3 ms·

They're very strict about sorting your own recycling, organic waste, and household waste here in Zurich. So strict that people are fined for not doing it proper

They're very strict about sorting your own recycling, organic waste, and household waste here in Zurich. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly. And also there are newspaper articles with the format of reporting on someone receiving a fine and how thankful they are now that they know the proper way to recycle (obviously planted - I had to write an article like this in junior high because I used the school phone to call 911 to ask the time). What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. I mean, even with these strict rules they still need to sort the stuff that people didn't sort properly in the first place. So why not sort it all? (Except for the biowaste because that could contaminate the recycling)

InMice 11mo ago
It is a free for all in USA, sometimes the trash truck comes down and grabs both recycling bins and trash bins and just dumps all into the same truck. No one cares, customer or trash service company. Many facilities dont sort if sorting becomes too much work they just toss what was picked up as reycling into the trash. Walk inside any warehouse type facility in America and they throw anything and everything into the trash that has lost its utility for the business. Working inside an order fulfillment warehouse opened my eyes to how much waste is created just to pack and ship everyones cheap single use junk. Bottle deposits haven't been adjusted for inflation in decades, no one even talks about it. States that dont have deposit laws people just litter aluminim cans everywhere. When there are bottle deposit laws they have exceptions like no deposit required for aluminum can if its contents are not carbonated. Why should that matter? Most people toss their food waste into the trash, effectively no one bothers with the effort to return nutrients back into the earth. Why do that when we can just pointlessly haul it away in a fuel burning truck and seal it away with toxic everyday garbage. The people who actually care about re-use and or reducing waste are tiny vocal minority compared to everyone else. When I walk into a grocery story filled with 100+ shoppers I am always the only person using reusable, non-plastic bags. I also laugh when if you don't use plastic bags, they slap plastic stickers on your items thanking you for not using plastic bags LOL. I know other countries are worse with pollution but gosh. Sounds nice in Zurich if there's actually people that care.
OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago
There's a lot of things that really jam up recycling. One of them is plastic grocery bags. They just cause a lot of problems in the mechanisation of recycling so it's very non-trivial to work around them. Oils and biowaste of course are of course another issue. Especially for corrugated fiberboard (brandname: cardboard) and the like. And then also it's hard for machines or lineworkers to easily differentiate plastics without sufficient market or regulatory pressure. If consumers are already generally sorting by broad category then they take most of the legwork out (leaving the facility to check their work) and those consumers also apply market pressure on manufacturers to make it obvious how their product is expected to be recycled. And of course also there's just a general component of everyone doing a little at a time to keep things organised from the start making the entire process an order of magnitude easier and more efficient for everyone downstream.
lostlogin 11mo ago
> I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. It’s a logical argument, but I feel another punishment in your future.
lotsofpulp 11mo ago
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. It's not about efficiency, it's about making some portion of the population feel good about their consumption. It is obvious that the production and use of pretty much all of these plastics leads to undesirable very long term outcomes, but very desirable short term outcomes. Politically, it is untenable to completely ban the plastic as the people would revolt, but it is (or was) also politically untenable to not do anything about the problem. Hence, the politically tenable solution is to pretend like society is doing something about the problem. It's the same thing with fossil fuels and carbon emissions.
bluGill 11mo ago
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. That depends. The big is there is so much volume that isn't recyclable that the costs of machines to sort everything (when most is waste) is just too high. As the other post started to get to: for some things clean waste matters and is common enough to sort. If you have greasy paper about all that we can do is burn it, but clean paper has enough value as to be worth it. Thus a separate stream for clean cardboard/paper is something that should be done early. For other things cleaning isn't as big a deal (unless you can get perfect clean they will need to clean again - but you still want it not to stink). Throw all your plastic (no bags - unless you have the rare system that can handle them), cans, and glass together: They have to sort anyway, but compartments for each (or separate trucks) are going to add up costs - One week there is more cans than others so you end up going back to the facility with half full compartments all the time burned fuel each way. You still want to separate trash, (even if the bag issue was solved) as there is so much that we can't really do anything about that the quantity means the sorting machines needed to handle total volumes are too high unless most things we know can't be recycled are not in. I'm not sure about organics. My impression is that most houses don't have enough of it as to be worth the bother in general. Businesses that have enough as to be worth it should also separate their kitchen waste but otherwise more fuel is burned in the trucks than we save. We also have to ask what is done with regular waste. Landfills are slow compost piles for organics, and we do collect the methane these days. Incinerators turn organics and plastics into fuel which is often the best we can do with them (recycling plastics still needs a lot of energy/chemicals, burning releases some CO2, but perhaps less than the above - this has been argued many times to different conclusions)
- Mountain_Skies 11mo ago
  The Ford Bronco assembly plant is near a large landfill where the methane is captured and used in the plant. Fans of other brands joke that the Bronco is literally made from garbage.
  - bitwize 11mo ago
    Bronco fans could counter with this: so are Princess Catherine's (rather not cheap) shoes. She is a fan of a brand called Rothy's, which makes casual footwear out of recycled plastic bottles that sell for $150 or so/pair.
mothballed 11mo ago
>. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly. Some parts of Oregon I lived in had high cost for general trash (almost every trash bin/dumpster I encountered was chained locked) and to use the city dump you needed an ID and maybe even required to live in the same county. The result of these asinine policies to force people into 'recycling' things that aren't recyclable and making trash so onerous that all you can find is locked up dumpsters, is you would often see piles of trash and junk in the national forest or BLM land, the result of either extreme inconvenience or desperation.
- gs17 10mo ago
  That dumping is probably not about recycling policies, but more about the cost of trash. Illegal dumping still happens in places where recycling is barely offered.
mc32 11mo ago
Since people make mistakes in categorization and sorting, recycling facilities have to do it over again. It's redundant. So why do they never the less have people sort? It's just a psychological tool: It makes people 'care' and it makes people think society at large, including the recycling company cares. Now, that doesn't mean the company doesn't care about recycling in and of itself --they probably do to some extent, but they also need to project outwardly that they care.
kingstnap 10mo ago
It makes a big difference. We'll sorted garbage is easier to deal with. I watched this video from Andrew Fraser on Indonesias plastic recycling industry. There were a few points during the documentary where this is pointed out. I had gemini point them out and verified them. --- The documentary indicates that separating rubbish bins at the source is important because it eliminates an entire process and makes almost everything recyclable (14:18 - 14:24). The speaker contrasts the Indonesian system, where scavengers sort mixed waste, with Western systems where waste is separated at the source (2:00 - 2:08, 6:57 - 7:00). At a modern processing facility, the speaker notes that if waste is not separated at the source, some material becomes too dirty to recycle (14:26 - 14:29, 20:26 - 20:29). Furthermore, the video highlights that imported plastics from Western nations are highly valuable because they are clean, dry, sorted, and high-grade, having gone directly into the recycling side of consumer bins (28:57 - 29:11). This high-quality imported plastic is essential for Indonesian recycling plants like PMS to mix with lower-quality local waste, allowing them to process more raw domestic waste and create more jobs (28:01 - 28:27). --- https://youtu.be/AyvgDUled7w?si=z0zkqGOsBLajXkqg https://youtu.be/AyvgDUled7w?si=z0zkqGOsBLajXkqg
- 47282847 10mo ago
  Sorting, and charging different prices for different types of waste (typical in Europe, don’t know elsewhere), also provides economic and psychological incentives to potentially reduce purchases of certain type.

