5 ms·

I really wonder whether this is a US thing. Don't they separate waste? Don't they recycle their trash? To me, some of the other comments (that were posted a few

I really wonder whether this is a US thing. Don't they separate waste? Don't they recycle their trash? To me, some of the other comments (that were posted a few hours earlier) read as if they were from the 1990s.

NegativeLatency 6y ago
Depends on where you live, most cities have recycling programs where recycling is picked up, but as you get more rural you either have to take recycling in yourself or there’s just no good options
- erickhill 6y ago
  Out in rural areas there's also zero composting. I know, because I own a homes in both a major US city and a rural location. Also, most of the plastic the city takes, the rural location services won't.
  - fludlight 6y ago
    Homes in rural areas have lots of land where you can compost yourself. Plastic recycling can be expanded by increasing the bottle fee and expanding some form of it to all plastic.
    - erickhill 6y ago
      Hm, mine and my neighbors don't. There are communities with small lots like ours that simply don't look or sound like giant farms with acres of land to burn your own trash or create your own composting. In fact we look darn near suburban. We have neighborhoods and small towns. It's not all prairie and farm land when one describes rural life.
  - tylerjwilk00 6y ago
    This is absurd. Yes rural lacks a government run composting program because it would have a negative benefit but plenty of people do there own composting and use it for gardens or such.
  - mason240 6y ago
    In rural areas many people feed their table scraps to chickens.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The whole environmental problem with plastic in well managed landfills is filling up city landfills where land is expensive. Rural landfills will never run out of space. It's a non-problem as long as it does actually make it to the landfill and not washed down a river or something.
- yencabulator 6y ago
  When COVID-19 hit, the only local rural recycling option stopped accepting anything except corrugated cardboard. Of course, who knows what happened to the recycling before that -- but right now, almost all of my recyclables go into the trash.
sergeykish 6y ago
I'm keeping "don't you know?" mood > Coca-Cola to switch to 100% rPET > December 2019 - in Sweden > October 2020 - in the Netherlands > first half of 2021 - in Norway [1] Meanwhile > Coca-Cola currently has an average of 20% rPET in bottles sold in California. But > California will make it mandatory for plastic bottles to contain 50% recycled content by 2030. [2] [1] https://www.cocacolaep.com/media/news/2020/coca-cola-in-western-europe-transitions-to-100-recycled-plastic-rpet-bottles-in-two-more-markets/ https://www.cocacolaep.com/media/news/2020/coca-cola-in-west... [2] https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/10/02/California-s-50-rPET-plastic-bottle-goal-Coca-Cola-Nestle-respond https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/10/02/California-...
- ShinTakuya 6y ago
  When I was living in Japan and shared a homestay with an American fellow from Missouri, it shocked me that he would throw all his recyclables in the general rubbish. As an Australian, despite how my country isn't the best in that field, I've always taken recycling seriously (even with the more challenging rules in Japan). It took him a while before the Japanese host and I could train him to recycle properly. It's not like he wasn't a decent guy, he just wasn't used to it. It made me wonder if recycling just wasn't a big thing in the US, and to hear that California, as a more liberal state, is still on 20% seems to confirm that.
  - Skunkleton 6y ago
    It definitely isn’t a big thing here. It’s made worse by the fact that our recycling infrastructure is generally inadequate.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Part of the problem is that recycling is a state-by-state thing, and some states will simply never care about recycling. When I was growing up in NYC recycling was even part of the curriculum, but there were definitely contexts in which recycling was difficult (for example, sidewalks usually had street garbage cans, but not street recycling cans)
  - 6y ago
Theodores 6y ago
The habits run deeper than the recycling. I am a tea and coffee drinker with a preferred mug and a travel mug which has a lid on it. If I go out for a stroll I fill the travel mug with coffee and take that. Never do I wake up in the morning and think I need some drink in an aluminium can or plastic bottle. Nor do I wake up and wish my beverages were laced with corn syrup. Or advertised on TV. If they stopped selling fizzy drinks tomorrow then I would not notice for a long time. I am also out of the habit of drinking alcohol, however, when I do drink beer I prefer it to be in a pub where the glass is not just recycled but is re-used. My additions to the recycling bins are small compared to those of a normal person that drinks beer, wine or other alcoholic beverages every day. I am also quite partial to citrus fruits so I have no aspiration to buy 'orange juice'. For whatever reason I have not adopted the habits of buying these tin cans and plastic bottles in the first place. I am set in my ways and no amount of TV advertising will suddenly make me start the day with an energy drink or have a moment with Coca Cola mid afternoon. I just am not interested. In the USA there is this culture of drinking fizzy drinks that the advertisers have been working on for decades. The default drink comes in a can or other single use container, not a preferred mug. Separating waste might be a habit that needs to be worked on by some people, however, there is this deeper habit of using single use containers all the time.