The real problem is that we manufacture garbage and buy it at a virtually infinite pace.
Everything you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has been consumed.
Tell you what is garbage - recycling is garbage.
Our planet is already awash in plastics and that isn't going to stop until we put a stop to the garbage manufacturing industry - i.e. the packaging industry.
"Recycling" is the concept that the packaging industry maintains so that you don't scream in anger at how that industry is polluting the planet.
The truth about recycling came out recently when China stopped accepting recycling from overseas and now the "recycling" i.e. garbage is piling up in incredible mounds here in Melbourne.
Local recycling companies have started to admit they are just throwing it all in landfill.
We need to turn off the garbage manufacturing tap.
It’s absurd how much goes into the bin. Why can’t restaurants especially use cloth napkins that are cleaned off-site and also silverware, plates and cups like what was done for centuries? Getting all restaurants’ service paraphernalia away from disposable-like-Ikea-furniture to nearly zero waste seems entirely doableb because that’s how it was before. Even store beverage containers like seltzer water are refilled without melting them down, why can’t more manufacturers go back to the deposit system and just clean containers instead of completely destroying and remaking them for every use?
Packaging is absolutely necessary for convenience and safety. You can't sell raw meat without a package, for instance; that idea is absurd and stupid. Do you really want to go back to the days when people were constantly suffering from and dying of easily-prevented food-borne illnesses?
For non-food items, packaging is necessary to minimize breakage in shipping. How much more garbage would there be if half the manufactured items were broken in transit?
Recycling is the proper answer to the proliferation of packaging. That we, as a society, aren't setting things up properly to facilitate this and minimize landfilling is our own failure, not that of the Chinese. There is absolutely no reason we can't have companies building large plants to collect recyclables and automatedly sort them and break them down for reprocessing into new packaging. If this isn't happening, it's because of a failure of governance.
The rules are too complex. If you move home to a few miles away the rules change.
Various parts of the recycling chain are highly fragile and far too easy to pollute (as the article discusses), or too susceptible to not being profitable. We've known that for years. Seems like a giant exercise in missing the point.
Should profit be the prime motive? Should we be recycling when re-use used to work so well for many products? Do we want to actually preserve the planet or merely go through the motions with recycling theatre until waste grows another order of magnitude? The waste from a weekly supermarket shop is horrifying compared to the equivalent waste in the nineties.
I think the time has come to take a cue from earlier times and simply require the manufacturers and retailers to cover the cost - you made it, you pay for its disposal, recycling or reuse. Suspect things would start to resolve quite quickly.
Before you say that can't possibly work, for many categories it used to, and it worked very well. For other categories, it should be ample encouragement to return to less packaging, or for fruit and veg, no packaging. We'd start to see some properly biodegradable solutions.
No, I don't suppose this will be too popular, especially with me wanting regulation to "encourage" it.
Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop.
Maybe once every week, 1/52 of the bins should be checked manually before being dumped in the truck. And the owners informed if there are problems like envelope windows or pizza boxes.
Yes, it's expensive to have a separate process to provide that feedback, but it might increase the quality of the recycled materials enough to actually raise the value above the cost of doing it.
> Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop.
For me this is the entire issue. The rules are more nuanced that I can easily remember. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like different cities have different rules, which leaves me even more confused even when I'm at home.
Another part of the problem (at least here in Austin): recycling is free; trash isn't.
A 24-gallon trash can costs $17.90/month.
A 64-gallon trash can costs $24.30/month.
A 96-gallon trash can costs $42.85/month.
You can get as many 96-gallon recycling cans as you want for $0/month.
The obvious goal is to convince people to recycle; but when your small-ish trash can is full, it's pretty tempting to just shove the pizza box from dinner into a recycling bin.
For sure, my area doesn't allow glass or paper and there's some weird thing about cardboard, has to be brown or white only or something like that. So we recycle plastics (you can do numbers 1-5 now!) and brown cardboard in the provided bins and take glass, paper and other cardboard to a recycle center once a month. My previous home allowed glass, plastics (1-2 only), cardboard (anything unless it had food pieces on it), and paper; it was about 6 miles from current home. Just different county.
This happens in some way in Australia. It's kind of good: you get notice when you throw out something they can't recycle/compost, and they threaten to stop collecting from you if you don't improve. It's kind of bad: I put litter in a black compostable bag instead of a green compostable bag and got a warning :-( When asked, they didn't care - use a green bag. Which means they probably don't notice green non-compostable ones.
