14 ms·

People are recycling too much garbage, and it's threatening the industry

115 points by weiming 8y ago

poster123 8y ago
My wife tells me that growing up in India, people would come door to door to collect metal and paper to be recycled -- to make money. That's not practical in the U.S. because people's time is much more valuable. If recycling really made sense, you would not need to mandate it.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  In my CA neighbourhood, metal scrap collection cars will come around on trash day. All the neighbours know that bulky items with high metal content can be left separate from their trash and it will get picked up.
- halite 8y ago
  > My wife tells me that growing up in India. She's correct. This still exists in smaller cities. I did this with all my books when I went last time.
- lainga 8y ago
  American children did the same thing in WWII (for the war effort, not money). In that case there was no mandate, either - it was all community-organized and sometimes highly competitive.
- lovich 8y ago
  As long as the cost of pollution from creating the products isn't baked into the cost of the price consumers pay, it will always seem not worth it to individuals. The problem is that we have so much pollution now its affecting us at a planetary level. This is a good situation for the government to come in and mandate a solution instead of letting the tragedy of the commons play out. A better solution might be mandating that pollution costs are baked into the product's costs, but doing nothing is just going to hurt everyone
- simmons 8y ago
  I definitely remember this being a thing in small-town America in the 1980's -- particularly with aluminum cans, which I suppose is one of the more valuable recyclables. Schools and churches would ask people to save their cans and bring them in as a fundraiser, and you'd sometimes see people walking up and down the highway picking up the cans thrown out by litterbugs. And yet today I have to pay someone to haul away my valuable materials. :)
- colanderman 8y ago
  People (like, random people, not officials) still do this for aluminum cans in US states with bottle deposits. They go door-to-door pulling cans out of recycling bins and bringing them to deposit centers en masse. I've seen this both in Boston and in the rural town I grew up in. The guy who frequented my childhood home actually made enough money to leave each "customer" a jar of peanuts each year at Christmas. And even if you have to pay someone to take recycling it makes sense because the damage to the environment is less than just dumping it in a landfill. That's a cost that's externalized by manufacturers and not easily recouped without mandatory recycling. (The alternative is to tax manufacturers and importers for all the trash they generate, equivalent to the environmental damage it causes. Bottle bills effectively combine these two approaches.)
  - southern_cross 8y ago
    > pulling cans out of recycling bins That's illegal in my area, and I assume in most areas with recycling programs. You want to pick up stray cans and recycle them then that's one thing, but pulling them out of recycling bins is considered theft.
    - wang_li 8y ago
      It’s kind of funny. The waste management firms worked with the city to require recycling. So now every home has to pay an additional fee for a recycling bin plus pick up. And of course the management company only wants to be in this particular business if they can sell the materials on to someone else. As soon as China stopped buying our recyclables WMNW started asking the city for permission to just stick everything in a landfill. I am required to sort my trash, compost, and recyclables. I’m supposed to wash and peel labels. I have to pay to have it picked up. The least that should happen is that the waste management company be required to actually recycle this stuff.
      - bonesss 8y ago
        See... we've known for ages that recycling is a bit of a losing proposition: otherwise we'd get paid for our used TP rolls like we do with aluminium cans. The distribution of labour in this case makes the economics even worse. The scenario you describe is a (I'm guessing, you're on HN), well-paid highly education citizen literally washing garbage before throwing it out, and paying for the privilege of an inefficient disposal system that requires routine intervention... I think an end-to-end total cost accounting wouldn't look too favorable.
- megaman22 8y ago
  There are a ton of people on the fringes that make extra cash hauling scrap metal, at least when the prices make sense. I had a couple uncles that would regularly go out "junking", picking up old cars and stoves and stuff.
- petepete 8y ago
  When I was a kid (mid eighties UK) everyone got their milk delivered nightly in glass bottles which, when empty, were left out for collection by the milkman on the next delivery. Nearly waste free (foil caps aside), efficient and not too expensive, albeit slightly more expensive than supermarket. We've taken several steps backwards in that regard.
- fergie 8y ago
  People in the US totally recycle metal, but paradoxically it is never encouraged since the economic incentives are so large. For example: One of the main reasons that abandoned buildings in Detroit decay so quickly is that they are generally stripped of their wiring and plumbing since copper and lead are so easy to turn into money. http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260 http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260
halite 8y ago
Now this is something that AI should help with.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Sort of. Machine vision is helpful, but the more trash in the recycling stream, the more dexterity your processing automation requires to handle non-compliant material, as well as the costs of trashing that non-compliant material. More emphasis needs to be placed on reducing the waste stream as a whole (trash and recyclables), and then leaning on a recycling lifecycle (with the remaining material disposed of with plasma gasification).
  - digikata 8y ago
    Still it seems like this would be a great automation problem to work on - not your standard shiny tech problem but something that would really make a difference.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      I wouldn’t talk someone out of working on solving the waste stream problem.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Already working in the most advanced recycling plants. Stadler's latest plant has zero people hand-sorting.[1] Here's NYC's big plant in Brooklyn.[2] Sill some hand-sorting. A robotic one from Japan.[3] It may not be profitable, but it's quite possible to separate just about everything automatically now. [1] http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/stadler-installs-fully-automated-waste-sorting-plant-norway-roaf/ http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/stadler-installs-fully... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUrBBBs7yzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUrBBBs7yzQ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxkklR3BNFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxkklR3BNFc
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
csense 8y ago
Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop. Maybe once every week, 1/52 of the bins should be checked manually before being dumped in the truck. And the owners informed if there are problems like envelope windows or pizza boxes. Yes, it's expensive to have a separate process to provide that feedback, but it might increase the quality of the recycled materials enough to actually raise the value above the cost of doing it.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  > Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop. For me this is the entire issue. The rules are more nuanced that I can easily remember. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like different cities have different rules, which leaves me even more confused even when I'm at home.
