I am not confident that the recycling doesn’t just get dumped with the rest of the garbage. I am extremely confident in my ability to properly separate recyclables and I’m the one who does it in my house.
I’m pretty picky. Clean newspaper, empty bottles, and aluminum cans. My wife, on the other hand puts all kinds of nasty stuff in there, despite gentle reminders from me. I end up picking out the dirty jars of tomato sauce and peanut butter.
I couldn’t answer the recycling question. While there’s curbside recycling for homes, there isn’t in most apartment complexes. We separate our recycling out and bring it to the convenience center where we have to put the right things in the right bins. So it’s all on us, no one else involved.
I have seen our sanitation crew dump our large recycle bin full of recyclables in with the regular garbage bin into the garbage (not recycle) truck.
mmm
Our university owns a wood framed yurt for some reason. It’s pretty nice, and also huge. We were in it during the day, but it could easily sleep 20 people with sleeping bags.
I intentionally recycle and check to see what my community recycling standards are. I’ve done this since my mother taught me back when she started the recycling program for the community I grew up in. However, I’m staying with a friend who throws everything with a recycle symbol into the bin, clean or not, whether our community handles it or not. It’s really irritating. But, it is her home and I am homeless without her help so I bite my tongue.
You melt it down and turn it into new products? The poll is about how confident you are that what you are putting out will be recycled and not end up in a landfill.
You can call your local recycler to get the percentages. Heck, many of them give public tours and the tour is pretty fascinating, if a bit depressing.
This.
My community recycles everything there’s a market for; I understand that this means sometimes recyclables end up in the landfill. However, our Solud Waste Department has given us a list of what they’d like us to put in recycling, so I put those things in. If they can’t actually recycle them this month, maybe they will next month.
I answered the question about leaving someone space to cross into a driveway by saying there are rules, but when I think about it, I’d qualify that. I was actually a witness to a crash that was facilitated by someone being a nice guy this way. He’d stopped ahead of the driveway, leaving space for the other guy to cross over, and so did the car in the far lane. Unfortunately, no one had gotten the memo to the motorcyclist coming up in the middle lane to what was by then a green light, and he T-boned the turning car. Since then, if you’re foolish enough to try turning left into a driveway that’s close to a light, I’ll just let you wait until traffic is actually clear. Now, if everyone at the light is on the same page and there are cars all the way across, sure, I’ll join in. Or if it’s just one or two lanes and I know I’m not setting up some poor schmuck for an accident, fine. But in the main, traffic rules are there for a reason. I’ll save my good Samaritan activities for when I’m on foot.
I really, really dislike those courtesy turns, or whatever you want to call them, because they sometimes go against the intuition of other drivers and you see stupid things happen. I haven’t seen an actual accident like that, but I’ve certainly seen near accidents, people, jamming on brakes, horns, etc. Just do what you’re supposed to do.
Our town doesn’t have recycling. When I tried taking our recycling to a nearby town they refused to take it. All our garbage goes in my work dumpster.
I’ve seen the aftermath of these accidents and seen close calls myself. We have a major North-South street next to my workplace. At the intersection with another street, each has two lanes of through traffic and a right turn only lane that extends the length of the block or longer. At rush hour, both through lanes are backed up considerably when the light is red, but there are fewer right turning cars, so that lane is light. There are parking lot entrances along each side of the street, So often when a car traveling south wants to make a left turn into the parking lot, two through lane cars will often do the courtesy of stopping and leaving a gap at the entrance to the parking lot (but with many cars backed up behind them).
I hope you can see where I’m going with this. The left turning car can’t see traffic in the right turn lane because its view is blocked by cars backed up in the through lanes. Cars in the right turn only lane, traveling at the 35 MPH speed limit, can’t see the left turning car. T-bone!
The city finally put double double yellow lines (that’s a median in California) along the street, but I still see cars making that left into the parking lot (because, you know, traveling an extra half block and making a u-turn at the light and then a right into the parking lot is just wrong).
I’ve learned to be suspicions of any situation on a multi-lane street where all the lanes except one are backed up and to never think “what luck!” and moving into that lane at full speed. Proceed cautiously.
I also have a similar intersection as in the poll at the complex where I live, and where I stayed for several years (this annex is not connected to the main complex and has its own separate entrance as should be clear from the Google Maps link). I have seen many wrecks there in my time here.
