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In Finland, neighbouring Sweden, we also have more different containers for different trash than you'd care for. It takes time to learn all that and when you've
by yason 13y ago
In Finland, neighbouring Sweden, we also have more different containers for different trash than you'd care for. It takes time to learn all that and when you've finally sorted out all your trash properly to different bins, you sit on your balcony and look at the garbage truck reversing to the yard. The guy goes inside the garbage shed and brings out one bin of certain color, empties it in the truck, and drives away to the next address only to come back a few days later to do the same. When your mind accidentally multiplies this activity by the number of different colored bins you have there, you begin to imagine the local emissions produced by these different trucks circling around all the time, emptying one type of trash each. There are so many bins that each of them must be rather small, so the buffering capacity of the garbage sheds causes excess traffic and pollution due to regular visits by the garbage trucks. Further, some things are collected in certain recycling points, such as non-returnable glass waste like jars and olive oil bottles, which means people take them there with private cars!
For a long time we used to have general waste and compostables. That was quite understandable because you really want the compostables into a separate heap because of...well, composting and you can produce bio gas off composts if the percentage of decomposing waste is high enough. But I'm pretty sure the separation of glass, wood, papers, cardboards etc. could be done in some automated way that reaches a good enough success rate that would make it economically and ecologically viable.
- hvidgaard 13y agoIt depends on the scale. In Denmark, while we can do it privately by driving to recycle stations - highly inefficient as you mention. The sorting in urban areas however, is mostly glass, paper (and the like), and general waste - it does not matter if a truck picks this up, because he would have to do so as general waste anyway, if it wasn't sorted. Many larger stores also have facilities for batteries, but I'm unsure how many uses them as most people I know toss them in with the general waste. It has also been tried many times to separate organic matter from the rest (different colour of bags), and using automatic systems to sort it. It has been mostly dropped because it's more expensive than just burning everything unfortunately. Which brings me to the main point. We can be very efficient and recycle most of the waste, find a optimum point where we minimize the environmental footprint - it's just expensive, and the first thing to go when the city need to save money. People just don't care about future generations, or don't believe it's a problem, to accept the cost of recycling.
- vidarh 13y agoI live in London, and here recycling is largely driven by cost cutting: Landfills are limited, and there are severe restrictions on incinerators, so many councils use recycling as a way to drive down their costs for waste disposal.
- hvidgaard 13y agoThat is political incentive though, they aren't quite as strict here. I think, no matter how we do it, it will be more expensive to recycle. That is, unless there is a political decision to tax waste burning/landfills, or resources become very scarce. But it really is a shame, because high density areas like Copenhagen, are ideal for pushing recycling. You get quantities, and you don't have to collect over a large geographical area. So the running cost of collecting is significantly less, and you can build larger and more efficient facilities to process and recycle the waste.