  - cellularmitosis 8y ago
    You could simplify the rules to “recycle aluminum, trash everything else”. It takes about 2x as much energy to manufacture new steel than to melt down old steel. For aluminum, that number is 20x, which means that recycling aluminum prevents a lot of greenhouse gas. Even after you account for the overhead of driving a bunch of collection trucks around and running recycling facilities, you’re still probably coming out ahead. With steel, paper, glass and plastic, is recycling really beneficial to the planet? It’s difficult to say.
    - 08-15 8y ago
      If you recycle paper, you end up with some sludge of degraded fibers. The sludge can be composted, it's just cellulose after all. Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it? It is, until weird coated papers get into the recycled feed stock. Those are not supposed to be recycled, but who knows all the rules and their exceptions? So weird and wonderful chemicals get into the sludge, and then into the compost, and then onto agricultural land, and into the drinking water supply. One of these chemicals is PFOA (see todays story about the toxicology of perfluorinated compounds), another BPA. I know of at least two instances where drinking water supplies in Germany were contaminated with PFOA through this route. Much finger pointing ensued, but nobody knows how to remove PFOA from either water or the affected land. But they said recycling is good, didn't they?
peterwwillis 8y ago
Recyclable materials already have stamps on them to indicate how they should be recycled (if at all), but it seems nobody was ever taught how to use them. I'm not sure why this is downvote-worthy. Did you all get taught how the recycling codes work?
- jMyles 8y ago
  I can't fathom why you're being downvoted. I remember clearly in elementary school being taught the names of every single type of cloud, but I'm sure I never, ever had anyone sit me down and explain the recycling codes.
- dawnerd 8y ago
  Many places tell people to ignore the numbers. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/sustainabilityatwork/article/581994 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/sustainabilityatwork/article/...
msie 8y ago
I don't like to recycle cans at my apartment bins because I know the bins will be contaminated. Not a big surprise. You can't guarantee that everybody will follow the rules. And the rules change too.
- msie 8y ago
  To be clear, I take the cans to a nearby depot.
swoongoonz 8y ago
Placer County in California pays for one bin recycling. Don't make people think, just allocate resources to cover recycling as a part of the waste stream.
petermcneeley 8y ago
I would bet its globally more optimal to have all trash sorted and cleaned and recycled at a plant than to have each individual in every household do a poor job of it themselves.
- estebank 8y ago
  Local sorting for compostable, definitely trash and possibly recyclable would be an improvement over what you're suggesting, then separation of recyclables can be done on the dry pile without the compostable trash ruining it (cardboard that has been wet is no longer recyclable, for example).
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I tend to agree with this although I haven't done all of the math. It seems however that their might be a net social good to create a recycling industry which consists of living accomodations, facilities for sorting, facilities for cleaning, and facilities for reconstituting bulk goods out of recyclable material, and then a set of factories that would use that to create 50 - 100% post consumer products for sale in the general market. The purpose of these economic units would be three fold, one it would provide housing and an income to anyone who was willing to work and it would not require a lot of pre-requisites for the work. Second it would reduce the landfall load and burdened cost of recycling by minimizing transportation costs while effectively recycling. And lastly it would provide a stream of goods and bulk materials for industry that would provide a means to offset some if not all of the cost of the operation. As a government sponsored activity I feel it could simultaneously provide living accommodations and meaningful work for a large chunk of the homeless population and an even larger fraction of the post-felony population.
  - cam_l 8y ago
    Recycling goods and people, so to speak. But seriously, why should businesses get to externalise the costs of disposal of the junk they make? Just make businesses responsible for the life cycle of their products.
    - 8y ago
extralego 8y ago
Let’s find the best possible explanation that doesn’t acknowledge the insanity of accepted consumer packaging practices and made-to-replace product cycles.
yawz 8y ago
Because partly, what can be recycled where is very confusing! Where I live, our recycling facilities can't recycle certain "recycle numbers". And they have a "no plastic bags" policy even if they have recycling numbers and indicators. We also have an additional bin for compostables, which sometimes increases the confusion for certain items. For instance, paper goes into recycling but not shredded paper, which needs to go with the compostables.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
seba_dos1 8y ago
The page is GDPRed. Cached copy: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp-rR3cJ:www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-recycling-20180618-story.html+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=pl&lr=lang_en%7Clang_pl https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp...
oldcynic 8y ago
The rules are too complex. If you move home to a few miles away the rules change. Various parts of the recycling chain are highly fragile and far too easy to pollute (as the article discusses), or too susceptible to not being profitable. We've known that for years. Seems like a giant exercise in missing the point. Should profit be the prime motive? Should we be recycling when re-use used to work so well for many products? Do we want to actually preserve the planet or merely go through the motions with recycling theatre until waste grows another order of magnitude? The waste from a weekly supermarket shop is horrifying compared to the equivalent waste in the nineties. I think the time has come to take a cue from earlier times and simply require the manufacturers and retailers to cover the cost - you made it, you pay for its disposal, recycling or reuse. Suspect things would start to resolve quite quickly. Before you say that can't possibly work, for many categories it used to, and it worked very well. For other categories, it should be ample encouragement to return to less packaging, or for fruit and veg, no packaging. We'd start to see some properly biodegradable solutions. No, I don't suppose this will be too popular, especially with me wanting regulation to "encourage" it.
- pintxo 8y ago
  We actually have this in Germany for over a decade [1], if not two. Personally, I'd say we got more packaging not less. So I am not sure such we can say it failed, but it's not really working either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)
  - oldcynic 8y ago
    That's... disappointing. I don't know enough about the scheme to comment much. Maybe the fees are low enough to not encourage much change. Perhaps we need a popular campaign of dumping all the single use plastic back to Tesco etc. :)
    - majewsky 8y ago
      The EU is actually pushing some of this. In Germany, stores used to offer plastic bags at checkout. But in the last year or so, nearly all of them switched to paper bags (with loud greenwashed advertising accompanying it) after the EU threatened to outlaw plastic bags entirely. The EU is now also looking into outlawing some single-use plastic items like straws that contribute a lot to plastic waste. News media fabricated a public outroar over this, making it sound like the EU wants to outlaw childrens' birthday parties, when in actuality the EU focused on plastic items where there exist viable replacements made from decomposable plant-based materials.
swolchok 8y ago
The system in the Bay Area is especially broken because it is built to nudge everyone to put as much as possible in recycling/compost. We've got very limited trash space, expensive upgrades to larger trash bins, and huge recycling/compost bins.
pedalpete 8y ago
This needs to be removed from the hands of the public and forced onto the recycling industry. These are solvable problems, and I would go so far to suggest they perhaps are not that difficult to solve. Recycling as a profit center is part of the issue. Some areas I've lived in have a single recycling bin for all recyclables, some force it on the households to separate paper from metals and plastics, and some have a bin for each. As the article mentions paper and cardboard can be mechanically separated from other materials, the reason some areas don't do this is not because they don't have the resources, it sometimes because different recyclers are paying the municipality (or whoever is in charge) for the material. So the sorting is then pushed on to the households to do. Aside from being too complicated, with too many overlapping rules, the sorting of packaging should be placed on the recycler who is in the business of recycling.
dogruck 8y ago
In 1996, the New York Times reported that recycling is often just expensive virtue signaling. https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
andrewstuart 8y ago
The real problem is that we manufacture garbage and buy it at a virtually infinite pace. Everything you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has been consumed. Tell you what is garbage - recycling is garbage. Our planet is already awash in plastics and that isn't going to stop until we put a stop to the garbage manufacturing industry - i.e. the packaging industry. "Recycling" is the concept that the packaging industry maintains so that you don't scream in anger at how that industry is polluting the planet. The truth about recycling came out recently when China stopped accepting recycling from overseas and now the "recycling" i.e. garbage is piling up in incredible mounds here in Melbourne. Local recycling companies have started to admit they are just throwing it all in landfill. We need to turn off the garbage manufacturing tap.
- wizardforhire 8y ago
  There’s a term for this, greenwashing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
- nunodonato 8y ago
  So much this. There is a reason why recycle is the 3rd in "reduce, reutilize, recycle" It's important people start using more ecological solutions to package and carry stuff around.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Hmm, in the US, I have only heard it "recycle, reuse, reduce".
    - apta 8y ago
      https://youtu.be/JqUm3M1cpi8?t=691 https://youtu.be/JqUm3M1cpi8?t=691
  - wilsonnb2 8y ago
    I actually think it's because the most common phrasing is "reduce, reuse, recycle", the pronunciation of which comes out as "re-duce, re-use, re-cy-cle". The 2-2-3 cadence just sounds more natural than 2-3-2 or 3-2-2.
cordite 8y ago
Can 98% of my mail not come just so I put it in the recycling bin without review? As for the disposal industry, we can learn a lot from Japan, but it starts with cultural expectations and education. It can get weird in some countries like Argentina (this knowledge is over a decade old, this may have changed) you don’t get the cartons or jugs for your milk. You get a plastic bag. The store keeps the carton and recycles it for their own monetary reasons.
fourmii 8y ago
Sometimes I feel that recycling for most of us is just another coping mechanism. It's a way to explain away the amount that we consume. We throw our recycling into the designated bins blindly without being critical about where it's going. Just recently, here in Australia, some of us, including me, learned that much of our recycling is simply being sold and shipped to China and other countries: https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china-recycling/story/index.html https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china-recycling/stor... What we really need to do is stop and think about the consequence and byproduct of our consumption. We can start with packaging, especially single use packaging. It's difficult to go the supermarket and buy produce that doesn't come pre-wrapped. Not to mention the issue of our online shopping purchases coming in multiple packages. Although, there does appear to be change coming. Just recently, our biggest supermarkets just announced that they will cease providing single use plastic bags: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-starts-today-here-s-what-you-need-to-know https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-start...
- colechristensen 8y ago
  That is not the point of the article. The point is that people are putting things which are not recyclable into their recycle bins. You can't recycle greasy paper. You can't recycle grocery bags. If it isn't clean and well sorted, it costs more to process and ultimately becomes a "feel good" way to send things to the same dump. People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle so as to keep costs down and have fewer things which could be recycled thrown in the dump. A load of paper can be contaminated with food scraps so that is becomes impossible to recycle. TL;DR don't put something into a recycling bin unless it is clean and you are sure that it is recyclable (read the guidance you get from your local authority)
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    > You can't recycle greasy paper. > People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle I'd say maybe pizza boxes should stop saying they're recyclable and start saying "DO NOT RECYCLE AFTER CONTACT WITH FOOD"...
docker_up 8y ago
State and Federal governments should outlaw any non-recyclable plastic. I'm okay paying higher prices, but they should streamline the plastics that are used in packaging and in products so that everything can be recycled and consumers don't have to think about it. When I order things from Amazon, and it comes in things like styrofoam, it is absolutely maddening, in 2018. The Federal government should pass a law where absolutely no non-recyclable plastic can be used anywhere. Let our costs go up, it will make things like recycling a lot more economically viable by simplifying things incredibly.
- ars 8y ago
  This isn't going to help. Almost all plastic is recyclable already - but not when it's mixed with other junk. What they should do is stop recycling glass, and recycle paper separately. That would solve the problem much easier.
  - jMyles 8y ago
    Why stop recycling glass?
    - ars 8y ago
      Because it's worthless. Because it contaminates everything else, making it much harder to recycle the other items. Because there's no reason to recycle it, the planet is made of it, we're not going to run out, and it's impossible to waste it. Do you know what they do with recycled glass right now? They crush it, and use it as a landfill cover (instead of sand). There's little point in spending all that effort to do that.
      - jMyles 8y ago
