5 ms·

could have been another article about japan. people rinse before bagging and their in noticeably less smell. what would be nice is a user pays system for garba

by fungi 11y ago

could have been another article about japan. people rinse before bagging and their in noticeably less smell. what would be nice is a user pays system for garbage recycling in order to create an incentive to reuse containers and reduce over packaging (unfortunately this would inevitability create a problem of more illegal dumping)

icelancer 11y ago
We already have user pays in Seattle. It costs $ for larger and larger cans of recycling and garbage (but not food waste, I don't think).
- reagency 11y ago
  Recycling is free, garbage and compost is feed (hah, pun!)
- mstromb 11y ago
  It seems that recycling is a flat rate even if you get two cans. Jumping from the smallest to largest compost can is ~$5. Trash is the really expensive one: http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServices/Garbage/HouseResidentsGarbage/GarbageRates/index.htm http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServices/Garbage/HouseResident... There's been a big push around composting lately, to the point where there will be fines for having too many compostables in the trash. People were up in arms over this, as it meant that the waste collection people would be rooting around in your trash to determine if it was complaint, though apparently they can't open opaque bags to check so it's pretty much a non-issue.
  - icelancer 11y ago
    This is already happening in my neighborhood/county at least. We separate our stuff but we've seen other cans get ticketed for contaminated receptacles. (I think it's mostly just warnings now, unless you are a habitual offender.) Still, this is all a bunch of crap. This is a perfect thing to centralize and no amount of shaming/fining the population is going to actually solve the problem in the long run without causing major headaches and graft for the waste management companies (oh, the stories I could tell about them).
yourapostasy 11y ago
I have found trying to reduce packaging and reuse containers rather difficult. If manufacturers and retailers cooperate to offer bulk product pricing for customers who reuse containers and thus reduce the significant packaging costs of retail quantities/products, I would be one of the (few?) target consumers who take advantage of that. I already try to do so, but I found significant frictional costs in my attempts. A couple examples of those costs. * Many checkout clerks are not familiar with properly keying in a package tare weight. This is a problem when you bring your own packaging when purchasing bulk. This is compounded when you already have some residual amount in the packaging, and want to convey the tare of the combined weight. The result is you increase the complexity of your at-home handling of packages (you have to set aside temporary space and containers for the residual amounts so your packages are empty at the store), and there is significant time at the check out for clerks looking up/asking others how to set a tare, and/or you go to customer service to correct improperly keyed-in tare values (or no tare values at all), even after politely asking the check out clerks if they would prefer you go to another line/clerk to handle the tare data. This even happens to me at supposedly highly-trained vendors like Whole Foods Market. * Manufacturers are simply not equipped to handle consumers who want to purchase one single unit of a large quantity of product, over and over, year after year. For example, a 5 gal carboy of Dr. Bronner's soap straight from the manufacturer costs about the same as the equivalent quantity 5, 1 gal jugs from the retail store, after accounting for shipping and handling and sales taxes, respectively. That's fine, except those carboys are not cheap, and there simply isn't an option to purchase refills that ship in heavy duty collapsible plastic bags (shipped in heavy cardboard), not to speak of sending those refills back to the manufacturer. I'd love to get refills like that for my staple items, in highly-generic and reusable containers, instead of always sending containers to the recycling plant. I'm constantly amazed how prolifically we use disposable plastic packaging, when in those applications where it spends most of its lifecycle away from UV exposure, it is an extraordinarily durable material. From a cultural perspective, I completely understand: I'm a very remote outlier consumer, and there are likely only a few thousand world wide who share my outlook and are are willing to go to some lengths to reduce how much I feed into the recycling and waste streams. My philosophy is that waste is a material expression of our lack of knowledge of how to usefully transform the embodied energy of the waste into something else we want to use, and the less waste and even recycling activity we perform, the more overall efficient we are.

by fungi 11y ago

icelancer 11y ago

We already have user pays in Seattle. It costs $ for larger and larger cans of recycling and garbage (but not food waste, I don't think).

reagency 11y ago
Recycling is free, garbage and compost is feed (hah, pun!)
mstromb 11y ago
It seems that recycling is a flat rate even if you get two cans. Jumping from the smallest to largest compost can is ~$5. Trash is the really expensive one: http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServices/Garbage/HouseResidentsGarbage/GarbageRates/index.htm http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServices/Garbage/HouseResident... There's been a big push around composting lately, to the point where there will be fines for having too many compostables in the trash. People were up in arms over this, as it meant that the waste collection people would be rooting around in your trash to determine if it was complaint, though apparently they can't open opaque bags to check so it's pretty much a non-issue.
- icelancer 11y ago
  This is already happening in my neighborhood/county at least. We separate our stuff but we've seen other cans get ticketed for contaminated receptacles. (I think it's mostly just warnings now, unless you are a habitual offender.) Still, this is all a bunch of crap. This is a perfect thing to centralize and no amount of shaming/fining the population is going to actually solve the problem in the long run without causing major headaches and graft for the waste management companies (oh, the stories I could tell about them).

yourapostasy 11y ago

I have found trying to reduce packaging and reuse containers rather difficult. If manufacturers and retailers cooperate to offer bulk product pricing for customers who reuse containers and thus reduce the significant packaging costs of retail quantities/products, I would be one of the (few?) target consumers who take advantage of that. I already try to do so, but I found significant frictional costs in my attempts. A couple examples of those costs. * Many checkout clerks are not familiar with properly keying in a package tare weight. This is a problem when you bring your own packaging when purchasing bulk. This is compounded when you already have some residual amount in the packaging, and want to convey the tare of the combined weight. The result is you increase the complexity of your at-home handling of packages (you have to set aside temporary space and containers for the residual amounts so your packages are empty at the store), and there is significant time at the check out for clerks looking up/asking others how to set a tare, and/or you go to customer service to correct improperly keyed-in tare values (or no tare values at all), even after politely asking the check out clerks if they would prefer you go to another line/clerk to handle the tare data. This even happens to me at supposedly highly-trained vendors like Whole Foods Market. * Manufacturers are simply not equipped to handle consumers who want to purchase one single unit of a large quantity of product, over and over, year after year. For example, a 5 gal carboy of Dr. Bronner's soap straight from the manufacturer costs about the same as the equivalent quantity 5, 1 gal jugs from the retail store, after accounting for shipping and handling and sales taxes, respectively. That's fine, except those carboys are not cheap, and there simply isn't an option to purchase refills that ship in heavy duty collapsible plastic bags (shipped in heavy cardboard), not to speak of sending those refills back to the manufacturer. I'd love to get refills like that for my staple items, in highly-generic and reusable containers, instead of always sending containers to the recycling plant. I'm constantly amazed how prolifically we use disposable plastic packaging, when in those applications where it spends most of its lifecycle away from UV exposure, it is an extraordinarily durable material. From a cultural perspective, I completely understand: I'm a very remote outlier consumer, and there are likely only a few thousand world wide who share my outlook and are are willing to go to some lengths to reduce how much I feed into the recycling and waste streams. My philosophy is that waste is a material expression of our lack of knowledge of how to usefully transform the embodied energy of the waste into something else we want to use, and the less waste and even recycling activity we perform, the more overall efficient we are.