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Recycling sucks. You have to dismantle products and packaging, cut cardboard into little squares no more than 20cm X 20cm, sort glass bottles by colour, remove

Recycling sucks. You have to dismantle products and packaging, cut cardboard into little squares no more than 20cm X 20cm, sort glass bottles by colour, remove the labels, or else it won't be (expensively) collected. You can also go drop it off yourself, but you have to pay for the pleasure, and own or rent a vehicle. Even after all of that, a majority of what is supposed to be recycled ends up being "recycled" into electricity, by an incinerator. That's the case in this neck of the woods, at any rate. Recycling treats a symptom, not a disease. We allow the production of wasteful packaging, we accept planned obsolescence, and we dispose of things that could be yet used for a long time to come. A better solution would be to impose the cost of disposal on manufacturers - this already happens to a degree with WEEE, but try actually getting a manufacturer to collect - it's made deliberately difficult as they'd rather you just fly-tip and save them the expense - even though you paid for that service as part of your purchase. Another better solution would be to pass goods on whole for re-use rather than recycling wherever possible, which has gained some traction through things like freecycle and eBay, but is still a minority case. This behaviour could be encouraged by governments, but is instead actively discouraged, as it hurts sales of new goods, and therefore tax revenues. As per usual, we'll only change when forced to - by which point it'll be too late. People will use 300 year old toasters in the future, and weep for our wastefulnes. I do what I can, buy very little new (all of my furniture is pre 1960), dumpster dive, pass things I no longer want or need on, but it's still not enough.