InMice 11mo ago

It is a free for all in USA, sometimes the trash truck comes down and grabs both recycling bins and trash bins and just dumps all into the same truck. No one cares, customer or trash service company. Many facilities dont sort if sorting becomes too much work they just toss what was picked up as reycling into the trash. Walk inside any warehouse type facility in America and they throw anything and everything into the trash that has lost its utility for the business. Working inside an order fulfillment warehouse opened my eyes to how much waste is created just to pack and ship everyones cheap single use junk. Bottle deposits haven't been adjusted for inflation in decades, no one even talks about it. States that dont have deposit laws people just litter aluminim cans everywhere. When there are bottle deposit laws they have exceptions like no deposit required for aluminum can if its contents are not carbonated. Why should that matter? Most people toss their food waste into the trash, effectively no one bothers with the effort to return nutrients back into the earth. Why do that when we can just pointlessly haul it away in a fuel burning truck and seal it away with toxic everyday garbage. The people who actually care about re-use and or reducing waste are tiny vocal minority compared to everyone else. When I walk into a grocery story filled with 100+ shoppers I am always the only person using reusable, non-plastic bags. I also laugh when if you don't use plastic bags, they slap plastic stickers on your items thanking you for not using plastic bags LOL. I know other countries are worse with pollution but gosh. Sounds nice in Zurich if there's actually people that care.

OneDeuxTriSeiGo 11mo ago

There's a lot of things that really jam up recycling. One of them is plastic grocery bags. They just cause a lot of problems in the mechanisation of recycling so it's very non-trivial to work around them. Oils and biowaste of course are of course another issue. Especially for corrugated fiberboard (brandname: cardboard) and the like. And then also it's hard for machines or lineworkers to easily differentiate plastics without sufficient market or regulatory pressure. If consumers are already generally sorting by broad category then they take most of the legwork out (leaving the facility to check their work) and those consumers also apply market pressure on manufacturers to make it obvious how their product is expected to be recycled. And of course also there's just a general component of everyone doing a little at a time to keep things organised from the start making the entire process an order of magnitude easier and more efficient for everyone downstream.

