bags. Where they were removed because trees.Bet most people who
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If you instead bury the wood products (like paper) in a landfill, then you've sequestered that carbo
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That only works if you put it on a local compost heap.
People opened up old land fills to clean/clear up the land, and were surprised to find 20 year old compostables that should have decayed but hadn't.
It turns out that when you compress garbage, and put layers upon layers, there just isn't enough oxygen for things to break down.
As to recycling plastics, maybe it will work better with plastics that are specifically designed to be recycled, even when contaminated, as this recent news [sciencealert.com] mentions.
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That only works if you put it on a local compost heap.
Well, that raises another point. We throw away a lot of food in most developed nations, the USA being one of the worst culprits. That food should be separated for composting. Some countries do separate their compost. It reduces landfill load, and produces useful output.
OP, you've ruined recycling for everyone! (Score:2)
For plastic, landfills work best. (Score:2)
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A better idea is to reduce the number of types of plastic in use and the number of colours. Standardize on one type and one colour for all bottles and jars and one type for lids. Do the same for each use of plastic and try to minimize the overall number of types of plastic. Instead of the absolute best plastic for each use go for a good enough plastic if it means reducing a specific type of plastic being used.
The fewer types and colours of plastic in use means that recyclers have an easier time doing their
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Good luck (Score:2)
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No, the problem is that recycling only works if there is a lot of free labour provided. By the people paying the bills. So, we pay for the privilege of recycling, and then we provide much of the labour to the company doing recycling for free.
It's sort of like going to work for whomever we work for, and paying our employer for the privilege....
We need more generic methods of recycling (Score:2)
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already done - they recycle cables with a machine that chops it all up and separates it afterwards, you get a pile of metal dust and a pile of plastic scraps. Pretty cool.
https://cablerecycling.com/ [cablerecycling.com]
bigger recycling of general purpose stuff does the same kind of thing, crush the input into tiny bits, shake the result so light paper flies off and heavy metal, glass drops down, then sort it in a similar manner to that. Trouble is, its not easy to recycle lots of general waste, it has to be pretty much the recy
You could also just live your life (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't want to spend your days and nights anxiously wondering whether everything you do meets someone's ever-changing standard for green moral purity, you may choose to ignore the moralizing. Instead of being mired in constant anxiety, you might find a way to be happy.
Be prepared to be barked at by doomsayers who have rejected happiness and embraced anxiety and zealous self-righteousness. Doom never comes: technology advancements make the future better. Preachers on TV and on the internet can be turned off.
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I take it you have never worked across the street from, or lived a bit down the road from, a large landfill. Try it for a few months (I have done both) and get back to us.
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I take it you have never worked across the street from, or lived a bit down the road from, a large landfill. Try it for a few months (I have done both) and get back to us.
Actually I do. It''s not a landfill any more and there's no apparent indication it ever was. Unless you looked it up or read it on a sign, you would never know.
Re:You could also just live your life (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are ok with humanity having no future, sure, great approach. Instead you could so some minimal sorting and not worry too much about it. But that would cause "unhappiness", so that is clearly not an option.
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If you are ok with humanity having no future
You believe doomsday predictions despite the fact that every doomsday prediction in the history of the world turned out to be false. Thousands of doomsday predictions, zero came true.
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If a type of persuasive argument is wrong 1000 times in a row, how wise is it to believe in that argument the 1001st time?
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Do you also disbelieve entropy and the second law of thermodynamics? We live on a finite planet and consumption shows no sign of slowing down. Doomsayers have been put off by clever technological solutions but we must admit the closed system we call Earth has been progressively decaying due to our actions. The collapse of our cheap energy present is an inevitability. I happen to believe it's survivable but a tech utopia it won't be.
In the distant future we will be able to get all the energy we need from the sun or from nuclear fusion here on Earth. Cheap energy will easily last until then.
Re:You could also just live your life (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't want to spend your days and nights anxiously wondering whether everything you do meets someone's ever-changing standard for green moral purity, you may choose to ignore the moralizing.
And you sir are why the human race is fucked.
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And you sir are why the human race is fucked.
If it weren't, you'd have to pick something else to moralize about. But you picked this, so the future has become certain doom. Too bad.
It's possible to go through a day without affirming your superior virtue and wisdom, you know. Try it. Or try actually earning the esteem you have for yourself by genuinely helping another individual in a practical way. Helping someone is better than judging them.
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You might think people should be better than this. That thought is a red herring; ignore it. If you want the world to be better, you need to expect common human behavior, not malign it.
Better? Making up new, nonsensical, quasi-religious rules everyday and telling people they have to obey them to ward off doomsday? What's good about that at all?
It doesn't help anyone. If you believe it, all it does is cause anxiety. No one can follow every new rule that zealots dream up.
