Recycling Questions

[watchwolf49]

Chronos’ apartment complex’ business model depends on the premises smelling clean … not like milk that soured last week …

[Chronos]

There’s a specialized device for removing all trace remnants of peanut butter from a jar. It’s called a dog.

[Dewey_Finn]

That’s a rather expensive way to recycle perhaps a penny’s worth of plastic.

[constanze]

There are seperate questions of

• what products can be technically recycled?

• what products actually are recycled in my community?

As for seperating, the easiest way is to use different bins and teach your citizens to proper sort. In a japanese town Kamikatsu, Tokushima - Wikipedia there are 34 categories, and Zero waste.

If you think your citizens are too stupid or too lazy or too anti-social to follow the directions, and will throw everything together, you could try what many communities elsewhere do:

households pay for “waste”, that is non-recycable garbage (usually burnt). Bins for paper, glass, plastic, metal, etc. are free. If you (trying to cheat) sort wrong, the garbage guys when collecting will take a peek, and if there’s too much wrong stuff in the recylcling bin, they will put a sticker (sorted wrong) on your bin and leave it. If you Keep Messing up, after the 3rd try, you will get a bigger waste bin, and have to pay more for that.
If you sort correctly and have only a Little waste, you save Money on the smaller-size waste bin.

[constanze]

Here Recycling: Dieses japanische Dorf will seinen Müll zu 100 Prozent wiederverwerten is a german article about the path of Kamikatsu. There’s also a german article on Huffingtonpost http://www.huffingtonpost.de/2015/12/15/grossartiges-vorbild-aus-japan-diese-stadt-ist-auf-dem-besten-weg-gar-keinen-mull-mehr-zu-produzieren_n_8811832.html, which I can’t find the English Version of.

In den USA gibt es beispielsweise einige Städte, darunter Berkeley in Kalifornien, die berichten, eine Rate von über 70 Prozent zu haben. = In the US for example are several cities, among them Berkely in California, who Claim to have a (Recycling) rate of above 70%.

[Mangetout]

@Chronos

Both steel and other metals can be sorted using magnets, though in different ways. Steel is easy: You turn on a big electromagnet, sweep it through your mixed trash, and what it picks up is steel (or some other form of iron, or cobalt, or nickel, but those are less common).

For other metals (aluminum, say), you pour a stream of mixed trash down some distance, and have an electromagnet off to the side. While the trash is falling, you turn on the magnet very quickly. The change in magnetic field will induce currents in the metal, causing it to produce its own magnetic field which pushes it away. A separate bin off to the side will catch the metal, while the non-metallic trash continues to fall straight down. In principle, you could even separate various metals from each other this way, as the strength of the effect depends on the conductivity of the metal.

For some other materials, you might be able to partly separate them using a fan (which will blow some materials more than others), or by immersing them in water or other inexpensive liquids (which will let some materials float but not others).

Good summary. I’ve also seen machines that sort out plastic bottles by feeding the mixed waste onto a large rotating drum with a stepped surface - the bottles bounce over the top - the other waste falls or is blown away in a different direction.

[Ken001]

@watchwolf49

Some recyclable materials need to be rinsed out before they’re put into a bin … just takes one person, one milk jug, to ruin it for everybody …

We do that and the reason is quite simple. People sort out recyclables and they are vulnerable to illness because the work is hands on. Sugar and organic materials (food) are a rich breeding ground for bacteria eg. salmonella, so reducing that footprint helps everyone.

@Dewey_Finn

I get that, and for something water-based like milk, it’s easy to rinse out the container. But what if you’ve got a plastic jar of peanut butter, that’s just about empty? Even then, there are peanut butter remnants clinging to the inside of the jar, and cleaning it thoroughly would, I think, consume more resources than you’d gain in recycling the jar.

Agreed although the energy wasted should be tiny. Personally I use a quick cold water rinse but the rest of my family automatically reach for the hot water. We don’t worry about smidges left in a jar.

[Ken001]

In my small city (50,000) the recycling factory is run by and for intellectually handicapped people. They get a wage and a meaningful job which they are very good at.

I have spent a two hour shift there on a fundraising effort. There are two wide conveyors with four people on each one. Metals were mostly removed first. Recycled waste passes along and it was our job to sort various items into different bins. What was left became rubbish.

It was an eyeopener. There are some crass people out there. Used nappies (diapers) were common as was discarded food, broken glass, and a myriad of other festering waste. However mostly it was ok and the sheer amount of recycling waste was mind boggling.

Later the supervisor told us that the conveyors were at half speed and the usual workers were able to sort far faster than we middle class adventurers. You’d have to try it to understand. I could barely keep up lol.