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Moving from Sweden to California, the recycling system here is still completely bewildering to me, and makes very little sense. Where I'm from, recycling start
by henrikschroder 11y ago
Moving from Sweden to California, the recycling system here is still completely bewildering to me, and makes very little sense.
Where I'm from, recycling started by grabbing simple low-hanging fruit. Newspapers. Aluminium cans. Glass bottles and jars. And it doesn't all go into one "recycling bin", but each thing is separated. Later, that expanded so you can now also recycle metal cans, plastic containers and cardboard. If you want to.
And the default was never landfill, instead all household trash is incinerated for heat and electricity. Sweden even imports trash to burn! And in the case people throw the "wrong" things in general trash, the incinerators can handle it, they're very good at exhaust filtering, and I bet you can even mine the residue for rare materials.
And that all makes sense to me. I can see the economics of it, and I can see the environmental impact of sorting. But the California system of one big "recycling" bin that you're supposed to throw god-knows-what in is completely opaque to me. How does anything useful come out of that? How much labour is needed to sort it at the station?
- stephengillie 11y agoThis article discusses some of the problems in the "one-bin" system. http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/american-recycling-is-stalling-and-the-big-blue-bin-is-one-reason-why/2015/06/20/914735e4-1610-11e5-9ddc-e3353542100c_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/american-rec...
- ZeroGravitas 11y agoThere's videos on YouTube of "single-stream" MRF facilities. I think Ars Technica just visited one and did a story on the machines involved. They use all sorts of cool tech like computer vision to sort flakes of plastic with tiny jets of air, eddy currents and magnets to sort metal and sonic imploders to disintegrate glass. There are people involved to pull out things that would jam the machines, but generally it's fairly automatable. Inside New York City’s newest recycling center - Machines use science to separate a stream of waste into valuable raw materials. http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/inside-new-york-citys-newest-recycling-center/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/inside-new-york-citys... Recycling in the US: An off-again, on-again love affair - It became a booming industry despite facing a series of intractable tradeoffs. http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-an-off-again-on-again-love-affair/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-a...