Or you know, start by simplifying the rules to be closer to what is actually necessary. Things like food and greasy pizza boxen that contaminate other co-mingled stuff are obviously only ever bad to put in the recycling bin. But there are plenty of things that are clearly recyclable yet deemed unprofitable or whatever - eg styrofoam, steel, many plastics - that cities assert are prohibited. These things can still be easily sorted, so a city making a policy that they should not be put in recycling bins is unreasonable. If the sorting center sees enough of it, maybe they can find a better destination for it.
This article completely leaves out the cost to get rid of trash that doesn't go in recycling stream. A city having to pay to get rid of their recycling, while novel, isn't the right comparison. The fallback is to have to pay to get rid of it as plain trash.
It seems to me like there needs to be a way for households to be paid for their recycling.
I don't know how it could practically be done, but if a household's recycling contributions could be tagged and tracked throughought the system somehow - then we could pay them for well-formed recycling, and not pay them (or charge them for waste disposal) when it's not well-formed.
I don’t recycle because of that exact reason. I don’t care that much to spend time sorting garbage. Batteries or toxic materials, I definitely sort, but I’m not going to waste my time inspecting plastics or being told by the garbage cops that this paper or that can’t be recycled.
Sometimes I feel that recycling for most of us is just another coping mechanism. It's a way to explain away the amount that we consume. We throw our recycling into the designated bins blindly without being critical about where it's going. Just recently, here in Australia, some of us, including me, learned that much of our recycling is simply being sold and shipped to China and other countries:
What we really need to do is stop and think about the consequence and byproduct of our consumption. We can start with packaging, especially single use packaging. It's difficult to go the supermarket and buy produce that doesn't come pre-wrapped. Not to mention the issue of our online shopping purchases coming in multiple packages.
Although, there does appear to be change coming. Just recently, our biggest supermarkets just announced that they will cease providing single use plastic bags:
My mother is a school teacher. They have two bins, trash, and the blue recycling bin. At the end of the day, the janitor would just tip the recycling bins into their trash bucket. Everyone knew that.
This isn't the same as where I live and work now. We have extensive recycling programs.
It's hard to do anything good for the community in places that are so individualistic. If it helps someone other than them, even if it ALSO helps them, it's something to be avoided. "A rising tide lifts all boats" doesn't make sense to them because the only important thing is that their boat is lifted higher. They legitimately just do not care about others
The point is that people are putting things which are not recyclable into their recycle bins. You can't recycle greasy paper. You can't recycle grocery bags. If it isn't clean and well sorted, it costs more to process and ultimately becomes a "feel good" way to send things to the same dump.
People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle so as to keep costs down and have fewer things which could be recycled thrown in the dump.
A load of paper can be contaminated with food scraps so that is becomes impossible to recycle.
TL;DR don't put something into a recycling bin unless it is clean and you are sure that it is recyclable (read the guidance you get from your local authority)
Can 98% of my mail not come just so I put it in the recycling bin without review?
As for the disposal industry, we can learn a lot from Japan, but it starts with cultural expectations and education. It can get weird in some countries like Argentina (this knowledge is over a decade old, this may have changed) you don’t get the cartons or jugs for your milk. You get a plastic bag. The store keeps the carton and recycles it for their own monetary reasons.
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
I would bet its globally more optimal to have all trash sorted and cleaned and recycled at a plant than to have each individual in every household do a poor job of it themselves.
I tend to agree with this although I haven't done all of the math.
It seems however that their might be a net social good to create a recycling industry which consists of living accomodations, facilities for sorting, facilities for cleaning, and facilities for reconstituting bulk goods out of recyclable material, and then a set of factories that would use that to create 50 - 100% post consumer products for sale in the general market.
The purpose of these economic units would be three fold, one it would provide housing and an income to anyone who was willing to work and it would not require a lot of pre-requisites for the work. Second it would reduce the landfall load and burdened cost of recycling by minimizing transportation costs while effectively recycling. And lastly it would provide a stream of goods and bulk materials for industry that would provide a means to offset some if not all of the cost of the operation.
As a government sponsored activity I feel it could simultaneously provide living accommodations and meaningful work for a large chunk of the homeless population and an even larger fraction of the post-felony population.