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Fizzy drinks are perfectly functional in fountains. And dirt cheap for the restaurants, to the degree that the soda companies restrict their availability to consumers. The single use drinks are sold at massive profit. I joke that restaurants are almost universally places that break even on food, if they are lucky, and make all their profit on hard/soft drinks.
mumblemumble 6y ago
The US had a big push toward single-stream recycling, where everything is thrown in one bin, and the recycling facility sorts it out. It's been something of a disaster, because of the way it's changed how individuals "recycle". The bins are frequently full of contaminated and non-recyclable materials that the facility's equipment is incapable of sorting back out. Since it's all commingled in the collection truck, one person who's sloppy about how they recycle can spoil not only their own recycling efforts, but those of their neighbors as well. In my own neighborhood, the recycle bins are frequently full of things like greasy pizza boxes, single-use paper cups, EPS, even yard waste and broken (particleboard) furniture. Chicago's current program is an illustrative example. After the city introduced it, the percentage of waste Chicagoans placed in the recycle bins roughly doubled, while the percentage of Chicago's waste that actually gets recycled was halved.
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  Covid shows how difficult it is to implement any effective policy in America above grade school intelligence, and that probably insults grade school children. The populace is simply too poorly educated, lazy, and propagandized to resist government policy.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Another issue is the bins themselves. They give 0 indication what is acceptable or not. That varies widely on who picks up your garbage. The second part is china stopped importing a lot of it. Turns out many were just bundling it up and shipping it to china. That ended a couple of years ago. That imploded the whole recycling market. The money in it dried up except for very particular items (usually metals). Everything else, no one really wanted it. To make people want to recycle you need to positively enforce it. If you goto a negative (such as a tax or fine) the incentive to do it falls off quickly. America used to recycle/reuse tons of stuff. Pepsi and Coke figured out a decent cost to their system was the reuse of their bottles. So they funded groups that worked against that. People would put a deposit on the bottles and containers. If you returned it you got the deposit back. If you tossed it someone else usually would find it and return it and get the deposit. It was a positive incentive. Instead now we have this weird thing where companies produce garbage and blame the customers for not 'taking care of it'. We have no real reason to do so other than feeling good about yourself. In some cases the ability and economic reality is not really there. Most single stream systems are basically 2 trucks. One picks up the garbage. The other picks up the recycling. Garbage goes straight to the dump. The recycling goes to a sort center. They dump it all out on large conveyor belts with a bunch of people standing next to it picking out what they can and slicing open any bags/boxes they see. Pulling anything that is obviously not for the stream (pizza boxes, magazines etc). The magnets pull out anything metal. The plastics and glass are sorted out usually by weight color and symbol if they have the machinery for it. Otherwise it is manual. This all takes time and money. If you are making 50cents for a 2ton bail of plastic the economics is not there. But if you say make 500 dollars for a bail then maybe it is there. In a neighborhood I once lived in the recycling guy decided he was not going to pick up anything except pop cans and newspaper. Everyone was mostly recycling correctly. Suddenly my neighbors and I had 2x the garbage to deal with. They all dumped it into the other bin and never recycled again for years. It took only one small negative thing to change from 'happy to help' to 'meh not doing it'. The boxes they had it in were obvious. One week everyone was doing it, then almost none. I would drive around the neighborhoods near mine and he had done it there too. They had to change the way they pickup garbage to undo what 1 guy did in 1 day.

