Yep, although they let you continue putting it into a recycling bin, so you think you are still recycling, but it all goes to the same place.
Oh my God, yes! Until a few months ago, my very nice apartment complex had no recycling bins. Finally, the complainers got their way, and administration contracted a company to leave a couple of bins and serve them on a weekly basis.
Good Lord, it turns my stomach when I have to lift the lid of a bin to dump my recyclables! Wow, I didn’t know a dirty napkin was a recyclable because it is “paper”. I didn’t know a torn cardboard box was a recyclable, either. I cold go on and on. The bins are constantly filled to the brim because half the stuff in there is crap.
As we learn more and more about the limitations of our efforts in these areas, I am frankly a bit surprised that certain loud mouthed political types have not made this into a political wedge issue. “Stop recycling, it’s all fake anyway! Government tyranny!”
Hmm, maybe I’ll run for office! 
It’s come up locally in my areas. Doesn’t seem to have gained national traction, though.
Around here at least there was no such subterfuge. The city made it real clear over a span of about 18 months that the public needed to up their game or recycling would have to be be shut down as unaffordable. The public didn’t, so the whole system was shut down, any bins left out were confiscated, and there’s no sham-cycling going on.
My metro area consists of three counties and many, many municipalities. SO lots of room for individual variation. From what I’ve seen, my little burb did the same as all, or nearly all, off the rest of tri-county area. Funny how having just one monopoly supplier of recycling services (Waste Management) encourages a consistent result.
So they picked up my Huge can that is used for food waste today. The rules say you have to use biodegradable bags, which I do. But they degrade sometimes too quickly. So this really big can has one small biodegradable bag and it busted open and didn’t come out of the can. It stinks to high heaven.
I could have just left it on the side of the house. Grrr
I try to be scrupulous about recycling because so many people aren’t. I check every six months or so to see of the list of recyclables has been updated. I bring the correct items to the hazardous waste place. I have tried to cut way back on plastic use (it’s darn difficult) I try to reuse, before I recycle because that is actually better, greener, and often cheaper.
I have quit flying and drive less. Heck, as of next year, I won’t be doing my car racing stuff any more. I think we all just need to keep making as many small changes as we can. And for heavens sake, quit with the disposable plastic bags. Learn to reuse bags and bring the others back to the store for them to recycle. Really, they ought to be banned here in the U.S.
Do what you can. I don’t think you are expected to do it all.
At my Dad’s house they just took the recycling bin one day and told him it now costs extra to have a second trash can.
~Max
I do miss the old days. Most people had a burn barrel in their backyard.
I mean, it made it hard for us young’uns to breathe, but hey, who cares about kids’ lungs (the parents were smoking in their living rooms anyhow).
Despite that whole “destroying the planet” thing, I still miss the smell of burning leaves in the autumn. Haven’t felt that nostalgia trigger in years…
From the time I was 14 till today (65) I’ve had a burn barrel in my yard, and at work as well. Just saying. I’ve approached neighboring town’s programs and been turned away.
Yeah Denver had ‘incinerators’ in just about every yard. A small brick structure that you would feed things into and hope it would melt or burn.
I’ve been in the mountains for… 32 years now. We do burn, but it’s slash and trees that fall. Really, it’s creating a defensible space for out house. There are plenty of summers where we can’t burn. Fire danger is high.
Yuck, you don’t have indoor plumbing either? 
My neighbor uses a burn barrel instead of paying for a trash hauler to take away his garbage. Luckily most of the time we are upwind, it gets pretty stinky when he burns his garbage.
For leaves most people just burn them in the road. Nice smell but burns your eyes. On motorcycle autumn rides going through a smoke cloud from burning leaves my eyes would be burning and watering like crazy rendering me almost blind which is not good while driving.
Curious, what surface(s) are the roads in your area? I would think that burning a pile of leaves on asphalt wouldn’t exactly be a good idea.
I assume those who are burning leaves live out in the country (and presumably have some open land), so why not just compost them?
It’s asphalt they’re burning the leaves on. And composting is what I do in my own yard. I own a vacant wooded lot in the Neighborhood and discovered people were dumping their leaves on my lot. I didn’t want mounds of extra leaves there even if it is wooded. I asked them to stop it. AFAIK they did. And they burn on the road edge.