lostlogin 11mo ago

> I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. It’s a logical argument, but I feel another punishment in your future.

lotsofpulp 11mo ago

>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. It's not about efficiency, it's about making some portion of the population feel good about their consumption. It is obvious that the production and use of pretty much all of these plastics leads to undesirable very long term outcomes, but very desirable short term outcomes. Politically, it is untenable to completely ban the plastic as the people would revolt, but it is (or was) also politically untenable to not do anything about the problem. Hence, the politically tenable solution is to pretend like society is doing something about the problem. It's the same thing with fossil fuels and carbon emissions.

bluGill 11mo ago

>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. That depends. The big is there is so much volume that isn't recyclable that the costs of machines to sort everything (when most is waste) is just too high. As the other post started to get to: for some things clean waste matters and is common enough to sort. If you have greasy paper about all that we can do is burn it, but clean paper has enough value as to be worth it. Thus a separate stream for clean cardboard/paper is something that should be done early. For other things cleaning isn't as big a deal (unless you can get perfect clean they will need to clean again - but you still want it not to stink). Throw all your plastic (no bags - unless you have the rare system that can handle them), cans, and glass together: They have to sort anyway, but compartments for each (or separate trucks) are going to add up costs - One week there is more cans than others so you end up going back to the facility with half full compartments all the time burned fuel each way. You still want to separate trash, (even if the bag issue was solved) as there is so much that we can't really do anything about that the quantity means the sorting machines needed to handle total volumes are too high unless most things we know can't be recycled are not in. I'm not sure about organics. My impression is that most houses don't have enough of it as to be worth the bother in general. Businesses that have enough as to be worth it should also separate their kitchen waste but otherwise more fuel is burned in the trucks than we save. We also have to ask what is done with regular waste. Landfills are slow compost piles for organics, and we do collect the methane these days. Incinerators turn organics and plastics into fuel which is often the best we can do with them (recycling plastics still needs a lot of energy/chemicals, burning releases some CO2, but perhaps less than the above - this has been argued many times to different conclusions)

Mountain_Skies 11mo ago
The Ford Bronco assembly plant is near a large landfill where the methane is captured and used in the plant. Fans of other brands joke that the Bronco is literally made from garbage.
- bitwize 11mo ago
  Bronco fans could counter with this: so are Princess Catherine's (rather not cheap) shoes. She is a fan of a brand called Rothy's, which makes casual footwear out of recycled plastic bottles that sell for $150 or so/pair.

mothballed 11mo ago

>. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly. Some parts of Oregon I lived in had high cost for general trash (almost every trash bin/dumpster I encountered was chained locked) and to use the city dump you needed an ID and maybe even required to live in the same county. The result of these asinine policies to force people into 'recycling' things that aren't recyclable and making trash so onerous that all you can find is locked up dumpsters, is you would often see piles of trash and junk in the national forest or BLM land, the result of either extreme inconvenience or desperation.

gs17 10mo ago
That dumping is probably not about recycling policies, but more about the cost of trash. Illegal dumping still happens in places where recycling is barely offered.

mc32 11mo ago

Since people make mistakes in categorization and sorting, recycling facilities have to do it over again. It's redundant. So why do they never the less have people sort? It's just a psychological tool: It makes people 'care' and it makes people think society at large, including the recycling company cares. Now, that doesn't mean the company doesn't care about recycling in and of itself --they probably do to some extent, but they also need to project outwardly that they care.

kingstnap 10mo ago

It makes a big difference. We'll sorted garbage is easier to deal with. I watched this video from Andrew Fraser on Indonesias plastic recycling industry. There were a few points during the documentary where this is pointed out. I had gemini point them out and verified them. --- The documentary indicates that separating rubbish bins at the source is important because it eliminates an entire process and makes almost everything recyclable (14:18 - 14:24). The speaker contrasts the Indonesian system, where scavengers sort mixed waste, with Western systems where waste is separated at the source (2:00 - 2:08, 6:57 - 7:00). At a modern processing facility, the speaker notes that if waste is not separated at the source, some material becomes too dirty to recycle (14:26 - 14:29, 20:26 - 20:29). Furthermore, the video highlights that imported plastics from Western nations are highly valuable because they are clean, dry, sorted, and high-grade, having gone directly into the recycling side of consumer bins (28:57 - 29:11). This high-quality imported plastic is essential for Indonesian recycling plants like PMS to mix with lower-quality local waste, allowing them to process more raw domestic waste and create more jobs (28:01 - 28:27). --- https://youtu.be/AyvgDUled7w?si=z0zkqGOsBLajXkqg https://youtu.be/AyvgDUled7w?si=z0zkqGOsBLajXkqg

47282847 10mo ago
Sorting, and charging different prices for different types of waste (typical in Europe, don’t know elsewhere), also provides economic and psychological incentives to potentially reduce purchases of certain type.