My old town toyed around with this. No idea if they're still doing it but the idea was everything coming in would at least get a rough sorting. Seems like a MUUUUUCH better solution, even if it costs more.
Local sorting for compostable, definitely trash and possibly recyclable would be an improvement over what you're suggesting, then separation of recyclables can be done on the dry pile without the compostable trash ruining it (cardboard that has been wet is no longer recyclable, for example).
It will be for sure when the process can be automated. I'm guessing it will be not more than 10 or 20 years until we have robots that sort through the trash and separate things with a much finer level of detail.
My wife tells me that growing up in India, people would come door to door to collect metal and paper to be recycled -- to make money. That's not practical in the U.S. because people's time is much more valuable. If recycling really made sense, you would not need to mandate it.
People (like, random people, not officials) still do this for aluminum cans in US states with bottle deposits. They go door-to-door pulling cans out of recycling bins and bringing them to deposit centers en masse. I've seen this both in Boston and in the rural town I grew up in. The guy who frequented my childhood home actually made enough money to leave each "customer" a jar of peanuts each year at Christmas.
And even if you have to pay someone to take recycling it makes sense because the damage to the environment is less than just dumping it in a landfill. That's a cost that's externalized by manufacturers and not easily recouped without mandatory recycling. (The alternative is to tax manufacturers and importers for all the trash they generate, equivalent to the environmental damage it causes. Bottle bills effectively combine these two approaches.)
As long as the cost of pollution from creating the products isn't baked into the cost of the price consumers pay, it will always seem not worth it to individuals. The problem is that we have so much pollution now its affecting us at a planetary level.
This is a good situation for the government to come in and mandate a solution instead of letting the tragedy of the commons play out. A better solution might be mandating that pollution costs are baked into the product's costs, but doing nothing is just going to hurt everyone
In my CA neighbourhood, metal scrap collection cars will come around on trash day. All the neighbours know that bulky items with high metal content can be left separate from their trash and it will get picked up.
People in the US totally recycle metal, but paradoxically it is never encouraged since the economic incentives are so large. For example: One of the main reasons that abandoned buildings in Detroit decay so quickly is that they are generally stripped of their wiring and plumbing since copper and lead are so easy to turn into money.
I definitely remember this being a thing in small-town America in the 1980's -- particularly with aluminum cans, which I suppose is one of the more valuable recyclables. Schools and churches would ask people to save their cans and bring them in as a fundraiser, and you'd sometimes see people walking up and down the highway picking up the cans thrown out by litterbugs.
And yet today I have to pay someone to haul away my valuable materials. :)
When I was a kid (mid eighties UK) everyone got their milk delivered nightly in glass bottles which, when empty, were left out for collection by the milkman on the next delivery. Nearly waste free (foil caps aside), efficient and not too expensive, albeit slightly more expensive than supermarket. We've taken several steps backwards in that regard.
American children did the same thing in WWII (for the war effort, not money). In that case there was no mandate, either - it was all community-organized and sometimes highly competitive.
There are a ton of people on the fringes that make extra cash hauling scrap metal, at least when the prices make sense. I had a couple uncles that would regularly go out "junking", picking up old cars and stoves and stuff.
Because partly, what can be recycled where is very confusing!
Where I live, our recycling facilities can't recycle certain "recycle numbers". And they have a "no plastic bags" policy even if they have recycling numbers and indicators.
We also have an additional bin for compostables, which sometimes increases the confusion for certain items. For instance, paper goes into recycling but not shredded paper, which needs to go with the compostables.
Let’s find the best possible explanation that doesn’t acknowledge the insanity of accepted consumer packaging practices and made-to-replace product cycles.
Placer County in California pays for one bin recycling. Don't make people think, just allocate resources to cover recycling as a part of the waste stream.
The economics are broken. Incent cleaner waste stream, and you'll get better outcomes. I have no idea how to incent it except to note cash-back schemes aren't being pointed to here.
The economics of garbage sorting are broken. but that doesn't mean garbage is broken, or recycling is broken. It means we need to look at what we want. If we want more people to recycle more, we need to tool up to handle more incorrect waste going into the input buffer.
If we want people to recycle "better" we need to be prepared to lose some inputs, because of the cost burden in the community of dealing with contamination. Or, we need to remove the complexity by making it easier.