No answer in the poll matched the situation here because they have a sign saying E-W traffic on the main road cannot block this intersection. But it is immensely foolish for anyone to actually try to use it to turn into the complex (or out of it), because the sight lines are crap and the 5 lanes of traffic is almost invariably heavy. People nevertheless will try to do so anyway-the most awesomeist manuever people will try is to come in off of Atlantic Blvd. there from the double left turn lanes-and come to a complete stop in the middle of the road to turn into the complex. This results in all of the vehicles behind them forced to come to a sudden stop, backing traffic up into the main intersection and blocking it for the next cycle as well, on both ends (left turn single lane from Hodges to Atlantic), and breeds rear-end collisions. I’ve both been forced to stop in the middle of the big intersection as well as miss the Hodges-Atlantic left turn because one of these bozos decided to camp there, blocking BOTH lanes.
I quickly realized that I had to do u-turns, both coming and going, to be safe and spare myself from being t-boned, could only get away with turning left coming out if the traffic was extremely light, which is hardly ever. If not I’d have to go right to the light at Queen’s Harbor and make a uie, often to go to work in the shopping center across the way. [Note I rarely walked, not wanting to become a road pizza in this town given its crazy drivers] Same with coming out of the shopping center , people will CONSTANTLY try to force left turns there, again blocking traffic coming from Atlantic just so their entitled behinds can save a couple of seconds. To their credit I do see people going up Hodges to the main entrance to do uie’s, but not all of them do.
So my poll answer would have been “They should go down to the first full intersection and make a u-turn to not inconvenience other drivers and risk an accident thanks to their entitled mindset.”
This situation mostly comes up for me on roads that are one lane in each direction, so that’s what I was thinking of when I answered the poll. And yes, I often stop to let someone turn left in front of me on those roads, especially if there’s a line of traffic backed up behind them. On a multi-lane highway, I wouldn’t. But also, the multilane roads near me mostly have space for the left-turning car to sit and wait without blocking their lane. (and the bigger ones have a barrier except where there’s a designated space to wait, and usually a light to make that turn safe.)
I have mostly two lane roads around me. I typically try not to block driveways, parking lots, and side streets when stopped for red lights. Otherwise people would never get out or in.
I voted that I’d stop and let the car turn; but if there’d been a choice for “depends on the overall traffic situation”, I’d have chosen that. I’m rarely driving in multi-lane traffic in which InternetLegend’s scenario might come up, so answered for the situations I’m usually in. – or, pretty much what @puzzlegal said.
To amplify on my previous answer – I don’t entirely trust the trash pickup crew, on any given day, not to toss everything in the landfill; but I think they’re at least mostly recycling whatever they’ve got a market for. I suspect, however, that some of what’s on their list of things that they pick up is items for which the market is at best variable, and that when there isn’t a market for some of it those portions wind up in the landfill; but that may not be a decision made by the local company doing the pickup. They sort items and send them on; they may sometimes be trashing supposed recyclables because the next stop won’t take them, but I think sometimes that decision’s made at the next stop up.
The trash truck that comes by has a section for “trash” and a section for “single stream recyclables”. I trust the trash lady to put the right bin in the right part of the truck. And we do an okay job of sorting out the stuff that we are supposed to put in the recycling bin. But… I suspect that most of what goes to single stream facilities ends up in the trash.
My town has a recycling & disposal center if I haul stuff to it myself, and I have a high degree of confidence that the aluminum I toss in the aluminum enclosure will be recycled. And the fluorescent lights I put in the fluorescent shed will be safely discarded. They publish a report each year of what they do with the stuff. The newspaper is disposed of for a fee (to the town, I mean) but it’s a smaller fee than the fee for the same weight of “trash”, so I suppose it’s probably being recycled.
Two different trucks. The recycling usually gets picked up mid-morning on trash day, and the landfill bin in the afternoon. I have no idea what happens to the recyclables after they leave my curb, but at least I know they’re not getting dumped into the same tuck with regular trash.
Back in California we had a third bin for compost, which we don’t have here in Nevada. I truly miss it.
We just got curbside compost earlier this year. It’s “free” but it wasn’t automatic to all residents, you had to specifically sign up for it. Previously we had been paying a company to collect our food waste and they’d bring us a bag of compost once a month or so.