I consider being able to opt out of the pointless religious cult of “recycling” a real freedom and not “dumb” at all, in that it’s based on following the actual science and economics.
Plastic recycling - this essentially doesn’t exist - 90% of plastic simply cannot be broken down and re-constituted with current technology, and the small fraction that can still can’t go into food-grade packaging. Almost every bit of plastic you have ever put into a recycling bin is now in a Chinese landfill.
Paper/cardboard/glass recycling - not thermodynamically sensible - you can do it but the cost in energy and water input is more than just growing trees or treating sand.
Metal recycling - this is the only one that actually makes sense thermodynamically in the abstract, but does it justify the cost (in emissions and money) of running a separate fleet of special garbage trucks that have to haul all of the pointless plastic and cardboard too? The answer is no.
For 30 years we’ve been washing, sorting, and ritualistically enshrining our garbage into the Special Appropriate Altars so that a second fleet of diesel trucks can pick it up and move it to a boat where it is sailed across the ocean to China and Malaysia and put into a landfill there. All to pretend that we are Doing Something about whatever we think The Problem is (hint: running out of trees or sand or space to bury garbage have never been real problems and are not what a scientific approach to real environmental issues are worried about). A few years ago when the Asian countries stopped accepting garbage imports, a bunch of American cities decided that subsidizing this ridiculous relic of hippie “do-something”-ism was no longer worth it and turned over the cards on the “recycling” scam. I’m sorry that some people still stuck in “find a way to bash Americans” mode haven’t gotten the memo and are still dutifully performing purity rituals on their garbage before putting it in the altar for shipment to the special sanctified landfill.
The “science” you cite sounds like you either pulled it out of your ass, or out of a right-wing anti-environment propaganda site, which amounts to the same thing. The reference to responsible re-use and recycling as a “religious cult” is the icing on the cake.
Multiple levels of bullshit here. Virtually all appropriate plastics actually get recycled in responsible jurisdictions, and that’s the vast majority of them unless contaminated, the wrong kind of plastic, or otherwise inappropriate. In the data for Manitoba cited below (which actually recycles less than Ontario, but they have data conveniently laid out) nearly all of it that is picked of recycling is in fact recycled; in total, nearly half – 45.9% of all plastic entering the province is recycled, and most of what isn’t is because it’s thrown away instead by lazy or misinformed consumers like you. The recovery rate for easy-to-recycle Type 1 plastic (PET) is 64.1%, and for HDPE even better at 75.9%. This is just for that province, but others are typical or even better.
As for the bullshit about you can’t use recycled plastic in food-grade packaging, just for one example all the bottled water l buy (several different brands) comes in bottles of 100% recycled PET.
Wrong again. Recycling cardboard takes 75% of the energy required to make new cardboard. (Not as impressive as plastic, granted, which takes about 12% of new-manufacturing energy to recycle.) Recycling glass bottles or jars instead of making new ones is estimated to result in average energy savings of around 400 watt-hours per bottle.
No, the major problem American cities face is a combination of idiot citizens who won’t recycle or don’t know how, and in some cases lack of adequate recycling facilities. It works just fine in civilized places, as I just indicated above. If recycling was a “scam” that didn’t work, we would not be growing our recycling programs as much as we are, expanding both their capabilities and capacities
Maybe what motivates an inclination to “bash Americans” is people like you.
Background info and cites for some of what I quoted above:
Thank you @wolfpup. The numbers I find correlate better with yours than with the previous poster. Most major cities have pretty comprehensive recycling facilities and will happily organize tours to educate concerned citizens about the processes they use and the energy results they achieve. Smaller cities do have problems related to the smaller amounts but they are not unsurmountable.
And yes, the biggest problem they have is citizens throwing dirty stuff into the recycling bin. No, your dirty paper plates and dirty plastics that hold remains of food cannot be recycled and can contaminate a batch of material. Don’t throw it in the bin if it can’t be recycled or is full of non-recyclable waste material. This includes ketchup, baked on cheese, etc.
I myself recycle as much as possible, but everything I’ve read about plastic recycling is not good. I’m not Canadian so I don’t know if this is a good source.
Here is another article written by the host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast.