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> In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. I
by rdtsc 8y ago
> In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill.
I heard other cities doing that. It is interesting in municipalities where people diligently separate their recycling into multiple streams, everything neatly going into a separate bins and so on, and then it all goes and gets dumped in the landfill.
That says something about human psychology. People need to engage in this ritual because it makes them feel better. They might say to themselves "I am separating my glass, from metal, from plastic, I am saving the environment! I feel good about myself". The economy doesn't work out in the end, but nobody dares to tell the people that, so they happily continue to sort their trash. It's kind of a dystopian win-win situation.
- SiempreViernes 8y agoWell no, the environment gets ruined so it's more of a "everyone suffers and die ahead of time" situation
- rdtsc 8y agoThat's why I called it a "a dystopian win-win" :-)
- selimthegrim 8y agoRecyclables, Please! Steam greenlight that stat. I’d buy it. Maybe the plot twist is you’re homeless all along!
- BrandonMarc 8y agoOr the recyclables are made out of people.
- umanwizard 8y agoRecycling is completely unrelated to most of the actually serious environmental issues. (E.g., climate change)
- dade_ 8y agoIt is common in Starbucks. I don't think anyone can recycle their disposable coffee cups, but they have blue bins with a separate coffee cup hole that winds up in the same pile of trash at the end of the day.
- philwelch 8y agoIt's just an API migration. You can't actually start recycling until you start receiving pre-sorted waste streams, so you roll out the pre-sorted waste streams and just source all of them to the same landfill you've been using. Later, you can source some of the recycling streams (independently of each other, even) to recycling.
- rdtsc 8y agoExcept I think the migration is in the other direction, which makes it more interesting. If you'd like to think in terms of software, it's like they had bought into the microservices trend year back, then migrated back to a monolith underneath but still left stateless microservices APIs and shims running on Docker containers spread throughout just so they can claim somewhere they still do "microservices" and feel good about themselves.