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It 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

It 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 ago
I 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 ago
  That 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.

vidarh 13y ago

I 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 ago
That 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.