NegativeLatency 6y ago

Depends on where you live, most cities have recycling programs where recycling is picked up, but as you get more rural you either have to take recycling in yourself or there’s just no good options

erickhill 6y ago
Out in rural areas there's also zero composting. I know, because I own a homes in both a major US city and a rural location. Also, most of the plastic the city takes, the rural location services won't.
- fludlight 6y ago
  Homes in rural areas have lots of land where you can compost yourself. Plastic recycling can be expanded by increasing the bottle fee and expanding some form of it to all plastic.
  - erickhill 6y ago
    Hm, mine and my neighbors don't. There are communities with small lots like ours that simply don't look or sound like giant farms with acres of land to burn your own trash or create your own composting. In fact we look darn near suburban. We have neighborhoods and small towns. It's not all prairie and farm land when one describes rural life.
- tylerjwilk00 6y ago
  This is absurd. Yes rural lacks a government run composting program because it would have a negative benefit but plenty of people do there own composting and use it for gardens or such.
- mason240 6y ago
  In rural areas many people feed their table scraps to chickens.
lopmotr 6y ago
Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The whole environmental problem with plastic in well managed landfills is filling up city landfills where land is expensive. Rural landfills will never run out of space. It's a non-problem as long as it does actually make it to the landfill and not washed down a river or something.
yencabulator 6y ago
When COVID-19 hit, the only local rural recycling option stopped accepting anything except corrugated cardboard. Of course, who knows what happened to the recycling before that -- but right now, almost all of my recyclables go into the trash.

sergeykish 6y ago

I'm keeping "don't you know?" mood > Coca-Cola to switch to 100% rPET > December 2019 - in Sweden > October 2020 - in the Netherlands > first half of 2021 - in Norway [1] Meanwhile > Coca-Cola currently has an average of 20% rPET in bottles sold in California. But > California will make it mandatory for plastic bottles to contain 50% recycled content by 2030. [2] [1] https://www.cocacolaep.com/media/news/2020/coca-cola-in-western-europe-transitions-to-100-recycled-plastic-rpet-bottles-in-two-more-markets/ https://www.cocacolaep.com/media/news/2020/coca-cola-in-west... [2] https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/10/02/California-s-50-rPET-plastic-bottle-goal-Coca-Cola-Nestle-respond https://www.beveragedaily.com/Article/2020/10/02/California-...

ShinTakuya 6y ago
When I was living in Japan and shared a homestay with an American fellow from Missouri, it shocked me that he would throw all his recyclables in the general rubbish. As an Australian, despite how my country isn't the best in that field, I've always taken recycling seriously (even with the more challenging rules in Japan). It took him a while before the Japanese host and I could train him to recycle properly. It's not like he wasn't a decent guy, he just wasn't used to it. It made me wonder if recycling just wasn't a big thing in the US, and to hear that California, as a more liberal state, is still on 20% seems to confirm that.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  It definitely isn’t a big thing here. It’s made worse by the fact that our recycling infrastructure is generally inadequate.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Part of the problem is that recycling is a state-by-state thing, and some states will simply never care about recycling. When I was growing up in NYC recycling was even part of the curriculum, but there were definitely contexts in which recycling was difficult (for example, sidewalks usually had street garbage cans, but not street recycling cans)
- 6y ago