        Interesting. I had no idea. So I guess... just use (and reuse) glass but don't recycle it?
  - edude03 8y ago
    I think what docker_up is saying is that if all materials were recyclable there wouldn't be "other junk" to mix in. I actually agree strongly with this, although I'm not sure how it could be practically implemented.
ggm 8y ago
The economics are broken. Incent cleaner waste stream, and you'll get better outcomes. I have no idea how to incent it except to note cash-back schemes aren't being pointed to here. The economics of garbage sorting are broken. but that doesn't mean garbage is broken, or recycling is broken. It means we need to look at what we want. If we want more people to recycle more, we need to tool up to handle more incorrect waste going into the input buffer. If we want people to recycle "better" we need to be prepared to lose some inputs, because of the cost burden in the community of dealing with contamination. Or, we need to remove the complexity by making it easier. Personally, my bugbear is the local (Qld, Australia) refusal to take the shopping bags full of recycles. The bags are recyclable, the contents are recyclable, but our local provider has decided not to accept the bags, but only the contents "because reasons"
pmontra 8y ago
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.
- moviuro 8y ago
  AKA: "Tracking you without consent was part of our DNA; oops"
- Klover 8y ago
  http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/nydailynews.com/ http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/nydailynews.com/ If you look at the source I think they've done it quite well! They put everything, including the fonts and the image into the source and as a result it's all a single file website! It might also be the reason why the body font (PT Serif) looks a bit off compared to the one on Google fonts, notably the 'i', over here: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif
wichert 8y ago
"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries". Is there another way to access this?
- jMyles 8y ago
  > "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries". > Is there another way to access this? GDPR (and, for that matter, all state interference in the internet) in a nutshell. What a shitshow. (Of course, it's also the fault of websites doing the sorts of bad-faith tracking that GDPR, in good-faith, tries to prevent, but the result is predictable all the same).
- magduf 8y ago
  This is a good reason to have an account with a VPN service.
fergie 8y ago
"And then there are items that should go straight to the trash — garden hoses, wood pallets, or, on one recent afternoon, a bound stack of roofing shingles." Ideally this stuff should be redistributed to places it can actually be used ("freecycling")
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
That GDPR wall made me LOL
dawnerd 8y ago
Up here in Portland they only give us a tiny trash can and a full size recycle so we kinda don't have a choice BUT to recycle everything. When I lived downtown they only picked up trash every other week. They've recently introduced a 2 dollar/month "recycling surcharge" because they're effectively just trashing all recycling.
edem 8y ago
Wow. Did I just see a page informing me about the site being blocked in Europe?
xbkingx 8y ago
Crazy bonkers idea... The cities I've lived in (in the US) provided the garbage and recycle bins. How about printing the recyclable materials and exceptions ON THE BINS. Put it on the lid, so it can be easily customized for each community. It amazes me that no one has proposed this yet. Another idea - randomly choose streets to spot check recycling behavior and flag the cans based on their score. Nothing exotic - don't have to do it constantly or over large areas, simple 3 score system (good, acceptable, and poor), and just a quick peak in the bins as they are manually thrown into the truck. Your score is affixed to the bin, which you are rolling out every week for all the neighborhood to see. Of course there would have to be some discretion, like people just moving in, hence the process being manual, and probably some exemption process. The next week, those rated poor will be rechecked and rescored. Fail again and you get a warning that has the problems checked off from a list. After 4 consecutive failures you receive a fine. Or maybe you have to deliver your garbage to a sorting facility where someone will go over the process. Or there's a class. There are lots of options beyond throwing up a website hidden behind 3 different local government portals.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  The items that are worthwhile to recycle change depending on what various buyers are paying.
  - xbkingx 8y ago
    But that doesn't really matter to the average resident - I've never received a notification that the recyclables list has changed, let alone fire pricing reasons. Different communities have slightly different rules (they've been 90%+ the same from my experience), but that's why I said to print on the lid. Same bins can be bought in bulk and the only logistics would be dealing with a smaller, easier to transport lids. Or just use a big, super strong sticker. New rules? New sticker covering the old one.
squarefoot 8y ago
Site says it's unavailable in Europe. What happened to the first2 Ws in the acronym WWW?
- Tom4hawk 8y ago
  GDPR happened. But to be honest, if news site needs so much information about me then I don't want to visit that website...
tomohawk 8y ago
In our area, landfills are scarce, so local governments are incentivized to push waste into the recycling stream. The result is that they trained people "when in doubt, put it in recycling". Now that recyclers don't want to accept the low grade stuff from them, they have a re-education problem on their hands. I imagine the government employees who put out the bad information leading to this are all still employed and have probably been promoted.
lbriner 8y ago
Obviously the ideal is to reduce "disposable" waste and we have lived 6000+ years as homo-sapiens without most of this modern stuff. I like the idea I heard about in a European country (sorry, forgotten which), where there is a disposal tax paid on all goods by the manufacturer so that the removal of waste is already paid for and doesn't require people to fly-tip etc. This is presumably a nice financial incentive for people to make better packaging to reduce their tax and therefore their sale prices.
- Yetanfou 8y ago
  The country is Germany, the program is called 'Der Grüne Punkt' ('The Green Dot'): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)
himom 8y ago
Stanford / Palo Alto gave up on a lot of recycling and went to “off-site sorting.” Stanford used to have 5! bins. Another fail is “recycling” at Costco, where basically no recycling happens and people just throw things in carelessly into any of the 3 bins. Worse, the staff contribute to its demise equally by eliminating the sorting signs and turning bins around to hide their labeling. Red, green, blue ... go figure which is which.
user5454 8y ago
In Sweden we incinerate[1] the trash in super hot ovens and use the resulting heat to heat our homes. We do recycle as well but as we sometimes even import trash to burn (it's a cold country after all) I don't feel so bad when throwing something in the ordinary bin instead of sorting it proper. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration
eqdw 8y ago
Straight up: If recycling things was valuable, recyclers would be paying people for their recyclable goods, independent of what trash collection does. Recycling may be the best option for the environment, but economically it's somewhere between a wash and a cost. Cities should budget appropriately

