Is it just me, or is the recycling industry somewhat disconnected with how people actually live?
I mean, we get all this huge push for recycling from cities and other organizations, but then the actual recyclers sabotage that by requiring consumers to spend an (IMO) absurd amount of time and energy relative to just trashing stuff, in order to recycle it.
For example, where I live, we’re not supposed to:
[ul]
[li]Put recycling in trash bags[/li][li]Recycle any cardboard that’s oily[/li][li]Recycle grocery bags[/li][li]Rinse out all the cans[/li][li]Anything chemical that can be recycled has to go somewhere else… that doesn’t pick up, and that has weird, inconvenient hours. [/li][/ul]
None of that is uncommon from what I understand.
And if you have a lot of boxes or something, you’re supposed to take them to the solid waste transfer station’s recycling bins, which are of course always super-full. But they post stern signs about not leaving stuff laying around outside the bin.
On top of that, we start hearing that most of it goes into the landfill anyway because a lot of it isn’t economical to recycle.
Is it surprising that people just basically ignore most of it?
Seems to me that the industry needs a much more end-user friendly way to do it- ultimately it has to be on par with trashing stuff to make people want to bother.
It almost feels like the primary motivators are a combination of trying to induce guilt in the citizen, and trying to make it financially annoying by charging more for regular trash bins and less (or nothing) for recycling ones. Pretty shitty ways to go about it- if they just made it more convenient, people would probably be a lot more amenable to it.
There is a cause-and-effect thing going on here: when people do not follow the rules a lot of recycling effort is wasted. I get that rules take some getting used-to before becoming a habit, tho. And rules between locations can also be different (e.g. between your home and office).
Keep in mind that Recycling is only part of the “huge push”, or messaging from local governments - don’t forget the Reduce and Reuse part. The best way to avoid the potential waste in the recycling system is to engage the other two things more (not have to recycle in the first place). This can take the form of avoiding single-use plastic items such as grocery bags (use canvas or other reusable bag), as well as single-use items that cannot be recycled, for example.
I believe that a lot of the problem with improper recycling stems from municipalities that issue fines for not recycling. Their guideline are never complete and lack detail and nuance. And the fear of getting fined can override common sense, causing people to mix things like greasy cardboard and chemically treated paper in with their recyclables.
Another thing that can reduce waste is reuse of small household items. I started a “give and take” corner in my building, where people can leave unwanted books and small household items out for others to pick up. It’s about 80% books, but people also leave out kitchenware, small appliances, office supplies, bed and bath accessories and decorative knickknacks.
I keep an eye on and discard obvious garbage as well as stuff that’s been left out more than week. But that seldom happens, there is a very high turnover. I wish more people would implement something like this. It’s easy to do in a large apartment building but I don’t know how you’d go about it in a suburban neighborhood.
I recycle bottles, cans, newspapers, and boxes. Everything that’s questionable goes in the trash. I figure they’d rather have 50 pounds of the good stuff than 60 pounds of questionable stuff. I still end up filling the recycle bin every two weeks.
Pretty much this. I crush my aluminum cans and bag them for separate recycling. 5 bags or so is an easy $30 off a grocery bill. Most of the recycling is boxes and plastic bottles. I could take the bottles to the same guy I take the cans to, but my disposal company needs to make money of recycling too or they won’t offer it.
I’ve seen people in my office bypass a trash can to put, say, Styrofoam cups into can recycle bin; also, the reason most “recycle bins” go to landfill is that people put things like pizza boxes (with cheese and grease inside which is hard to process), and other non-recycle items
It is that way because at its core it is a central planning dictate from the government and not based on any real sort of economic necessity.
It does not need to be efficient. Once mandatory recycling is enacted, the do-gooders have their full reward. The follow ups don’t matter.
Anything you tell the general public must be idiot proof. We cannot get people to deposit their trash into actual trash cans as you still notice litter everywhere. The idea that regular people will do things like you mentioned is absurd at best.
And of course, no recycler want styrofoam. But it’s not that it can’t be recycled. There are a couple places that do recycle it:
There’s a company called Styro-go in Calgary that does it. Not sure exactly what they do with it, other than to make some other kind of plastic things.
A company called Agilyx in Tigard, Oregon (suburb of Portland) converts it and other plastics to synthetic oils.
There may be others, but those I found with a quick google.
Some of this is regional - different places recycle much more than others (and even in Western countries, it’s not as simple as US vs Europe and others - some European countries are great, some are fucking appalling) so I think there’s some value in finding out all the ways recycling is made to work well in the places it does, and spread those.