Personally, my bugbear is the local (Qld, Australia) refusal to take the shopping bags full of recycles. The bags are recyclable, the contents are recyclable, but our local provider has decided not to accept the bags, but only the contents "because reasons"
This needs to be removed from the hands of the public and forced onto the recycling industry. These are solvable problems, and I would go so far to suggest they perhaps are not that difficult to solve.
Recycling as a profit center is part of the issue.
Some areas I've lived in have a single recycling bin for all recyclables, some force it on the households to separate paper from metals and plastics, and some have a bin for each.
As the article mentions paper and cardboard can be mechanically separated from other materials, the reason some areas don't do this is not because they don't have the resources, it sometimes because different recyclers are paying the municipality (or whoever is in charge) for the material. So the sorting is then pushed on to the households to do.
Aside from being too complicated, with too many overlapping rules, the sorting of packaging should be placed on the recycler who is in the business of recycling.
The system in the Bay Area is especially broken because it is built to nudge everyone to put as much as possible in recycling/compost. We've got very limited trash space, expensive upgrades to larger trash bins, and huge recycling/compost bins.
The cities I've lived in (in the US) provided the garbage and recycle bins. How about printing the recyclable materials and exceptions ON THE BINS. Put it on the lid, so it can be easily customized for each community. It amazes me that no one has proposed this yet.
Another idea - randomly choose streets to spot check recycling behavior and flag the cans based on their score. Nothing exotic - don't have to do it constantly or over large areas, simple 3 score system (good, acceptable, and poor), and just a quick peak in the bins as they are manually thrown into the truck. Your score is affixed to the bin, which you are rolling out every week for all the neighborhood to see. Of course there would have to be some discretion, like people just moving in, hence the process being manual, and probably some exemption process. The next week, those rated poor will be rechecked and rescored. Fail again and you get a warning that has the problems checked off from a list. After 4 consecutive failures you receive a fine. Or maybe you have to deliver your garbage to a sorting facility where someone will go over the process. Or there's a class.
There are lots of options beyond throwing up a website hidden behind 3 different local government portals.
"And then there are items that should go straight to the trash — garden hoses, wood pallets, or, on one recent afternoon, a bound stack of roofing shingles."
Ideally this stuff should be redistributed to places it can actually be used ("freecycling")
[+] [-] andrewstuart|7 years ago|reply
Everything you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has been consumed.
Tell you what is garbage - recycling is garbage.
Our planet is already awash in plastics and that isn't going to stop until we put a stop to the garbage manufacturing industry - i.e. the packaging industry.
"Recycling" is the concept that the packaging industry maintains so that you don't scream in anger at how that industry is polluting the planet.
The truth about recycling came out recently when China stopped accepting recycling from overseas and now the "recycling" i.e. garbage is piling up in incredible mounds here in Melbourne.
Local recycling companies have started to admit they are just throwing it all in landfill.
We need to turn off the garbage manufacturing tap.
[+] [-] nunodonato|7 years ago|reply
It's important people start using more ecological solutions to package and carry stuff around.
[+] [-] himom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wizardforhire|7 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
[+] [-] grecy|7 years ago|reply
Only when you buy junk, which I assert is not actually food anyway.
Stick the outside and you'll buy fruit, vegetables, meat, beans, rice and pasta.
You can put all of those into re-usable bags or containers and buy everything you need to eat very healthy meals with no waste at all.
If it comes in a shiny plastic package, plastic bottle or tin can, you shouldn't be eating it anyway (in general)
[+] [-] magduf|7 years ago|reply
For non-food items, packaging is necessary to minimize breakage in shipping. How much more garbage would there be if half the manufactured items were broken in transit?
Recycling is the proper answer to the proliferation of packaging. That we, as a society, aren't setting things up properly to facilitate this and minimize landfilling is our own failure, not that of the Chinese. There is absolutely no reason we can't have companies building large plants to collect recyclables and automatedly sort them and break them down for reprocessing into new packaging. If this isn't happening, it's because of a failure of governance.
[+] [-] oldcynic|7 years ago|reply
Various parts of the recycling chain are highly fragile and far too easy to pollute (as the article discusses), or too susceptible to not being profitable. We've known that for years. Seems like a giant exercise in missing the point.
Should profit be the prime motive? Should we be recycling when re-use used to work so well for many products? Do we want to actually preserve the planet or merely go through the motions with recycling theatre until waste grows another order of magnitude? The waste from a weekly supermarket shop is horrifying compared to the equivalent waste in the nineties.