115 points by weiming 8y ago

My wife tells me that growing up in India, people would come door to door to collect metal and paper to be recycled -- to make money. That's not practical in the U.S. because people's time is much more valuable. If recycling really made sense, you would not need to mandate it.

dv_dt 8y ago
In my CA neighbourhood, metal scrap collection cars will come around on trash day. All the neighbours know that bulky items with high metal content can be left separate from their trash and it will get picked up.
halite 8y ago
> My wife tells me that growing up in India. She's correct. This still exists in smaller cities. I did this with all my books when I went last time.
lainga 8y ago
American children did the same thing in WWII (for the war effort, not money). In that case there was no mandate, either - it was all community-organized and sometimes highly competitive.
lovich 8y ago
As long as the cost of pollution from creating the products isn't baked into the cost of the price consumers pay, it will always seem not worth it to individuals. The problem is that we have so much pollution now its affecting us at a planetary level. This is a good situation for the government to come in and mandate a solution instead of letting the tragedy of the commons play out. A better solution might be mandating that pollution costs are baked into the product's costs, but doing nothing is just going to hurt everyone
simmons 8y ago
I definitely remember this being a thing in small-town America in the 1980's -- particularly with aluminum cans, which I suppose is one of the more valuable recyclables. Schools and churches would ask people to save their cans and bring them in as a fundraiser, and you'd sometimes see people walking up and down the highway picking up the cans thrown out by litterbugs. And yet today I have to pay someone to haul away my valuable materials. :)
colanderman 8y ago
People (like, random people, not officials) still do this for aluminum cans in US states with bottle deposits. They go door-to-door pulling cans out of recycling bins and bringing them to deposit centers en masse. I've seen this both in Boston and in the rural town I grew up in. The guy who frequented my childhood home actually made enough money to leave each "customer" a jar of peanuts each year at Christmas. And even if you have to pay someone to take recycling it makes sense because the damage to the environment is less than just dumping it in a landfill. That's a cost that's externalized by manufacturers and not easily recouped without mandatory recycling. (The alternative is to tax manufacturers and importers for all the trash they generate, equivalent to the environmental damage it causes. Bottle bills effectively combine these two approaches.)
- southern_cross 8y ago
  > pulling cans out of recycling bins That's illegal in my area, and I assume in most areas with recycling programs. You want to pick up stray cans and recycle them then that's one thing, but pulling them out of recycling bins is considered theft.
  - wang_li 8y ago
    It’s kind of funny. The waste management firms worked with the city to require recycling. So now every home has to pay an additional fee for a recycling bin plus pick up. And of course the management company only wants to be in this particular business if they can sell the materials on to someone else. As soon as China stopped buying our recyclables WMNW started asking the city for permission to just stick everything in a landfill. I am required to sort my trash, compost, and recyclables. I’m supposed to wash and peel labels. I have to pay to have it picked up. The least that should happen is that the waste management company be required to actually recycle this stuff.
    - bonesss 8y ago
      See... we've known for ages that recycling is a bit of a losing proposition: otherwise we'd get paid for our used TP rolls like we do with aluminium cans. The distribution of labour in this case makes the economics even worse. The scenario you describe is a (I'm guessing, you're on HN), well-paid highly education citizen literally washing garbage before throwing it out, and paying for the privilege of an inefficient disposal system that requires routine intervention... I think an end-to-end total cost accounting wouldn't look too favorable.
megaman22 8y ago
There are a ton of people on the fringes that make extra cash hauling scrap metal, at least when the prices make sense. I had a couple uncles that would regularly go out "junking", picking up old cars and stoves and stuff.
petepete 8y ago
When I was a kid (mid eighties UK) everyone got their milk delivered nightly in glass bottles which, when empty, were left out for collection by the milkman on the next delivery. Nearly waste free (foil caps aside), efficient and not too expensive, albeit slightly more expensive than supermarket. We've taken several steps backwards in that regard.
fergie 8y ago
People in the US totally recycle metal, but paradoxically it is never encouraged since the economic incentives are so large. For example: One of the main reasons that abandoned buildings in Detroit decay so quickly is that they are generally stripped of their wiring and plumbing since copper and lead are so easy to turn into money. http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260 http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260

halite 8y ago

Now this is something that AI should help with.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Sort of. Machine vision is helpful, but the more trash in the recycling stream, the more dexterity your processing automation requires to handle non-compliant material, as well as the costs of trashing that non-compliant material. More emphasis needs to be placed on reducing the waste stream as a whole (trash and recyclables), and then leaning on a recycling lifecycle (with the remaining material disposed of with plasma gasification).
- digikata 8y ago
  Still it seems like this would be a great automation problem to work on - not your standard shiny tech problem but something that would really make a difference.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    I wouldn’t talk someone out of working on solving the waste stream problem.
- Animats 8y ago
  Already working in the most advanced recycling plants. Stadler's latest plant has zero people hand-sorting.[1] Here's NYC's big plant in Brooklyn.[2] Sill some hand-sorting. A robotic one from Japan.[3] It may not be profitable, but it's quite possible to separate just about everything automatically now. [1] http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/stadler-installs-fully-automated-waste-sorting-plant-norway-roaf/ http://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/stadler-installs-fully... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUrBBBs7yzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUrBBBs7yzQ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxkklR3BNFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxkklR3BNFc
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago

csense 8y ago

Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop. Maybe once every week, 1/52 of the bins should be checked manually before being dumped in the truck. And the owners informed if there are problems like envelope windows or pizza boxes. Yes, it's expensive to have a separate process to provide that feedback, but it might increase the quality of the recycled materials enough to actually raise the value above the cost of doing it.

DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
> Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback loop. For me this is the entire issue. The rules are more nuanced that I can easily remember. Also, I may be mistaken, but it seems like different cities have different rules, which leaves me even more confused even when I'm at home.
- cellularmitosis 8y ago
  You could simplify the rules to “recycle aluminum, trash everything else”. It takes about 2x as much energy to manufacture new steel than to melt down old steel. For aluminum, that number is 20x, which means that recycling aluminum prevents a lot of greenhouse gas. Even after you account for the overhead of driving a bunch of collection trucks around and running recycling facilities, you’re still probably coming out ahead. With steel, paper, glass and plastic, is recycling really beneficial to the planet? It’s difficult to say.
  - 08-15 8y ago
    If you recycle paper, you end up with some sludge of degraded fibers. The sludge can be composted, it's just cellulose after all. Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it? It is, until weird coated papers get into the recycled feed stock. Those are not supposed to be recycled, but who knows all the rules and their exceptions? So weird and wonderful chemicals get into the sludge, and then into the compost, and then onto agricultural land, and into the drinking water supply. One of these chemicals is PFOA (see todays story about the toxicology of perfluorinated compounds), another BPA. I know of at least two instances where drinking water supplies in Germany were contaminated with PFOA through this route. Much finger pointing ensued, but nobody knows how to remove PFOA from either water or the affected land. But they said recycling is good, didn't they?

peterwwillis 8y ago

Recyclable materials already have stamps on them to indicate how they should be recycled (if at all), but it seems nobody was ever taught how to use them. I'm not sure why this is downvote-worthy. Did you all get taught how the recycling codes work?

jMyles 8y ago
I can't fathom why you're being downvoted. I remember clearly in elementary school being taught the names of every single type of cloud, but I'm sure I never, ever had anyone sit me down and explain the recycling codes.
dawnerd 8y ago
Many places tell people to ignore the numbers. https://www.portlandoregon.gov/sustainabilityatwork/article/581994 https://www.portlandoregon.gov/sustainabilityatwork/article/...

msie 8y ago

I don't like to recycle cans at my apartment bins because I know the bins will be contaminated. Not a big surprise. You can't guarantee that everybody will follow the rules. And the rules change too.

msie 8y ago
To be clear, I take the cans to a nearby depot.

swoongoonz 8y ago

Placer County in California pays for one bin recycling. Don't make people think, just allocate resources to cover recycling as a part of the waste stream.

petermcneeley 8y ago

I would bet its globally more optimal to have all trash sorted and cleaned and recycled at a plant than to have each individual in every household do a poor job of it themselves.

estebank 8y ago
Local sorting for compostable, definitely trash and possibly recyclable would be an improvement over what you're suggesting, then separation of recyclables can be done on the dry pile without the compostable trash ruining it (cardboard that has been wet is no longer recyclable, for example).
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I tend to agree with this although I haven't done all of the math. It seems however that their might be a net social good to create a recycling industry which consists of living accomodations, facilities for sorting, facilities for cleaning, and facilities for reconstituting bulk goods out of recyclable material, and then a set of factories that would use that to create 50 - 100% post consumer products for sale in the general market. The purpose of these economic units would be three fold, one it would provide housing and an income to anyone who was willing to work and it would not require a lot of pre-requisites for the work. Second it would reduce the landfall load and burdened cost of recycling by minimizing transportation costs while effectively recycling. And lastly it would provide a stream of goods and bulk materials for industry that would provide a means to offset some if not all of the cost of the operation. As a government sponsored activity I feel it could simultaneously provide living accommodations and meaningful work for a large chunk of the homeless population and an even larger fraction of the post-felony population.
- cam_l 8y ago
  Recycling goods and people, so to speak. But seriously, why should businesses get to externalise the costs of disposal of the junk they make? Just make businesses responsible for the life cycle of their products.
  - 8y ago

extralego 8y ago

Let’s find the best possible explanation that doesn’t acknowledge the insanity of accepted consumer packaging practices and made-to-replace product cycles.

yawz 8y ago

Because partly, what can be recycled where is very confusing! Where I live, our recycling facilities can't recycle certain "recycle numbers". And they have a "no plastic bags" policy even if they have recycling numbers and indicators. We also have an additional bin for compostables, which sometimes increases the confusion for certain items. For instance, paper goes into recycling but not shredded paper, which needs to go with the compostables.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

seba_dos1 8y ago

The page is GDPRed. Cached copy: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp-rR3cJ:www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-recycling-20180618-story.html+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=pl&lr=lang_en%7Clang_pl https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp...

oldcynic 8y ago

The rules are too complex. If you move home to a few miles away the rules change. Various parts of the recycling chain are highly fragile and far too easy to pollute (as the article discusses), or too susceptible to not being profitable. We've known that for years. Seems like a giant exercise in missing the point. Should profit be the prime motive? Should we be recycling when re-use used to work so well for many products? Do we want to actually preserve the planet or merely go through the motions with recycling theatre until waste grows another order of magnitude? The waste from a weekly supermarket shop is horrifying compared to the equivalent waste in the nineties. I think the time has come to take a cue from earlier times and simply require the manufacturers and retailers to cover the cost - you made it, you pay for its disposal, recycling or reuse. Suspect things would start to resolve quite quickly. Before you say that can't possibly work, for many categories it used to, and it worked very well. For other categories, it should be ample encouragement to return to less packaging, or for fruit and veg, no packaging. We'd start to see some properly biodegradable solutions. No, I don't suppose this will be too popular, especially with me wanting regulation to "encourage" it.

pintxo 8y ago
We actually have this in Germany for over a decade [1], if not two. Personally, I'd say we got more packaging not less. So I am not sure such we can say it failed, but it's not really working either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)
- oldcynic 8y ago
  That's... disappointing. I don't know enough about the scheme to comment much. Maybe the fees are low enough to not encourage much change. Perhaps we need a popular campaign of dumping all the single use plastic back to Tesco etc. :)
  - majewsky 8y ago
    The EU is actually pushing some of this. In Germany, stores used to offer plastic bags at checkout. But in the last year or so, nearly all of them switched to paper bags (with loud greenwashed advertising accompanying it) after the EU threatened to outlaw plastic bags entirely. The EU is now also looking into outlawing some single-use plastic items like straws that contribute a lot to plastic waste. News media fabricated a public outroar over this, making it sound like the EU wants to outlaw childrens' birthday parties, when in actuality the EU focused on plastic items where there exist viable replacements made from decomposable plant-based materials.

swolchok 8y ago

The system in the Bay Area is especially broken because it is built to nudge everyone to put as much as possible in recycling/compost. We've got very limited trash space, expensive upgrades to larger trash bins, and huge recycling/compost bins.

pedalpete 8y ago

This needs to be removed from the hands of the public and forced onto the recycling industry. These are solvable problems, and I would go so far to suggest they perhaps are not that difficult to solve. Recycling as a profit center is part of the issue. Some areas I've lived in have a single recycling bin for all recyclables, some force it on the households to separate paper from metals and plastics, and some have a bin for each. As the article mentions paper and cardboard can be mechanically separated from other materials, the reason some areas don't do this is not because they don't have the resources, it sometimes because different recyclers are paying the municipality (or whoever is in charge) for the material. So the sorting is then pushed on to the households to do. Aside from being too complicated, with too many overlapping rules, the sorting of packaging should be placed on the recycler who is in the business of recycling.

dogruck 8y ago

In 1996, the New York Times reported that recycling is often just expensive virtue signaling. https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

andrewstuart 8y ago

The real problem is that we manufacture garbage and buy it at a virtually infinite pace. Everything you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has been consumed. Tell you what is garbage - recycling is garbage. Our planet is already awash in plastics and that isn't going to stop until we put a stop to the garbage manufacturing industry - i.e. the packaging industry. "Recycling" is the concept that the packaging industry maintains so that you don't scream in anger at how that industry is polluting the planet. The truth about recycling came out recently when China stopped accepting recycling from overseas and now the "recycling" i.e. garbage is piling up in incredible mounds here in Melbourne. Local recycling companies have started to admit they are just throwing it all in landfill. We need to turn off the garbage manufacturing tap.

wizardforhire 8y ago
There’s a term for this, greenwashing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwashing
nunodonato 8y ago
So much this. There is a reason why recycle is the 3rd in "reduce, reutilize, recycle" It's important people start using more ecological solutions to package and carry stuff around.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Hmm, in the US, I have only heard it "recycle, reuse, reduce".
  - apta 8y ago
    https://youtu.be/JqUm3M1cpi8?t=691 https://youtu.be/JqUm3M1cpi8?t=691
- wilsonnb2 8y ago
  I actually think it's because the most common phrasing is "reduce, reuse, recycle", the pronunciation of which comes out as "re-duce, re-use, re-cy-cle". The 2-2-3 cadence just sounds more natural than 2-3-2 or 3-2-2.

cordite 8y ago

Can 98% of my mail not come just so I put it in the recycling bin without review? As for the disposal industry, we can learn a lot from Japan, but it starts with cultural expectations and education. It can get weird in some countries like Argentina (this knowledge is over a decade old, this may have changed) you don’t get the cartons or jugs for your milk. You get a plastic bag. The store keeps the carton and recycles it for their own monetary reasons.

fourmii 8y ago

Sometimes I feel that recycling for most of us is just another coping mechanism. It's a way to explain away the amount that we consume. We throw our recycling into the designated bins blindly without being critical about where it's going. Just recently, here in Australia, some of us, including me, learned that much of our recycling is simply being sold and shipped to China and other countries: https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china-recycling/story/index.html https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china-recycling/stor... What we really need to do is stop and think about the consequence and byproduct of our consumption. We can start with packaging, especially single use packaging. It's difficult to go the supermarket and buy produce that doesn't come pre-wrapped. Not to mention the issue of our online shopping purchases coming in multiple packages. Although, there does appear to be change coming. Just recently, our biggest supermarkets just announced that they will cease providing single use plastic bags: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-starts-today-here-s-what-you-need-to-know https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-start...

colechristensen 8y ago
That is not the point of the article. The point is that people are putting things which are not recyclable into their recycle bins. You can't recycle greasy paper. You can't recycle grocery bags. If it isn't clean and well sorted, it costs more to process and ultimately becomes a "feel good" way to send things to the same dump. People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle so as to keep costs down and have fewer things which could be recycled thrown in the dump. A load of paper can be contaminated with food scraps so that is becomes impossible to recycle. TL;DR don't put something into a recycling bin unless it is clean and you are sure that it is recyclable (read the guidance you get from your local authority)
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  > You can't recycle greasy paper. > People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle I'd say maybe pizza boxes should stop saying they're recyclable and start saying "DO NOT RECYCLE AFTER CONTACT WITH FOOD"...

docker_up 8y ago

State and Federal governments should outlaw any non-recyclable plastic. I'm okay paying higher prices, but they should streamline the plastics that are used in packaging and in products so that everything can be recycled and consumers don't have to think about it. When I order things from Amazon, and it comes in things like styrofoam, it is absolutely maddening, in 2018. The Federal government should pass a law where absolutely no non-recyclable plastic can be used anywhere. Let our costs go up, it will make things like recycling a lot more economically viable by simplifying things incredibly.

ars 8y ago
This isn't going to help. Almost all plastic is recyclable already - but not when it's mixed with other junk. What they should do is stop recycling glass, and recycle paper separately. That would solve the problem much easier.
- jMyles 8y ago
  Why stop recycling glass?
  - ars 8y ago
    Because it's worthless. Because it contaminates everything else, making it much harder to recycle the other items. Because there's no reason to recycle it, the planet is made of it, we're not going to run out, and it's impossible to waste it. Do you know what they do with recycled glass right now? They crush it, and use it as a landfill cover (instead of sand). There's little point in spending all that effort to do that.
    - jMyles 8y ago
      Interesting. I had no idea. So I guess... just use (and reuse) glass but don't recycle it?
- edude03 8y ago
  I think what docker_up is saying is that if all materials were recyclable there wouldn't be "other junk" to mix in. I actually agree strongly with this, although I'm not sure how it could be practically implemented.