pizza234 11y ago
Disposal is not so complicated in all the countries. In some you have much looser rules, eg. no labels removal, and [directly] paid collection. While it's true that solving the causes is radically more effective than treating the symptoms, in the isolated view of the garbage recycling, separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection.
- pessimizer 11y ago
  > separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection. Why would this be true? I would think that a worker after collection would be 10x more efficient and precise when separating recyclables then individuals doing it piecemeal. The consumer is certainly paid less than a employee to do that job badly (in comparison), but there's no way that the extra taxes that I would have to pay to have recyclables sorted centrally would be higher than value of the time it takes to sort it myself.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Try to take apart a box where you have half-empty yoghurt cups and newspapers. And now imagine having them separately. Separation by the consumer is far easier, because they can make sure in the paper container is purely paper, and it can just be dissolved, cleaned, and recast into paper. And in the plastic container is just plastic, metal and organic stuff, so you can clean it with water, and are left with plastic and metal, and can separate magnetically.
  - CaptSpify 11y ago
    I'm skeptical of this myself. I think the real reason would be: It's cheaper for the recycling company, as it costs them nothing for you to recycle.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Commercial recyclers operate at a scale too large to hire people to sort. They depend on automated sorting, which uses blown air and physics to separate items - plastic flies higher than metal. What doesn't go into one of the other slots gets sent to the landfill... Including most of the glass jars that you cleaned and sorted carefully.
    - theoh 11y ago
      Actually in some cases the equipment is more advanced. About 8 years ago I visited a mixed recycling facility in London which separated plastic bottles by computer vision triggering a precise air jet to launch each bottle into a different hopper. There was also a stage that used rollers to shatter glass bottles, though I don't remember the purpose of that.
- nwah1 11y ago
  Combined with the traditional sorting techniques, computer vision and AI are improving to such an extent that sorting probably doesn't need to be done by the consumer anymore. It will just take awhile for all the infrastructure to catch up to this reality.
- thinkmassive 11y ago
  > separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection I think this is an antiquated view, because at least some recycling facilities specifically request that you not separate anything. It might sorted by humans after collection, but apparently it's most efficient to have everything dumped into the truck together. http://durhamnc.gov/862/Recycling http://durhamnc.gov/862/Recycling
  - douche 11y ago
    When they are just running it through some magnets to kick out the metal that's worth recycling and feeding the rest into an incinerator/trash-fueled boiler.
david-given 11y ago
In the UK I had two wheelie bins. One was for landfill, the other was for recycling. The recyling bin would take paper, carboard, most plastics, cans, etc. Not glass, which had to be taken to separate bottle banks. Also not some kinds of plastic --- yoghurt pots, mainly. But on the whole recycling was hardly a burden.
- ndespres 11y ago
  In my town, after the landfill filled up, they built an incinerator. The town dump was turned into a "transfer station" where residents could bring their trash and recyclables. Trash would get "transferred" into trucks and hauled off to the incinerator, where it was converted into ash and electricity. The recyclables which we dutifully sorted into glass, plastics, newspaper, cardboard, metal.. were also hauled off to that same incinerator. As a condition of building the incinerator in the town, the builder granted us a yearly quota of so many tons of garbage we could dump in there for free. Since our garbage was under that quota, they just brought the recycling there too! Why pay for it to be properly processed when we could burn it for free?
  - Symbiote 11y ago
    Because you can sell scrap metal and glass for cash, but it doesn't burn. It will contaminate the ash, which you can also sell.
yesco 11y ago
In my town you just have to sort the plastics from the papers and they will collect it for free every Tuesday. The trash bags on the other hand are very expensive and not very big, I find myself trying to get as much as I can in my recycling to avoid having to buy more. In fact the first week I moved in I didn't crush or sort anything because my landlord told me that was all I needed to do and they still collected it (even though my landlord was wrong). Its also worth noting that as a result of this system, every house on my street always has a larger amount of recycling then garbage (we don't use bins so its easier to notice), it would be nice if more places did this.
aeorgnoieang 11y ago
Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away? If the prices covered the real costs, and they were reasonably known and understandable, people buying stuff could make their own decisions about the best tradeoffs to make between all the various things you mention. Recycling and reusing are great, but there are real costs to both. I've got a bunch of CDs that I don't really want anymore. I'm certainly not ever likely to use them, given Spotify and the like. But I feel bad enough about just throwing them away that I've just held on to them. I fantasize about giving them away to someone but realistically that would be such a pain in the ass that I almost certainly will never bother. [Now I'm motivated to throw them away!] Just the cost of someone driving to where I live and, maybe, take them from me – for free – has both non-zero environmental and economic costs! Throwing things away is fine. Not accounting for all the costs, to everyone, is the real problem.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- c22 11y ago
  > Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away? Because if the cost is great many people will just dump their trash illegally.
  - aeorgnoieang 11y ago
    That's part of the cost too! In fact, that's probably one of the most important, and potentially largest, components of the cost to consider. People already dump their trash illegally. Are you arguing that whatever laws they're breaking should be repealed?
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      People get into this really nasty habit of thinking law exists in a vacuum free from the existence of human nature. This is sounding a lot like a gun control argument. Instead, think of this from a goal based perspective. Your goal is to reduce stuff getting thrown in the trash. Therefore, you want to encourage recycling. Making recycling expensive harms your goal. You want to encourage people to recycle, not discourage. Don't do it, then. Trying to force people to recycle doesn't work. It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin. Negative reinforcement being off the table, use positive reinforcement.
cradle2cradle 11y ago
Cradle to Cradle? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865475873/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0865475873&linkCode=as2&tag=littdidd-20&linkId=TQSSCEHTF7S4IFAZ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865475873/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...
hackuser 11y ago
> You have to dismantle products and packaging, cut cardboard into little squares no more than 20cm X 20cm, sort glass bottles by colour, remove the labels This doesn't describe recylcing in any place I've lived or seen for a long time. Either all materials go in one big bag/box or at most they are sorted into paper and 'other'. Some of what you describe I saw with early recycling programs long ago, but I've never heard of 20x20cm squares of cardboard.
lobster_johnson 11y ago
The extent of pre-sorting needed depends completely on the local recycler company and how modern their systems are. Where I lived recently, there were no specific guidelines about coloured glass, labels or cardboard dimensions. In NYC, it's even simpler — only two bins: (1) glass, plastic, metal and cartons (mostly juice containers), and (2) paper and cardboard. By metal, they mean almost anything made of metal, including spray cans and filing cabinets (!).
lgieron 11y ago
> We allow the production of wasteful packaging, we accept planned obsolescence, Regarding planned obsolescence, it seems fairly easy to legislate away - just pass a law that mandates a minimum of 5-10 years warranty for consumer goods (cars, laptops, smartphones, home applicances). This way, the manufacturers will reengineer the devices to last longer.
- orthecreedence 11y ago
  I agree. This is one of those cases where I think regulation over markets is warranted. The free market won't solve this problem because it's cheaper to make junk that breaks and people are too focused on the now to care if their stove will work in 10 years. It's one of those greater-good problems that the market ignores but would benefit society as a whole. As a consumer, it would be nice to have protection against shoddy craftsmanship as well. Something like this might even have the side effect of moving more production jobs back to in-country factories where quality can be controlled much better than in a foreign country. EDIT: Thought about this more. There has to be some body that regulates what constitutes an appliance worth warranting. Maybe this could be done on a cost basis, but then would you have to have a warranty on an expensive piece of art? If you did have some sort of department deciding these things, would that allow for corruption? Would the microwave lobby somehow worm their way out of having a microwave being included as a warranty-guaranteed appliance? No easy answers, unless I'm missing something.
  - lgieron 11y ago
    Ha ha, actually, I'm in a "foreign" country (Poland, biggest producer of home applicances in Europe due to proximity to West EU markets and low cost of labor), so moving back is not what I would consider a good thing :)
    - orthecreedence 11y ago
      Interesting, I didn't know that most appliance production happens in Poland. I was trying to find a general way of noting the production relationship between the US and China, but I know not everyone here is from the US and not all countries ship manufacturing off to China. Maybe the "foreign" country remark was a bit too general. Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured "in-house" in the US years ago and how they function now, it's night and day. People are sold on features, not longevity...but I would much rather have fridge that lasts 30 years and keeps my food cold than one that orders new food online when I'm out and breaks after 2 years and can't be repaired. I want there to be a more realistic balance between cost and longevity so the things we put so much resources into building don't just end up in a landfill two years after their creation. We're offsetting economic costs in exchange for environmental costs. It's an enormous debt that we'll have to pay back soon.
agumonkey 11y ago
Make trendy the people like this San Francisco family that lives with almost no garbage. This is mostly a cobra effect of modern opulence, people had nothing and knew how to reuse. Now we just meh out of the issue and put it aside like morons. There are more and more attempts at reducing waste but it's still shown as niche in TV news and such. Make Kanye West use glass bottles and tote bags.
nihonde 11y ago
Every single Japanese home separates their trash into: (1) burnable trash, (2) plastic, (3) paper-pack, (4) PET bottles, (5) cans, (6) glass bottles, (7) cardboard, (8) broken glass, metal, etc., and (9) large items such as furniture. When I first moved to Japan, I thought it was crazy how many rules there were about separating garbage. It was inconceivable to me that people took the time and effort to ensure that the plastic bits from product packaging go into one bin, and the paper bits into another. The first time I had to wash a plastic food container and leave it out to dry so that I could throw it away clean, I balked. No one could possibly put up with this nonsense. Guess what? It's been over a year now since I moved to Japan, and the garbage routine is a completely invisible part of my life. You get into the habit. It feels good to do your part. Everyone else is doing their part, too. Is Japan the perfect (or even the most effective) country in terms of recycling and waste management? Not at all. Is it by far the cleanest place that I've ever lived in (including USA and Europe)? Absolutely, yes. I'm not suggesting that Japan has the answer. I'm just observing that a sorting effort made from the bottom up distributes the work and avoids the expense of sorting later. Until I'd seen it in action, I would never have believed that people would tolerate such a confusing and onerous system.
- galfarragem 11y ago
  Recycling looks as the perfect activity to apply the strategy of gamification. E.g. Each family could have a card and get some score for amount of recycling materials. Then this score could be translated as prizes for children, pets, etc.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    That idea is pretty fucking insulting. If my local community came up with that I would trash the notification and card straight away.
    - galfarragem 11y ago
      Maybe you should use your anger as fuel to elaborate a bit more your comment..