I think the time has come to take a cue from earlier times and simply require the manufacturers and retailers to cover the cost - you made it, you pay for its disposal, recycling or reuse. Suspect things would start to resolve quite quickly.
Before you say that can't possibly work, for many categories it used to, and it worked very well. For other categories, it should be ample encouragement to return to less packaging, or for fruit and veg, no packaging. We'd start to see some properly biodegradable solutions.
No, I don't suppose this will be too popular, especially with me wanting regulation to "encourage" it.
[+] [-] csense|7 years ago|reply
Maybe once every week, 1/52 of the bins should be checked manually before being dumped in the truck. And the owners informed if there are problems like envelope windows or pizza boxes.
Yes, it's expensive to have a separate process to provide that feedback, but it might increase the quality of the recycled materials enough to actually raise the value above the cost of doing it.
[+] [-] DoofusOfDeath|7 years ago|reply
For me this is the entire issue. The rules are more nuanced that I can easily remember. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like different cities have different rules, which leaves me even more confused even when I'm at home.
[+] [-] bradstewart|7 years ago|reply
A 24-gallon trash can costs $17.90/month. A 64-gallon trash can costs $24.30/month. A 96-gallon trash can costs $42.85/month.
You can get as many 96-gallon recycling cans as you want for $0/month.
The obvious goal is to convince people to recycle; but when your small-ish trash can is full, it's pretty tempting to just shove the pizza box from dinner into a recycling bin.
[+] [-] ewams|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindslight|7 years ago|reply
This article completely leaves out the cost to get rid of trash that doesn't go in recycling stream. A city having to pay to get rid of their recycling, while novel, isn't the right comparison. The fallback is to have to pay to get rid of it as plain trash.
[+] [-] newnewpdro|7 years ago|reply
I don't know how it could practically be done, but if a household's recycling contributions could be tagged and tracked throughought the system somehow - then we could pay them for well-formed recycling, and not pay them (or charge them for waste disposal) when it's not well-formed.
There's your feedback loop.
[+] [-] fjsolwmv|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fourmii|7 years ago|reply
https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china-recycling/stor...
What we really need to do is stop and think about the consequence and byproduct of our consumption. We can start with packaging, especially single use packaging. It's difficult to go the supermarket and buy produce that doesn't come pre-wrapped. Not to mention the issue of our online shopping purchases coming in multiple packages.
Although, there does appear to be change coming. Just recently, our biggest supermarkets just announced that they will cease providing single use plastic bags:
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-start...
[+] [-] mrguyorama|7 years ago|reply
This isn't the same as where I live and work now. We have extensive recycling programs.
It's hard to do anything good for the community in places that are so individualistic. If it helps someone other than them, even if it ALSO helps them, it's something to be avoided. "A rising tide lifts all boats" doesn't make sense to them because the only important thing is that their boat is lifted higher. They legitimately just do not care about others
[+] [-] colechristensen|7 years ago|reply
The point is that people are putting things which are not recyclable into their recycle bins. You can't recycle greasy paper. You can't recycle grocery bags. If it isn't clean and well sorted, it costs more to process and ultimately becomes a "feel good" way to send things to the same dump.
People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle so as to keep costs down and have fewer things which could be recycled thrown in the dump.
A load of paper can be contaminated with food scraps so that is becomes impossible to recycle.
TL;DR don't put something into a recycling bin unless it is clean and you are sure that it is recyclable (read the guidance you get from your local authority)
[+] [-] cordite|7 years ago|reply
As for the disposal industry, we can learn a lot from Japan, but it starts with cultural expectations and education. It can get weird in some countries like Argentina (this knowledge is over a decade old, this may have changed) you don’t get the cartons or jugs for your milk. You get a plastic bag. The store keeps the carton and recycles it for their own monetary reasons.
[+] [-] pmontra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moviuro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petermcneeley|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
It seems however that their might be a net social good to create a recycling industry which consists of living accomodations, facilities for sorting, facilities for cleaning, and facilities for reconstituting bulk goods out of recyclable material, and then a set of factories that would use that to create 50 - 100% post consumer products for sale in the general market.
The purpose of these economic units would be three fold, one it would provide housing and an income to anyone who was willing to work and it would not require a lot of pre-requisites for the work. Second it would reduce the landfall load and burdened cost of recycling by minimizing transportation costs while effectively recycling. And lastly it would provide a stream of goods and bulk materials for industry that would provide a means to offset some if not all of the cost of the operation.
