I get about an $8 credit on each garbage bill, I am billed bi-monthly. So I get paid to recycle. I wish we had yard waste recycling too but it’s not available. I have 2 large compost bins but the stuff builds up faster than I can use it.
I’m in the middle. I generally believe in the merit of recycling, and I tend to do it if I can, but I’m cynical about what happens to the contents of my recycling bins after they are picked up, and many local concils in the Sydney metro region actually admitted a few years ago they were stockpiling paper waste because it was to expensive to recycle it, and nobody would buy the finished product at the asked price when compared to new plantation paper.
This skepticism is reinforced by the fact that, in my overgoverned city there are no fewer than about 35 local councils, each with its mayor etc. Each has its own rules about garbage collection, and although most have had some sort of (supposedly mandatory) recycling in place since about 1990, they seem pretty half-arsed about it: some big blocks of apartments just have a huge dumpster for everything as it’s easier (read “cheaper”) for the council garbage trucks to collect.
There is a further reason for my skepticism: in the 1970s I remember the garbage truck had a three man crew (one driving and two on the running boards at the back collecting the bins manually). The bins were those cheap plastic ones with the handle on either side. They were very small by today’s standards, yet somehow families managed to get by with just one of these. In the 1980s, the councils went to one man truck operation. Automated collection meant issuing households with “wheelie bins”. These hold about double the amount the previous ones did. Come the 1990s, and we were given recycling tubs as well (over and above the wheelie bins). I can now put out about three times the volume of stuff I could thirty years ago, with the councils’ blessing. All in the name of recycling. WTF? Reuse and minimal initial packaging is more effective than recycling, IMHO.
So how does this translate into my own actions? Well, we have a large wheelie bin and two recycling bins. The wheelie bin (for general non-recyclables) is collected weekly. The recycling bins go out one at a time on alternate weeks (paper one week and bottles the next. As our household produces more recyclable waste than non-recyclable, I find that by garbage night, the recycling tub is overflowing, and the wheelie bin is only about a third full. I have no hesitation in filling the wheelie bin with recyclables. My guilt is overpowered by my skepticism as to their fate (I suspect landfill for everything).
[sub]OLD JOKE:[/sub]
[sub]“Hey mate, where’s ya bin?”[/sub]
[sub]“Aaah bin on holidays!”[/sub]
[sub]“No no, where’s a WHEELIE bin?”[/sub]
[sub]Aaaww man, aah wheelie bin in jail…"[/sub]
The first roommate I had when I moved to Columbus was a rabid recycler and I learned it all from her.
As of January, the community I live in gets free recycling; if our recycling level gets high enough, the city will actually MAKE money. (Even though the location says Columbus, I’m technically in a different city.) We don’t have to separate anything, but they asked us to put newspapers in a bag or box. I have something to recycle pretty much every week. I generally only have garbage every other week. My neighbors vary - maybe 1/2 the houses on my street recycle regularly. The volume has increased significantly since the new program started.
I try to buy stuff with minimal packaging to reduce and reuse when possible and I recycle everything I can.
GT
It’s required here, and just about everybody does it. No charge for the every-other-week pickup.
At school I am a hardcore recycler…I recycle my glass bottles, newspaper, school papers etc. I’m in MA so I am hardcore about collecting bottles and cans. I even sometimes go out on my bike and go hunting for bottles and cans…thank Bob for kids who enjoy drinking in the woods and litterbugs! 
One upside to recycling is that schools and communities can make MONEY off of selling recyclable stuff! It’s a good way to enrich the coffeers of your community! ( eg they sell the plastic bottles to companies that make stuff out of it!)
I do what I can. My city just got started a few years ago and doesn’t make any provisions for apartments, yet. I reduce by using cloth bags and such, re-use because I’m cheap (shake the crumbs out of that baggie and it’s good to go!) and I can put some things to use at my school. I recycle redeemable bottles and cans by bagging them for the people who come through collecting, put sadly, a lot of cans and jars get tossed out.
The two things I’d like to fix are how many paper towels my students and I use in the classroom and that there’s no newspaper recycling. We live so far from recycling plants that it costs more to truck them to the facility than anyone could make from recycling. There’s only so many papier mache projects I can assign!
At work, I do - well insomuch as I dump my paper in the blue cans, versus the regular garbage cans. At home, we don’t. Never have. It just isn’t worth the time or the effort.
We used to recycle religiously at home, when the city had a recycling plan that was easy to use. You put your recycling items in a different bag than your garbage, and put everything out on garbage day and it was picked up. Then, recycling was suspended, and when it was reinstated, it’s a more complicated system where certain things have to go to the curb on certain days.
