From what I've observed, distribution makes sense if your nodes are homogeneous. Centralization makes sense if your nodes are heterogeneous. People are typical

From what I've observed, distribution makes sense if your nodes are homogeneous. Centralization makes sense if your nodes are heterogeneous. People are typically heterogeneous (various levels of training, apathy, emotions, stress) and getting them to recycle properly is impossible. If everyone were a robot with the exact same version of the exact same recycling firmware with no known bugs, distributed recycling would make absolute sense.