pizza234 11y ago

Disposal is not so complicated in all the countries. In some you have much looser rules, eg. no labels removal, and [directly] paid collection. While it's true that solving the causes is radically more effective than treating the symptoms, in the isolated view of the garbage recycling, separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection.

pessimizer 11y ago
> separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection. Why would this be true? I would think that a worker after collection would be 10x more efficient and precise when separating recyclables then individuals doing it piecemeal. The consumer is certainly paid less than a employee to do that job badly (in comparison), but there's no way that the extra taxes that I would have to pay to have recyclables sorted centrally would be higher than value of the time it takes to sort it myself.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Try to take apart a box where you have half-empty yoghurt cups and newspapers. And now imagine having them separately. Separation by the consumer is far easier, because they can make sure in the paper container is purely paper, and it can just be dissolved, cleaned, and recast into paper. And in the plastic container is just plastic, metal and organic stuff, so you can clean it with water, and are left with plastic and metal, and can separate magnetically.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  I'm skeptical of this myself. I think the real reason would be: It's cheaper for the recycling company, as it costs them nothing for you to recycle.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Commercial recyclers operate at a scale too large to hire people to sort. They depend on automated sorting, which uses blown air and physics to separate items - plastic flies higher than metal. What doesn't go into one of the other slots gets sent to the landfill... Including most of the glass jars that you cleaned and sorted carefully.
  - theoh 11y ago
    Actually in some cases the equipment is more advanced. About 8 years ago I visited a mixed recycling facility in London which separated plastic bottles by computer vision triggering a precise air jet to launch each bottle into a different hopper. There was also a stage that used rollers to shatter glass bottles, though I don't remember the purpose of that.
nwah1 11y ago
Combined with the traditional sorting techniques, computer vision and AI are improving to such an extent that sorting probably doesn't need to be done by the consumer anymore. It will just take awhile for all the infrastructure to catch up to this reality.
thinkmassive 11y ago
> separation by the consumer is still more effective than having it done after collection I think this is an antiquated view, because at least some recycling facilities specifically request that you not separate anything. It might sorted by humans after collection, but apparently it's most efficient to have everything dumped into the truck together. http://durhamnc.gov/862/Recycling http://durhamnc.gov/862/Recycling
- douche 11y ago
  When they are just running it through some magnets to kick out the metal that's worth recycling and feeding the rest into an incinerator/trash-fueled boiler.