As a government sponsored activity I feel it could simultaneously provide living accommodations and meaningful work for a large chunk of the homeless population and an even larger fraction of the post-felony population.
[+] [-] dawnerd|7 years ago|reply
https://foresternetwork.com/daily/waste/far-from-typical/
[+] [-] estebank|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ConceptJunkie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seba_dos1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poster123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colanderman|7 years ago|reply
And even if you have to pay someone to take recycling it makes sense because the damage to the environment is less than just dumping it in a landfill. That's a cost that's externalized by manufacturers and not easily recouped without mandatory recycling. (The alternative is to tax manufacturers and importers for all the trash they generate, equivalent to the environmental damage it causes. Bottle bills effectively combine these two approaches.)
[+] [-] lovich|7 years ago|reply
This is a good situation for the government to come in and mandate a solution instead of letting the tragedy of the commons play out. A better solution might be mandating that pollution costs are baked into the product's costs, but doing nothing is just going to hurt everyone
[+] [-] dv_dt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fergie|7 years ago|reply
http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260
[+] [-] simmons|7 years ago|reply
And yet today I have to pay someone to haul away my valuable materials. :)
[+] [-] petepete|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lainga|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] halite|7 years ago|reply
She's correct. This still exists in smaller cities. I did this with all my books when I went last time.
[+] [-] megaman22|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yawz|7 years ago|reply
Where I live, our recycling facilities can't recycle certain "recycle numbers". And they have a "no plastic bags" policy even if they have recycling numbers and indicators.
We also have an additional bin for compostables, which sometimes increases the confusion for certain items. For instance, paper goes into recycling but not shredded paper, which needs to go with the compostables.
[+] [-] extralego|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swoongoonz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|7 years ago|reply
The economics of garbage sorting are broken. but that doesn't mean garbage is broken, or recycling is broken. It means we need to look at what we want. If we want more people to recycle more, we need to tool up to handle more incorrect waste going into the input buffer.
If we want people to recycle "better" we need to be prepared to lose some inputs, because of the cost burden in the community of dealing with contamination. Or, we need to remove the complexity by making it easier.
Personally, my bugbear is the local (Qld, Australia) refusal to take the shopping bags full of recycles. The bags are recyclable, the contents are recyclable, but our local provider has decided not to accept the bags, but only the contents "because reasons"
[+] [-] pedalpete|7 years ago|reply
Recycling as a profit center is part of the issue.
Some areas I've lived in have a single recycling bin for all recyclables, some force it on the households to separate paper from metals and plastics, and some have a bin for each.
As the article mentions paper and cardboard can be mechanically separated from other materials, the reason some areas don't do this is not because they don't have the resources, it sometimes because different recyclers are paying the municipality (or whoever is in charge) for the material. So the sorting is then pushed on to the households to do.
Aside from being too complicated, with too many overlapping rules, the sorting of packaging should be placed on the recycler who is in the business of recycling.
[+] [-] dogruck|7 years ago|reply
https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-...
[+] [-] swolchok|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xbkingx|7 years ago|reply
The cities I've lived in (in the US) provided the garbage and recycle bins. How about printing the recyclable materials and exceptions ON THE BINS. Put it on the lid, so it can be easily customized for each community. It amazes me that no one has proposed this yet.
Another idea - randomly choose streets to spot check recycling behavior and flag the cans based on their score. Nothing exotic - don't have to do it constantly or over large areas, simple 3 score system (good, acceptable, and poor), and just a quick peak in the bins as they are manually thrown into the truck. Your score is affixed to the bin, which you are rolling out every week for all the neighborhood to see. Of course there would have to be some discretion, like people just moving in, hence the process being manual, and probably some exemption process. The next week, those rated poor will be rechecked and rescored. Fail again and you get a warning that has the problems checked off from a list. After 4 consecutive failures you receive a fine. Or maybe you have to deliver your garbage to a sorting facility where someone will go over the process. Or there's a class.
There are lots of options beyond throwing up a website hidden behind 3 different local government portals.
[+] [-] maxerickson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edem|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fergie|7 years ago|reply
Ideally this stuff should be redistributed to places it can actually be used ("freecycling")
[+] [-] halite|7 years ago|reply