Theodores 6y ago

The habits run deeper than the recycling. I am a tea and coffee drinker with a preferred mug and a travel mug which has a lid on it. If I go out for a stroll I fill the travel mug with coffee and take that. Never do I wake up in the morning and think I need some drink in an aluminium can or plastic bottle. Nor do I wake up and wish my beverages were laced with corn syrup. Or advertised on TV. If they stopped selling fizzy drinks tomorrow then I would not notice for a long time. I am also out of the habit of drinking alcohol, however, when I do drink beer I prefer it to be in a pub where the glass is not just recycled but is re-used. My additions to the recycling bins are small compared to those of a normal person that drinks beer, wine or other alcoholic beverages every day. I am also quite partial to citrus fruits so I have no aspiration to buy 'orange juice'. For whatever reason I have not adopted the habits of buying these tin cans and plastic bottles in the first place. I am set in my ways and no amount of TV advertising will suddenly make me start the day with an energy drink or have a moment with Coca Cola mid afternoon. I just am not interested. In the USA there is this culture of drinking fizzy drinks that the advertisers have been working on for decades. The default drink comes in a can or other single use container, not a preferred mug. Separating waste might be a habit that needs to be worked on by some people, however, there is this deeper habit of using single use containers all the time.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Fizzy drinks are perfectly functional in fountains. And dirt cheap for the restaurants, to the degree that the soda companies restrict their availability to consumers. The single use drinks are sold at massive profit. I joke that restaurants are almost universally places that break even on food, if they are lucky, and make all their profit on hard/soft drinks.

mumblemumble 6y ago

The US had a big push toward single-stream recycling, where everything is thrown in one bin, and the recycling facility sorts it out. It's been something of a disaster, because of the way it's changed how individuals "recycle". The bins are frequently full of contaminated and non-recyclable materials that the facility's equipment is incapable of sorting back out. Since it's all commingled in the collection truck, one person who's sloppy about how they recycle can spoil not only their own recycling efforts, but those of their neighbors as well. In my own neighborhood, the recycle bins are frequently full of things like greasy pizza boxes, single-use paper cups, EPS, even yard waste and broken (particleboard) furniture. Chicago's current program is an illustrative example. After the city introduced it, the percentage of waste Chicagoans placed in the recycle bins roughly doubled, while the percentage of Chicago's waste that actually gets recycled was halved.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Covid shows how difficult it is to implement any effective policy in America above grade school intelligence, and that probably insults grade school children. The populace is simply too poorly educated, lazy, and propagandized to resist government policy.
sumtechguy 6y ago
Another issue is the bins themselves. They give 0 indication what is acceptable or not. That varies widely on who picks up your garbage. The second part is china stopped importing a lot of it. Turns out many were just bundling it up and shipping it to china. That ended a couple of years ago. That imploded the whole recycling market. The money in it dried up except for very particular items (usually metals). Everything else, no one really wanted it. To make people want to recycle you need to positively enforce it. If you goto a negative (such as a tax or fine) the incentive to do it falls off quickly. America used to recycle/reuse tons of stuff. Pepsi and Coke figured out a decent cost to their system was the reuse of their bottles. So they funded groups that worked against that. People would put a deposit on the bottles and containers. If you returned it you got the deposit back. If you tossed it someone else usually would find it and return it and get the deposit. It was a positive incentive. Instead now we have this weird thing where companies produce garbage and blame the customers for not 'taking care of it'. We have no real reason to do so other than feeling good about yourself. In some cases the ability and economic reality is not really there. Most single stream systems are basically 2 trucks. One picks up the garbage. The other picks up the recycling. Garbage goes straight to the dump. The recycling goes to a sort center. They dump it all out on large conveyor belts with a bunch of people standing next to it picking out what they can and slicing open any bags/boxes they see. Pulling anything that is obviously not for the stream (pizza boxes, magazines etc). The magnets pull out anything metal. The plastics and glass are sorted out usually by weight color and symbol if they have the machinery for it. Otherwise it is manual. This all takes time and money. If you are making 50cents for a 2ton bail of plastic the economics is not there. But if you say make 500 dollars for a bail then maybe it is there. In a neighborhood I once lived in the recycling guy decided he was not going to pick up anything except pop cans and newspaper. Everyone was mostly recycling correctly. Suddenly my neighbors and I had 2x the garbage to deal with. They all dumped it into the other bin and never recycled again for years. It took only one small negative thing to change from 'happy to help' to 'meh not doing it'. The boxes they had it in were obvious. One week everyone was doing it, then almost none. I would drive around the neighborhoods near mine and he had done it there too. They had to change the way they pickup garbage to undo what 1 guy did in 1 day.