david-given 11y ago

In the UK I had two wheelie bins. One was for landfill, the other was for recycling. The recyling bin would take paper, carboard, most plastics, cans, etc. Not glass, which had to be taken to separate bottle banks. Also not some kinds of plastic --- yoghurt pots, mainly. But on the whole recycling was hardly a burden.

ndespres 11y ago
In my town, after the landfill filled up, they built an incinerator. The town dump was turned into a "transfer station" where residents could bring their trash and recyclables. Trash would get "transferred" into trucks and hauled off to the incinerator, where it was converted into ash and electricity. The recyclables which we dutifully sorted into glass, plastics, newspaper, cardboard, metal.. were also hauled off to that same incinerator. As a condition of building the incinerator in the town, the builder granted us a yearly quota of so many tons of garbage we could dump in there for free. Since our garbage was under that quota, they just brought the recycling there too! Why pay for it to be properly processed when we could burn it for free?
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Because you can sell scrap metal and glass for cash, but it doesn't burn. It will contaminate the ash, which you can also sell.

yesco 11y ago

In my town you just have to sort the plastics from the papers and they will collect it for free every Tuesday. The trash bags on the other hand are very expensive and not very big, I find myself trying to get as much as I can in my recycling to avoid having to buy more. In fact the first week I moved in I didn't crush or sort anything because my landlord told me that was all I needed to do and they still collected it (even though my landlord was wrong). Its also worth noting that as a result of this system, every house on my street always has a larger amount of recycling then garbage (we don't use bins so its easier to notice), it would be nice if more places did this.

aeorgnoieang 11y ago

Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away? If the prices covered the real costs, and they were reasonably known and understandable, people buying stuff could make their own decisions about the best tradeoffs to make between all the various things you mention. Recycling and reusing are great, but there are real costs to both. I've got a bunch of CDs that I don't really want anymore. I'm certainly not ever likely to use them, given Spotify and the like. But I feel bad enough about just throwing them away that I've just held on to them. I fantasize about giving them away to someone but realistically that would be such a pain in the ass that I almost certainly will never bother. [Now I'm motivated to throw them away!] Just the cost of someone driving to where I live and, maybe, take them from me – for free – has both non-zero environmental and economic costs! Throwing things away is fine. Not accounting for all the costs, to everyone, is the real problem.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
c22 11y ago
> Why not impose the full cost of disposal on people that throw things away? Because if the cost is great many people will just dump their trash illegally.
- aeorgnoieang 11y ago
  That's part of the cost too! In fact, that's probably one of the most important, and potentially largest, components of the cost to consider. People already dump their trash illegally. Are you arguing that whatever laws they're breaking should be repealed?
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    People get into this really nasty habit of thinking law exists in a vacuum free from the existence of human nature. This is sounding a lot like a gun control argument. Instead, think of this from a goal based perspective. Your goal is to reduce stuff getting thrown in the trash. Therefore, you want to encourage recycling. Making recycling expensive harms your goal. You want to encourage people to recycle, not discourage. Don't do it, then. Trying to force people to recycle doesn't work. It's economically infeasible to track down who threw that oil can in the curbside bin. Negative reinforcement being off the table, use positive reinforcement.

cradle2cradle 11y ago

Cradle to Cradle? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865475873/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0865475873&linkCode=as2&tag=littdidd-20&linkId=TQSSCEHTF7S4IFAZ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865475873/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...

hackuser 11y ago

> You have to dismantle products and packaging, cut cardboard into little squares no more than 20cm X 20cm, sort glass bottles by colour, remove the labels This doesn't describe recylcing in any place I've lived or seen for a long time. Either all materials go in one big bag/box or at most they are sorted into paper and 'other'. Some of what you describe I saw with early recycling programs long ago, but I've never heard of 20x20cm squares of cardboard.