Traditional religions give people a break and make the rules something attainable and/or forgivable for shortfalls. The environmental religion is all doomsday, all the time.
Mods, come on. He didn't even bother to explain why he feels that way, let along provide any sort of counter-argument.
You need an explanation of why people might w
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"Doom never comes," thought the man as he chopped down the last tree on Easter Island, just before the civilization collapsed from lack of trees.
"So far so good!" thought the man who fell off a tall building as he passed another floor.
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"Doom never comes," thought the man as he chopped down the last tree on Easter Island, just before the civilization collapsed from lack of trees.
"So far so good!" thought the man who fell off a tall building as he passed another floor.
Cool stories bro. Our lives are not these stories.
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Cool stories bro. Our lives are not these stories.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to remain ignorant.
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In other words: learn to live and enjoy the mantra of "I've got mine, fuck you.".
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In other words: learn to live and enjoy the mantra of "I've got mine, fuck you.".
Environmentalists want to tell everyone they're not allowed to "get theirs". Because doomsday. I'm telling people they don't need to listen to doomsayers and they should go ahead and "get theirs" if they want.
It's the environmental religion that wants people to feel anxious and afraid and hopeless. I'm telling them they can choose to feel happy instead.
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The problem with the left is it's become this (as you say) ever changing standard for moral purity.
It's just a symptom — a tactic they use. People should know they don't need to go along with it. It isn't making people happy, or strong, or any other good thing.
And it can never be satisfied. There's no limiting principle. There will always be a next thing. No one will ever be woke enough nor green enough. Doomsday and the bogeyman will always be right around the corner. (Must keep those donations coming in and those voters terrorized.)
But we didn't solve it through moralizing bullshit, or even technology, we solved it through laws.
Technology gave people enough resources so they were no lon
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Go live in Beijing, you dumb fuck.
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Progress is a bitch, isn't it?
Totalitarianism is a bitch
Seems like the wrong question to ask... (Score:2)
On the post-consumer side the real questions are collection and sorting(with the question of sorting depending in part on how well you can answer that of collection); with the question of 'will it recycle?' then varying by material (eg. copper so readily that we have trouble keeping people from stealing it for sale; most other metals that don't depend on being som
The other two R's (Score:5, Insightful)
People used to talk about the three R's - Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. We have embraced the recycling part, partly because it's so easy to do. When you throw something away, you just throw it in the blue-coloured bin. It's with the other two R's where we need more participation to effectively manage our waste problem.
For reduction, I wish manufacturers would cut back on so much packaging. I'm regularly appalled by the amount of materials used to package some things. I purchased an Ikea pillow that came packed in a large box filled with plastic bubble wrap!
For reuse, shopping bags are an easy place to start. With imagination, however, I think there are many more things than can be reused or repurposed.
Re: The other two R's (Score:2)
My local épicerie has started putting small snacksâ"nuts, trail mix, and the likeâ"into glass jars. The deposit is $1. They've been doing this with sauces for years now (which are made in-house), but I think they're buying the snacks in bulk and repackaging them. To me, this is an ideal solution. Glass costs a lot of money to transport because of the weight, but if you're a neighbourhood grocery store, people are coming on foot or by bike. They can carry a small amount of extra weight f
Of course it works. (Score:5, Insightful)
Recycling works, how we are currently implementing recycling is a failure.
Thus far, recycling has been a bolt-on addition to societies instead of being considered central to it's existence which is precisely why it is not working as hoped. However, in a sustainable (capitalistic) society, the cost of recycling paid by the manufacturers of products. This generates the revenue needed to run the recycling industry as well as creates a feedback loop that favors easily recyclable product designs.
Feedback loops like these are the only way we will be able to fix our heath, pollution and trash problems but for now shortsighted selfishness rules the day.
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Exactly this. Look at how Japan has done recycling to get some idea of how it can be done right (or at least, a lot better). It starts with making packages easier to recycle (few to no mixed materials); making it clear what can be recycled, where, and when (stamping all packaging with a recycling label, having collectoin services, etc); and th
The entire point of recycling is LOST here... (Score:5, Insightful)
... it's NOT A BUSINESS. Recycling is a PUBLIC SERVICE. As soon as you bring BUSINESS into it, you begin the race to the bottom, and then there's no GOOD being done; only scavenging for the most profitable low-lying fruit.
Outside of America, there still are a FEW PLACES where "business" takes second place to "The greater good", and government still serves the latter. Shockingly, their recycling projects actually FUCKING WORK. There is nothing wrong with Recycling except the fact that we expect it to be for-profit.
