4 ms·

An undocumented but well known side effect of the combination of curbside recycling and bottle deposits is that once the cans and bottles are placed outdoors, h

An undocumented but well known side effect of the combination of curbside recycling and bottle deposits is that once the cans and bottles are placed outdoors, homeless people cut the bags open to fish out the deposit containers. This makes a tremendous mess, and the city recycling trucks often won't pick up the the bags once they have been shredded, and it creates litter up and down the street -- it probably costs 5x as much to clean up after the homeless as they get off of the bottle deposits, and this is after they've already performed the labor of separating the solid waste stream.

antiterra 7y ago
Its a straightforward side effect to avoid as well, don’t use bags. Austin and Chicago come to mind as cities that don't accept bagged items for recycling. Neither has bottle deposit but I don’t see it being a huge issue to add, if they so chose.
myself248 7y ago
For this to happen, a couple things have to be in place: 1: Ordinary people have to find the deposit so small as to not be worthwhile, so they chuck the cans in with their normal recycling rather than returning them to claim the deposit. 2: The recycling has to go out in bags rather than bins or carts. I'm in Michigan and even our 10¢ deposit, which was impressive in the 1970s, has ceased to be worthwhile for many people. We should've upped it to 25¢ a decade ago, and expanded it to include juice and other noncarbonated things, but I digress! However, my city uses a big rolling bin for recycling, so there's no bag to slice open. If someone wanted to root through the bin, they could do so without making a mess. (And if they decided to dump the bin on the street, after once occurrence I'd be sitting on the porch on trash night with a blunderbuss full o' rock-salt...)
- deleted 7y ago
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- gbronner 7y ago
  In response to #1, Manhattan real estate costs over $1k per square foot, often more. Adding a third container/bag to everyone's trash area would eat up far more capital in real estate than it would produce in income. #2: Manhattan is super dense, and there's no place to put that many bins. Bags scale better than bins anyway, and a lot of buildings use trash compactors which work far better with bags. Finally, there's not enough room between parked cars to get bins from the sidewalk to the street easily.
- altec3 7y ago
  I'm in Oregon and our deposit is 10¢ as well, we also have the big bins/carts. The homeless around here will pull everything out of our recycling bin a lot of the time to find cans. Most of the time they'll put it all back, but sometimes they wont, and I'll find my trash/recycling littered about the street. It also has the effect that almost everyone in my area leaves their trash cans on the street, because if you put them somewhere near your house the homeless people will find it, and invite themselves up onto your property.

antiterra 7y ago

Its a straightforward side effect to avoid as well, don’t use bags. Austin and Chicago come to mind as cities that don't accept bagged items for recycling. Neither has bottle deposit but I don’t see it being a huge issue to add, if they so chose.

myself248 7y ago

For this to happen, a couple things have to be in place: 1: Ordinary people have to find the deposit so small as to not be worthwhile, so they chuck the cans in with their normal recycling rather than returning them to claim the deposit. 2: The recycling has to go out in bags rather than bins or carts. I'm in Michigan and even our 10¢ deposit, which was impressive in the 1970s, has ceased to be worthwhile for many people. We should've upped it to 25¢ a decade ago, and expanded it to include juice and other noncarbonated things, but I digress! However, my city uses a big rolling bin for recycling, so there's no bag to slice open. If someone wanted to root through the bin, they could do so without making a mess. (And if they decided to dump the bin on the street, after once occurrence I'd be sitting on the porch on trash night with a blunderbuss full o' rock-salt...)

deleted 7y ago
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gbronner 7y ago
In response to #1, Manhattan real estate costs over $1k per square foot, often more. Adding a third container/bag to everyone's trash area would eat up far more capital in real estate than it would produce in income. #2: Manhattan is super dense, and there's no place to put that many bins. Bags scale better than bins anyway, and a lot of buildings use trash compactors which work far better with bags. Finally, there's not enough room between parked cars to get bins from the sidewalk to the street easily.
altec3 7y ago
I'm in Oregon and our deposit is 10¢ as well, we also have the big bins/carts. The homeless around here will pull everything out of our recycling bin a lot of the time to find cans. Most of the time they'll put it all back, but sometimes they wont, and I'll find my trash/recycling littered about the street. It also has the effect that almost everyone in my area leaves their trash cans on the street, because if you put them somewhere near your house the homeless people will find it, and invite themselves up onto your property.