ggm 8y ago

The economics are broken. Incent cleaner waste stream, and you'll get better outcomes. I have no idea how to incent it except to note cash-back schemes aren't being pointed to here. The economics of garbage sorting are broken. but that doesn't mean garbage is broken, or recycling is broken. It means we need to look at what we want. If we want more people to recycle more, we need to tool up to handle more incorrect waste going into the input buffer. If we want people to recycle "better" we need to be prepared to lose some inputs, because of the cost burden in the community of dealing with contamination. Or, we need to remove the complexity by making it easier. Personally, my bugbear is the local (Qld, Australia) refusal to take the shopping bags full of recycles. The bags are recyclable, the contents are recyclable, but our local provider has decided not to accept the bags, but only the contents "because reasons"

pmontra 8y ago

> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.

moviuro 8y ago
AKA: "Tracking you without consent was part of our DNA; oops"
Klover 8y ago
http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/nydailynews.com/ http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/nydailynews.com/ If you look at the source I think they've done it quite well! They put everything, including the fonts and the image into the source and as a result it's all a single file website! It might also be the reason why the body font (PT Serif) looks a bit off compared to the one on Google fonts, notably the 'i', over here: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif https://fonts.google.com/specimen/PT+Serif

wichert 8y ago

"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries". Is there another way to access this?

jMyles 8y ago
> "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries". > Is there another way to access this? GDPR (and, for that matter, all state interference in the internet) in a nutshell. What a shitshow. (Of course, it's also the fault of websites doing the sorts of bad-faith tracking that GDPR, in good-faith, tries to prevent, but the result is predictable all the same).
magduf 8y ago
This is a good reason to have an account with a VPN service.

fergie 8y ago

"And then there are items that should go straight to the trash — garden hoses, wood pallets, or, on one recent afternoon, a bound stack of roofing shingles." Ideally this stuff should be redistributed to places it can actually be used ("freecycling")

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

That GDPR wall made me LOL

dawnerd 8y ago

Up here in Portland they only give us a tiny trash can and a full size recycle so we kinda don't have a choice BUT to recycle everything. When I lived downtown they only picked up trash every other week. They've recently introduced a 2 dollar/month "recycling surcharge" because they're effectively just trashing all recycling.

edem 8y ago

Wow. Did I just see a page informing me about the site being blocked in Europe?

xbkingx 8y ago

Crazy bonkers idea... The cities I've lived in (in the US) provided the garbage and recycle bins. How about printing the recyclable materials and exceptions ON THE BINS. Put it on the lid, so it can be easily customized for each community. It amazes me that no one has proposed this yet. Another idea - randomly choose streets to spot check recycling behavior and flag the cans based on their score. Nothing exotic - don't have to do it constantly or over large areas, simple 3 score system (good, acceptable, and poor), and just a quick peak in the bins as they are manually thrown into the truck. Your score is affixed to the bin, which you are rolling out every week for all the neighborhood to see. Of course there would have to be some discretion, like people just moving in, hence the process being manual, and probably some exemption process. The next week, those rated poor will be rechecked and rescored. Fail again and you get a warning that has the problems checked off from a list. After 4 consecutive failures you receive a fine. Or maybe you have to deliver your garbage to a sorting facility where someone will go over the process. Or there's a class. There are lots of options beyond throwing up a website hidden behind 3 different local government portals.

maxerickson 8y ago
The items that are worthwhile to recycle change depending on what various buyers are paying.
- xbkingx 8y ago
  But that doesn't really matter to the average resident - I've never received a notification that the recyclables list has changed, let alone fire pricing reasons. Different communities have slightly different rules (they've been 90%+ the same from my experience), but that's why I said to print on the lid. Same bins can be bought in bulk and the only logistics would be dealing with a smaller, easier to transport lids. Or just use a big, super strong sticker. New rules? New sticker covering the old one.

squarefoot 8y ago

Site says it's unavailable in Europe. What happened to the first2 Ws in the acronym WWW?

Tom4hawk 8y ago
GDPR happened. But to be honest, if news site needs so much information about me then I don't want to visit that website...

tomohawk 8y ago

In our area, landfills are scarce, so local governments are incentivized to push waste into the recycling stream. The result is that they trained people "when in doubt, put it in recycling". Now that recyclers don't want to accept the low grade stuff from them, they have a re-education problem on their hands. I imagine the government employees who put out the bad information leading to this are all still employed and have probably been promoted.

lbriner 8y ago

Obviously the ideal is to reduce "disposable" waste and we have lived 6000+ years as homo-sapiens without most of this modern stuff. I like the idea I heard about in a European country (sorry, forgotten which), where there is a disposal tax paid on all goods by the manufacturer so that the removal of waste is already paid for and doesn't require people to fly-tip etc. This is presumably a nice financial incentive for people to make better packaging to reduce their tax and therefore their sale prices.

Yetanfou 8y ago
The country is Germany, the program is called 'Der Grüne Punkt' ('The Green Dot'): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)

himom 8y ago

Stanford / Palo Alto gave up on a lot of recycling and went to “off-site sorting.” Stanford used to have 5! bins. Another fail is “recycling” at Costco, where basically no recycling happens and people just throw things in carelessly into any of the 3 bins. Worse, the staff contribute to its demise equally by eliminating the sorting signs and turning bins around to hide their labeling. Red, green, blue ... go figure which is which.

user5454 8y ago

In Sweden we incinerate[1] the trash in super hot ovens and use the resulting heat to heat our homes. We do recycle as well but as we sometimes even import trash to burn (it's a cold country after all) I don't feel so bad when throwing something in the ordinary bin instead of sorting it proper. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration

eqdw 8y ago

Straight up: If recycling things was valuable, recyclers would be paying people for their recyclable goods, independent of what trash collection does. Recycling may be the best option for the environment, but economically it's somewhere between a wash and a cost. Cities should budget appropriately