Fuck the article, fuck the asshat who wrote it, and fuck that "sustainability expert" who by his own declaration is part of the fucking problem, not the solution.
mnem
~ Sick of everything being reduced to the LCD ~
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The world is only becoming ever-increasingly capitalist on top of how it's already mostly capitalist, if we're going to fix its problems then we have to have solutions that are compatible with capitalism. If we can still manage to ban certain things, though, we can still solve the problem. Just ban non-compostable packaging. Phase it out, starting with the lowest-hanging fruit. We can solve this problem. We've done harder things.
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Excellent advice, no doubt.
You're experience of living in Europe matches none of the accounts I've heard of this from anyone else.
And we're doing great with out imperial period. Can't imagine why those guys gave up on it.
Waste (Score:5, Informative)
So I have a greasy pizza box.
Which is composed of food waste. And cardboard.
I can recycle food waste, because it just rots down and composts.
Cardboard... also rots down and composts, especially if wet.
If we truly have machine capable of recycling tons of thick cardboard, but they can't handle a slightly greasy box, and whatever else is left after garbage-handling guy scrapes the remains into a box for composting... what the hell kind of shitty process are we using?
The problem I have with recycling is that majority of stuff is not recyclable because of crap like this. You can recycle a milk bottle, but you have to use your own hot water and soap to clean it out first. Maybe try collecting more than once every few weeks, and putting through an industrial-scale wash!
I'm not sitting there scrubbing out my ketchup bottles at my own time/expense so that someone else can be paid money to melt down a tiny sliver of plastic and then sell it on again.
If you want me to recycle, I need a carrot as much as a stick. How about "we'll collect all your rubbish, but you'll get a $5 credit on anything pre-sorted correctly?" You won't do it because *recycling is not profitable* for anyone but the guy getting paid the compulsory payment that the council collects from myself.
In a related story, UK councils have noticed a 40% increase in fly-tipping (dumping of rubbish in an unauthorised way) over recent years. I know *exactly* why that is. Because people just want rid of rubbish, and penalising them for doing it wrong means they may as well just risk dumping it and risking a bigger fine that they're less likely to ever get caught for. I drive past a fly-tipped load on my way to work at least once a week now, industrial, commercial and personal (e.g. mattresses, etc.).
Waste disposal is a public service. Charge us for it. Then do it. Don't make me work for it, then penalise me for "getting it wrong", the make me pay for it, then landfill the damn stuff anyway.
Another story in the UK news recently: A council REMOVED green bins from a guy who put them out wrongly on two occasions. Zero evidence. Zero lawful reason. They can't even prove *he* contaminated the bins. So they took away his bins for SIX MONTHS. Guess where his rubbish is going in future... not in the bin, that's for sure.
Personally I'd have sued their asses for evidence for that, and then failing to provide a service on the basis of zero evidence and THEN charged them for waste collection for that missing period and/or demanded a rebate on the waste collection portion of my tax (if you're not providing the service, why am I paying?).
Re:Waste (Score:4, Informative)
If we truly have machine capable of recycling tons of thick cardboard, but they can't handle a slightly greasy box
We have machines that could do each. They are *not* the same machine. You said it yourself, composting. Recycled paper is not composted, it is recycled. Throw your pizzabox in your compost bin instead.
You can recycle a milk bottle, but you have to use your own hot water and soap to clean it out first.
No you don't. At least not in any normal country.
How about "we'll collect all your rubbish, but you'll get a $5 credit on anything pre-sorted correctly?"
Isn't living in a world that isn't a giant scrap heap carrot enough? You now expect to be paid for not screwing up the environment? What next, pay me $10 or I'll drop a turd on your doorstep? Nice neighborhood you live in, it would be a shame if it started to have garbage in it.
Waste disposal is a public service. Charge us for it.
Holy shit you're sending mixed messages.
Another story in the UK news recently: A council REMOVED green bins from a guy who put them out wrongly on two occasions. Zero evidence. Zero lawful reason. They can't even prove *he* contaminated the bins. So they took away his bins for SIX MONTHS. Guess where his rubbish is going in future... not in the bin, that's for sure.
Well to be fair, the UK home to one of the most populated cities in the world, a city where garbage collection involves just throwing your bags in the street and someone picking them up isn't exactly a bastion of modern waste management.
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It does sound hard to separate trash as it is presented, but I would have thought that a process could be devised whereby the trash is shredded/crushed and then left in a settling tank, collect the sediment, scoop up the floating particles and then keep processing each fraction until you extract whatever is viable and send the rest to a landfill or burn it to power the whole process.
It might even be possible to grow algae or some other bacteria in the water full of pizza grease and cellulose and harvest th
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You save money when you recycle by not having pay for a new landfill for all the trash that everyone is throwing out. How much would that add to your taxes?
It's hard with the current waste stream. (Score:2)
You buy something and it comes in a cardboard box ... with three pieces of plastic attached with some industrial-strength glue. Or your item comes in a disposable container with four different kinds of plastic welded together. Or your rechargeable device is impossible to deconstruct BY DESIGN, so you can neither replace the batteries nor remove them for recycling.