I have to admit, I don’t entirely get why there is such a high bar of purity. How does a tiny bit of organic additive from your kitchen cause huge obstacles to reusing a material that has already been highly processed, compared to, like, digging that shit out of the ground or rending it from living matter?
Recycling is Big Business. As someone upthread said, recycling only works if someone can make a buck off of it.
I live in southern Oregon. In 2018 China halted imports of recyclable rubbish, which effectively halted all recycling in small and rural communities on the west coast. Apparently most of what was collected for recycling was shipped to China for processing.
Here’s a list of what they will and will not accept for recycling. Note that what they do take are things that are illegal to throw in the landfill: used motor oil and old batteries, or things that they can easily sell: scrap metal. They also take for “recycling” yard debris, which of course they don’t recycle but rather just feed into a chipper and deposit in a designated pile on the back corner of the landfill site.
So everything except for soda cans, which have a 10¢ per can/bottle deposit fee, gets thrown in the garbage. I hate to do it because we used to recycle everything we could, but now… what’re ya gonna do? When I was growing up my dad burned paper trash in a burn barrel, but of course that creates air pollution, so that’s out.
The combined carrot-and-stick approach seems to work (as well as can be expected). Eg in Germany you will notice half a dozen different bins, so there is no excuse not to sort your waste properly, and at the same time the inspectors can stick you with some truly staggering fines if you don’t.
The government also makes sure as much consumer packaging as possible is, in fact, recyclable.
the other people in my apartment building are bad recyclers so whenever i take out the trash I was have to pull things out of the recycling bin and put them in the trash bin. I feel stupid for doing it because I know this is happening all over the city and the country, but if I’m already going to be doing the Sorting might as well keep doing it when I get to the trash can.
I dont see any of that thats so difficult. My recycle place like plastic bags. But yes certain can recycle cans that have been rinsed, the issue being that too many people spend so much energy and water getting the cans clean, it ends up costing to system. So if you feel that can has to be rinsed as otherwise it will get smelly, attract bugs, go for it. It’s not needed for the recyclers. And if you want to put your recycling in a trash bag, that’s fine, just dump the bag and re-use.
Basically dont recycle pizza boxes, just trash them.
That all depends. Certainly aluminum is quite worthwhile. Glass is a break even, maybe better. Cardboard even makes them $, if there is lots of it.
It’s plastic that’s the big issue. Certain kinds break even, others cost and have little market.
I have this maybe half-baked idea that recycling is hamstrung by public notions of what should be happening with recycling waste, rather than what’s best. I’d much prefer that my old plastic wrap is incinerated locally to generate electricity, rather than be shipped half-way around the planet to be burned in a ditch like the best case seems to be now. But it’s been promised that it all gets melted in to new pop bottles or something, so anything short of that is unthinkable.
While those are written as rules, it’s basically just a different way of saying ‘we don’t accept these items, don’t put them in your recycling bin’.
An easier way to look at it is to recycle clean paper/cardboard (as in no food or grease on them), metal and plastic (with whatever restrictions are on those). Everything else gets dealt with on it’s own and isn’t their problem.
Something that I like to stress about this is that Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is in order of importance. Create less garbage, reuse what you can, then recycle what’s left over. The more you reduce, the less you have to recycle.
I agree with that. When I toss a pickle jar or soup can into the recycling bin, I can see it being tossed into 2000+ degree furnace. I’m sure it adds some impurities, but I have to imagine the pickle juice or little bit of tomato sauce burns off pretty rapidly.
My assumption has always been that cleaning the items you recycle is more about keeping animals out of the places that the items are stored before being recycled.
Capitalism isn’t doing a particularly great job of handling the issue of waste, and it doesn’t seem right to blame the “recycling industry.” As an industry, things are only going to get recycled if there’s economic value. However, as we can clearly see, there’s demand from citizens that things be recycled regardless of the economic incentive. That is to say, clearly we all feel guilty about using a plastic cup for 5 minutes that’s then going to exist for thousands of years in a landfill (at best), and would very much like someone to assuage our guilt by reusing the plastic in that cup. But that’s just not going to happen right now, based on economics.
Why, then, isn’t everyone involved in producing and selling that plastic cup on the hook for the costs of recycling it? Why does, say, Solo get to make money selling frappucino cups to Starbucks, and Starbucks get to make money selling frappucinos in single use plastic cups, and then we blame the recycling industry for not having enough money or interest or technology to deal with the refuse? It’s not like they asked for all of these frappucino cups to exist.