To be honest, keeping up with the schedule is too much of a hassle, and the length of time between the recycling pick-up days is a little insane. We live in an apartment – where are we supposed to keep 2 weeks worth of recycling? In the middle of the living room floor? I need that stuff out of the house, and if that means putting it in the regular trash … well, it does mean putting it out with the regular trash. I also had to pay a ticket a while back for putting a recycling bag at the curb 2 hours too early. I confess I didn’t really know the limit for when things could be on the curb, so when I put it there I frankly didn’t care very much. We were leaving on vacation the evening before pick-up day. (As I later learned) it’s okay to put bags on the curb anytime after 6 PM the day before pick-up day. I put ours there about 4 PM, as we were getting in the car to leave. I broke the rules, I didn’t even bother to find out the rules before I did it, so I’m not complaining about having to pay the fine, but it was one more thing that made me think I don’t have that much interest in keeping bags of recycling hanging around inside the apartment for weeks at a time.
If it redeems me at all, we do have a summer cottage, and when we are there, we are back to recycling religiously because 1. we have a side yard to store garbage and recycling, and 2. you put it out on garbage pick-up day and they take it away. Yay.
I recycle my cans, glass and (most) plastic with 2 exceptions out of general principle:
I don’t put newspapers in the recycling bins & throw them in with my regular garbage because:
The local government here only mandates recycling and picks up recylables at residences - not apartment buildings or commerical property (carting laws / mafia / lobbyists / et al.). A single stationary store throws more unread newspapers into their dumpsters on one Sunday evening than I do in 3 years time. The fact the town recycling trucks won’t pick up the thousands of empty liquor bottles at bars and taverns is something that bothers me as well - but I will occasionally bring them home from my place and put them @ the curb.
I hate having to put non-carbonated beverage containers in the recycle bin because :
The unfair NY State 5¢ deposit law. People are only required to return carbonated beverage (beer & soda) containers. Apparently, people who drink bottled water, Gatorade, Yoo-Hoo, Iced Tea, wine coolers or Red Bull don’t throw their empty bottles all over the place and have been issued an exemption by the state politicians.
We must live in the same city, because it sounds like the situation we have: no curbside pickup, sort and take your own stuff (except beverage bottles and cans) to one depot, take your beverage bottles and cans to another… Frankly, speaking as one who came to this city from communities where weekly curbside pickup of all these things was the norm (hello, Sunspace), I find the situation here to be inconvenient and a hassle.
Nothing I like better ( :rolleyes: ) than taking a bunch of paper and cardboard to the local outdoor recycling depot on a brisk winter’s day, the temps around -30 with the wind chill, and the wind threatening to blow all the stuff around the parking lot where the depot is located. And let’s not forget those oh-so-handy bottle depots, where surly employees stand ready to miscount how many containers you return, and the floor is littered with broken glass.
We do our best, but as you might be able to guess, we sometimes we get to the point where we say “screw it,” and just get rid of the stuff by whatever means present themselves. If that means cutting up, say, a cardboard box so that it fits in a garbage bag, then we do it. If a local Scout troop or another community group is having a bottle drive, they can have our bottles and cans. You get the idea.
If this city made it as convenient as other cities, and put in weekly curbside pickup of all recyclables, including bottles and cans, we’d be enthusiastic participants of our city’s efforts. Until then, well…
The (conservative) American Enterprise Institute’s The Eight Myths of Recycling
[quote]
[ul][li]Myth 1: Our Garbage Will Bury Us[]Myth 2: Our Garbage Will Poison Us[]Myth 3: Our Packaging Is Immoral[]Myth 4: We Must Achieve “Trash Independence”[]Myth 5: We’re Squandering Irreplaceable Resources[]Myth 6: Recycling Always Protects the Environment[]Myth 7: Recycling Saves ResourcesMyth 8: Without Forced Mandates, There Wouldn’t Be Any Recycling[/ul][/li][/quote]
The (decade old) NYT Magazine Anti-Recycling Myths Commentary on “Recycling is Garbage”
[quote]
[ul][li]Myth #1: The recycling movement is a product of a false “crisis” in landfill space.[]Myth #2: Landfills are innocuous.[]Myth #3: Landfill space is cheap and abundant. [/li]Myth #4: Recycling should pay for itself.[li]Myth #5: There are no markets for recycled materials.[]Myth #6: Recycling doesn’t “save trees”.[]Myth #7: The environmental harms of manufacturing and using products are incorporated into their prices.[]Myth #8: Manufacturers are compelled by law to make costly changes in their packaging and products.[]Myth #9: Recycling is nearing its maximum potential.Myth #10: Recycling is a time-consuming burden on the American public.[/ul][/li][/quote]
We used to take recycling seriously, and complied to the law. But then we noticed that although we sorted glass, paper, tin cans, etc., everything went into the same truck - one of those standard trash compactor trucks.
So we more or less said to hell with it. We still do the paper sort but that’s all.
Complaints from the trash people? Not one.
I don’t recycle anything. No matter what it is, it goes in the trash.