lobster_johnson 11y ago

The extent of pre-sorting needed depends completely on the local recycler company and how modern their systems are. Where I lived recently, there were no specific guidelines about coloured glass, labels or cardboard dimensions. In NYC, it's even simpler — only two bins: (1) glass, plastic, metal and cartons (mostly juice containers), and (2) paper and cardboard. By metal, they mean almost anything made of metal, including spray cans and filing cabinets (!).

lgieron 11y ago

> We allow the production of wasteful packaging, we accept planned obsolescence, Regarding planned obsolescence, it seems fairly easy to legislate away - just pass a law that mandates a minimum of 5-10 years warranty for consumer goods (cars, laptops, smartphones, home applicances). This way, the manufacturers will reengineer the devices to last longer.

orthecreedence 11y ago
I agree. This is one of those cases where I think regulation over markets is warranted. The free market won't solve this problem because it's cheaper to make junk that breaks and people are too focused on the now to care if their stove will work in 10 years. It's one of those greater-good problems that the market ignores but would benefit society as a whole. As a consumer, it would be nice to have protection against shoddy craftsmanship as well. Something like this might even have the side effect of moving more production jobs back to in-country factories where quality can be controlled much better than in a foreign country. EDIT: Thought about this more. There has to be some body that regulates what constitutes an appliance worth warranting. Maybe this could be done on a cost basis, but then would you have to have a warranty on an expensive piece of art? If you did have some sort of department deciding these things, would that allow for corruption? Would the microwave lobby somehow worm their way out of having a microwave being included as a warranty-guaranteed appliance? No easy answers, unless I'm missing something.
- lgieron 11y ago
  Ha ha, actually, I'm in a "foreign" country (Poland, biggest producer of home applicances in Europe due to proximity to West EU markets and low cost of labor), so moving back is not what I would consider a good thing :)
  - orthecreedence 11y ago
    Interesting, I didn't know that most appliance production happens in Poland. I was trying to find a general way of noting the production relationship between the US and China, but I know not everyone here is from the US and not all countries ship manufacturing off to China. Maybe the "foreign" country remark was a bit too general. Obviously there will always be a cheapest place to manufacture things, but seeing the difference from when things were manufactured "in-house" in the US years ago and how they function now, it's night and day. People are sold on features, not longevity...but I would much rather have fridge that lasts 30 years and keeps my food cold than one that orders new food online when I'm out and breaks after 2 years and can't be repaired. I want there to be a more realistic balance between cost and longevity so the things we put so much resources into building don't just end up in a landfill two years after their creation. We're offsetting economic costs in exchange for environmental costs. It's an enormous debt that we'll have to pay back soon.

agumonkey 11y ago

Make trendy the people like this San Francisco family that lives with almost no garbage. This is mostly a cobra effect of modern opulence, people had nothing and knew how to reuse. Now we just meh out of the issue and put it aside like morons. There are more and more attempts at reducing waste but it's still shown as niche in TV news and such. Make Kanye West use glass bottles and tote bags.

nihonde 11y ago

Every single Japanese home separates their trash into: (1) burnable trash, (2) plastic, (3) paper-pack, (4) PET bottles, (5) cans, (6) glass bottles, (7) cardboard, (8) broken glass, metal, etc., and (9) large items such as furniture. When I first moved to Japan, I thought it was crazy how many rules there were about separating garbage. It was inconceivable to me that people took the time and effort to ensure that the plastic bits from product packaging go into one bin, and the paper bits into another. The first time I had to wash a plastic food container and leave it out to dry so that I could throw it away clean, I balked. No one could possibly put up with this nonsense. Guess what? It's been over a year now since I moved to Japan, and the garbage routine is a completely invisible part of my life. You get into the habit. It feels good to do your part. Everyone else is doing their part, too. Is Japan the perfect (or even the most effective) country in terms of recycling and waste management? Not at all. Is it by far the cleanest place that I've ever lived in (including USA and Europe)? Absolutely, yes. I'm not suggesting that Japan has the answer. I'm just observing that a sorting effort made from the bottom up distributes the work and avoids the expense of sorting later. Until I'd seen it in action, I would never have believed that people would tolerate such a confusing and onerous system.

galfarragem 11y ago
Recycling looks as the perfect activity to apply the strategy of gamification. E.g. Each family could have a card and get some score for amount of recycling materials. Then this score could be translated as prizes for children, pets, etc.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  That idea is pretty fucking insulting. If my local community came up with that I would trash the notification and card straight away.
  - galfarragem 11y ago
    Maybe you should use your anger as fuel to elaborate a bit more your comment..