4 ms·

Right, the mentality of a lot of people is I'd feel bad putting this in the trash so I'll put in the donation bin and then all thinking about where it actually

Right, the mentality of a lot of people is I'd feel bad putting this in the trash so I'll put in the donation bin and then all thinking about where it actually ends up is for someone else to deal with.

pdx 9y ago
That's as it should be. Nobody should expect every person in the country to individually solve the problem of how best to allocate that resource. The donation bin is the correct solution, so that the resource can be graded, sorted, sold locally, or compressed into bales and sold internationally.
- gowld 9y ago
  Only if it's profitable for the donatee. It's not right for me to just dump my trash on your lawn and call it a "gift".
compiler-guy 9y ago
When that someone is someone who specializes in dealing with the issue, passing it along to them makes a lot of sense. I don't know the best way to recycle used clothes (for any definition of best). It is likely that a used-clothes donation center does. If that donation center can make a profit, even better.
- tomkarlo 9y ago
  What if they can't make a profit? It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the individual generating the trash. Other countries don't take this approach - instead, they place a high premium on disposal costs of unsorted trash, and require that anything you try to recycle be carefully sorted.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    This kind of runs counter to how the entire rest of modern civilization works, doesn't it? I don't have the foggiest idea how to grow grains, refine aluminum from bauxite, knit a sweater, build a water purifier, manufacture pens and pencils, bleach paper and bind it into spiral notebooks, raise livestock, or pick coffee beans, so I indirectly pay millions of people to do these things for me and focus on writing code. Why shouldn't I indirectly pay someone to sit at a conveyor belt and separate my recyclables? Single-stream recycling is a godsend, and it's annoying that I have to drive across town or find specific vendors to recycle textiles, batteries, electronics, and stuff like that.
    - tomkarlo 9y ago
      The problem is you don't pay for someone to separate your recyclables. If we were all charged for the garbage we generate, and also for how expensive it was to process, then it'd be fine. But in most cases, consumers in the US don't pay truly variable rates for the garbage they generate. (Even in the generally progressive San Francisco, you're charged a monthly fee based simply on how many trash cans you have - so pretty much everyone pays the same, and there's little incentive to generate less trash.) https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/ https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/ However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills. There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet. It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.
      - philwelch 9y ago
        Or we'll realize that it's not cost-effective to recycle anything other than glass and metal and stop subsidizing plastic recycling at all. Glass and metal recycling wouldn't be any problem for single stream recycling because the value of recycled materials would make up for the cost of separation. If we're going to subsidize forms of recycling that aren't cost-effective, I'd rather we subsidize forms of recycling that also aren't annoying to the end user. Forcing people to separate Plastic #1 from Plastic #5 when it's cheaper to just dump both plastics in a landfill in the first place strikes me as Kafkaesque.

pdx 9y ago

That's as it should be. Nobody should expect every person in the country to individually solve the problem of how best to allocate that resource. The donation bin is the correct solution, so that the resource can be graded, sorted, sold locally, or compressed into bales and sold internationally.

gowld 9y ago
Only if it's profitable for the donatee. It's not right for me to just dump my trash on your lawn and call it a "gift".

compiler-guy 9y ago

When that someone is someone who specializes in dealing with the issue, passing it along to them makes a lot of sense. I don't know the best way to recycle used clothes (for any definition of best). It is likely that a used-clothes donation center does. If that donation center can make a profit, even better.

tomkarlo 9y ago
What if they can't make a profit? It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the individual generating the trash. Other countries don't take this approach - instead, they place a high premium on disposal costs of unsorted trash, and require that anything you try to recycle be carefully sorted.
- philwelch 9y ago
  This kind of runs counter to how the entire rest of modern civilization works, doesn't it? I don't have the foggiest idea how to grow grains, refine aluminum from bauxite, knit a sweater, build a water purifier, manufacture pens and pencils, bleach paper and bind it into spiral notebooks, raise livestock, or pick coffee beans, so I indirectly pay millions of people to do these things for me and focus on writing code. Why shouldn't I indirectly pay someone to sit at a conveyor belt and separate my recyclables? Single-stream recycling is a godsend, and it's annoying that I have to drive across town or find specific vendors to recycle textiles, batteries, electronics, and stuff like that.
  - tomkarlo 9y ago
    The problem is you don't pay for someone to separate your recyclables. If we were all charged for the garbage we generate, and also for how expensive it was to process, then it'd be fine. But in most cases, consumers in the US don't pay truly variable rates for the garbage they generate. (Even in the generally progressive San Francisco, you're charged a monthly fee based simply on how many trash cans you have - so pretty much everyone pays the same, and there's little incentive to generate less trash.) https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/ https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/ However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills. There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet. It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.
    - philwelch 9y ago
      Or we'll realize that it's not cost-effective to recycle anything other than glass and metal and stop subsidizing plastic recycling at all. Glass and metal recycling wouldn't be any problem for single stream recycling because the value of recycled materials would make up for the cost of separation. If we're going to subsidize forms of recycling that aren't cost-effective, I'd rather we subsidize forms of recycling that also aren't annoying to the end user. Forcing people to separate Plastic #1 from Plastic #5 when it's cheaper to just dump both plastics in a landfill in the first place strikes me as Kafkaesque.