3 ms·
I think recycling might be a bit more practical if we gave up on the ridiculous idea of single-stream recycling, which offers a small amount of convenience to p
by emodendroket 4y ago
I think recycling might be a bit more practical if we gave up on the ridiculous idea of single-stream recycling, which offers a small amount of convenience to people at the cost of obliterating whatever small margins recycling offered in the first place.
- lazide 4y agoWhen someone tries non-single source recycling, it becomes clear how much of the current recycling dog and pony show is bullshit - because all except a small hard core of folks won’t do it unless they get paid! Which, frankly, is a really strong signal. For those folks, they’re just wasting their time, because it has to go through the same sorting process as single source does, as everyone’s recycling gets co-mingled, and most others just throw random trash in there. And that won’t scale for non-economic recycling (aka currently things that aren’t Aluminum and certain other metals). In a lot of the Bay Area (even Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Santa Clara!) it’s normal for folks to go through every morning and raid everyones recycle bins for valuable recycling before the city trash vendor can arrive, then sell it. Everything else gets left of course, as it’s a cost, and usually just gets sent into the trash anyway.
- emodendroket 4y agoThis is not some bizarre thought experiment that's never been tried; other countries, such as Japan, have had a system like this for decades. Once again, if we're serious we should be enforcing it.