The first step is to mandate simpler packaging and construction, perhaps with a cap-and-trade strategy which charges you a cost per distinct mat
It's Easy For Me!!! (Score:2)
The have signs for each container list what they will take and other signs what they will not take.
NO special or confusing rules.
When in doubt, put it in the garbage
SIMPLE
If your municipality has rules that are confusing, you might consider moving. Easy-peasy in my neck-of-
Depends on methodology (Score:2)
But there is a better way. Post consumer separation. Haul all the mixed trash to a single facility. Separate paper and cardboard that is acceptable to be reprocessed, separate metals (you can induce currents in non ferrous metal and still separate it. Classify the metals. Automation can separate out the glass and plastics. Some humans are needed separating the types of plastics. Grinding the rest up and and refiltering for metals. There are l
Sounds familiar (Score:2)
It means plastic scrap exports are made of Bitcoins?
Recycling is a business (Score:2)
That's where the problem comes in, recycling is one of the few public services where a profit is expected.
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Eh? The company hired to take my city's trash makes a profit or they wouldn't do it. The ambulance companies are that way too, as are the hospitals.
sure, fire and police don't, but they are necessary. recycling isn't "necessary" thing to most people
proper solution (Score:2)
incinerate as fuel for power generation. paper and most plastics are fuel, let's not waste it.
oh, you care about carbon pollution? then solve the replacing of our main power sources (I vote for square miles of solar panels and storage systems in desert with UHVDC lines to distribute), the carbon load from trash would be quite minor addition.
How soon until we stripmine landfills? (Score:2)
concentrate on the high value simple stuff first (Score:2)
Since we don't seem to have the technology to sort recycling, and the rules are too complex for people to remember, why not concentrate on the simple things.
Newspaper, cardboard, glass, aluminum cans. NOTHING ELSE. It should say so on the bin. No plastics - its just too complicated. Too difficulty to know which numbers are recycled where.
We also need to get away from the all to common practice of hiding trash bins to force people to recycle - its much better for them to throw a bit of recylable materia
define work? (Score:2)
Is it worth it? that depends. It is not financially viable since the Chinese stopped buying garbage. So long as the costs to produce a product from recycled goods is less than extracting it from nature, then yes, recycling works on a financial perspective as well-but this isn't experienced in practice.
Overall, does recycling "work" in a public sense? No, it's a feel-good exercise that is more expensive and can consume more energy to
Even easy rules (Score:2)
...are too complicated for a shockingly large number of people. I once had a few shifts at recycling plant doing sorting and it was appalling the number of people who thought they were recycling *paper* by putting it in a *plastic* bag. If the paper was loose we could dump it out and dispose of the bag separately but most times it all went to landfill.
Dishwasher (Score:2)
I put pieces of recycling inside the dishwasher on top of things so that any spare capacity gets used. My primary motivation was so that it didn't get stinky in the recycle bin in the kitchen, since all the recycle stuff is clean it doesn't attract insects.
If you get some things while they are still warm you can compact it, fit more in the bin and then you don't have to take it out so often. The dishwasher saves me heaps of time.
Impossibly low contamination standards? (Score:2)
The new standards China set on recyclables coming in aren't impossibly low. They collect recyclables that meet the standard from their own citizens. They got tired of collecting garbage from North America and sending it to their landfills. The reason for that, as shown by too many people here, is people are unwilling, for a number of reasons, to sort their recycling properly. It isn't far from as hard as people make it out to be. Yet it doesn't take many people to contaminate a bundle of recycling. They wou
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You can compost roadkill. I can't see why you wouldn't be able to compost a large amount of paper with a small amount of cheese on it.
Composting would be a waste. Grease and carton is basically a candle so you burn it to get the energy.
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Composting is used to generate natural gas, derp.
If that natural gas is used to generate electricity, then it's much more efficient to generate electricity directly from an incinerator.
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Of course you can, cheese is non-toxic organic.
Not if it's some of the crap the big chains pass off as cheese. Real mozzarella or Parmesan is OK. The artificial cheese simulants are probably petrochemical-based.
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Having consumers sort trash is backwards horseshit.
Single-stream recycling is great when it's available, but it's still too expensive for small communities. We had it in the big city (Phoenix), but now we have to hand-separate recyclables into about five different streams. Bring all the recyclables to the station in one bin, and the stream separation takes literally seconds.
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I don't know how it works were you live. Here (rural Germany), everyone has a bin for regular waste, and pays by the volume of that one. With the exception of certain hazardous materials you are allowed to put anything in it.
There also is a separate paper bin. That one is free (and the counties even tend to make some profit from it, recycling works quite well for that one).
Plastics are separate (households don't pay for that one either, but the system tends to work not that well looking a the big picture -