[alienicecream]

In my county they banned the collection of any recycling that was bagged. So if you put your recycling in a bag to contain it, the garbage man won't pick it up. So now what happens is everyone puts their recycling loose in a blue bin and the wind blows all the bins over and scatters the recycling all over the neighborhood and eventually into the nearby ponds and ravines.

If you complain about the policy they tell you that it's because the recycling plant can't deal with the bags, it clogs up their machines. So in an age of automated assembly plants and advanced robotics the entire county here is at the mercy of a recycling plant that can't obtain a machine that can cut a bag open.

It just goes to show what a farce the whole program is. Now they're talking about making the rules even more restrictive, like using clear garbage bags so people won't put recycling in the garbage, even though that is going to increase the trash accumulating in the environment. It's a bureaucratic box-ticking and back-patting scheme.

[logifail]

> If you complain about the policy they tell you that it's because the recycling plant can't deal with the bags, it clogs up their machines[...]

Machines?! Most press photos that show the inside of plastic recycling sorting plants show a surprising number of Mk I human beings standing at a conveyor belt helping sort out the, err, rubbish.

[alienicecream]

Yeah, they could just hire some people for minimum wage to do it, but apparently that's too much to ask too, they would rather focus on vanity measures that will make things worse for the environment and more difficult for people to comply with, but will look good in a press release. This is the natural product of environmentalism and bureaucracy.