The recycling rules for every city I’ve checked are picky to the extreme.
They will say things like they take plastic frozen food tubs with a recycling mark, except black ones.
And they will take clear plastic milk containers but only if you remove the colored collar that held on the cap.
They will take bottles but not bottle caps.
Etc.
Yet the stuff I see people have put into the bins is anything but fussy.
A person will put a cardboard case that held bottled water in with its plastic wrapper still attached.
People will toss out newspapers in the plastic delivery bags, even including the little sample foil packets of hand lotion.
And nearly every pizza box can be seen to contain the little plastic “table” that keeps the top up, and often the wax paper, napkins and even crusts from the meal.
So I wonder . . .
What happens when people break the rules, are they destroying the value of their recycling efforts? Are they negating any value when they do that? Do the trash handlers toss all these errors into the landfill, at a net loss for their efforts?
Or are the rules simply being too picky, and the handlers are quite able to sort out what’s what and carry on.
Because, if it’s the latter, then I suspect the rules should be simplified so more people will recycle.
My collection company will simply refuse to dump the bins into the truck if the guy sees inappropriate items in the bin. We like our refuse to be taken away, so we make sure it’s sorted.
In Edinburgh I got talking to some Pollish 20 somethings. They were over here for work. They told me that their temp agency once had them working at a recycling place.
A lorry load card/ plastic/ glass would come in and they would sort this into its rightful place. If I remember correctly, the the most common mistake by recyclers is placing waxy cardboard in with their plastics.
The truck attendants here are not super picky, but they will ocassionally leave an item or two on the ground. I’m guessing that they sort the recyclables again at the diisposal facility. I’ve always tried to be careful about separating things. I rinse out and crush cans when possible and I remove labels, again if it’s easy to do, and separate caps. We are charged by the can for garbage, but you can put out as many recycle bins as you have for the same flat fee. Each subscriber is furnished 3 bins, metal & plastic, mixed paper and newspaper, but I’ve managed to collect about 6 bins over the years.
Over here some councils will seek prosecution if you dare to put a bit of paper in with your recycled cans. Mostly they don’t seem unduly bothered as it all gets sorted out at the recycling centre anyway. The biggest bugbear with them is that they won’t take a green waste bin (garden stuff) if they see normal household waste in it (and that includes vegetable peelings which they prefer you to compost) - but I think that’s fair because some people where I live seem to regard their green waste bin as an overflow for their household (black) bin.
Here in San Jose they hire dudes to sort through the recycling bins. All the stuff goes on a belt, while dudes with dust masks and rubber gloves sort the crap out, putting it in several bins, including “garbage/trash”.
If you recycle bin contains too much non-recycle junk, they can fine you.
Everything has to be separated as much as possible in order to get the most out of the recycling process. Too much of the wrong kind of plastic will reduce the quality of the recycled plastic. A plastic bag in with the paper will screw up the recycled paper. All of it needs to be pretty well picked through before it goes to the actual recycling process.
The better you are at separating your recyclables, the less work it is on the back end to sort them. It’s a transfer of labor from the recycling center to you. If the city has stringent rules, then it costs them less to implement a recycling program, and reduces your taxes. The more people who break the rules, the more sorters they need at the center, the more they charge the city, the more your taxes go up.
Is that really the case? I’ve never seen municipal taxes go down (other than finished bond issues). I’m going somewhere with this…
Landfills are so cheap (in Michigan) that I’d always assumed that municipal recycling was some costly, feel-good effort to placate a small, vocal percentage of our population that believes in such things. When you consider the union workforce that collects the refuse, you’re at least doubling the high payroll (i.e., the normal garbage crew, and then the special recycling crew) and the processing and so on. How much is recycling really worth to a small municipality? I have a hunch (and I’m asking for data, not making an assertion) that recycling costs more in taxes than just utilizing available landfills. Of course those figures are bound to change from place to place, but I have this gut feeling that it’s just not profitable in my neck of the woods – otherwise our “mandatory” recycling program would be enforced, and I’d see a lot more bins on garbage collection day.
FWIW, I don’t recycle much of anything other than deposit cans.
It really depends on what city you’re in, and even what part of the city - I don’t know if it’s still that way, but when I lived in San Francisco, there were two trash/recycling companies with different territories. One would take whatever you put in the blue bin, and the other was hyper fussy. Not only were you restricted to just #1 and #2 plastics, they had to be bottles, where the neck is smaller than the body of the container. They would not accept jars or tubs, such as what you’d get from the deli, even though they were #1 plastic.
To enforce this, the drivers would root through your bin and leave any offending items behind. If you were a repeat offender, or the driver was in a mood to do so, they’d leave a flyer on top of the leftovers describing the #1 and #2 bottles restriction.
I tell you, this was quite a shock, coming from Sacramento, where they’d take anything, up to and including old barns - the yard waste team once got a surprise when they came around the corner and found my neighbor had torn down a barn and there was a huge heap of lumber waiting for them on the curb.
As for who does the sorting, that’s a decision made by the municipality. If they want to cut their costs, they’ll require the public to do the sorting. If they’re more interested in keeping the recyclables out of the landfill to meet federal or state quotas, they’ll take whatever you leave and do the sorting at the transfer station.
Here in the UK we’re having to look at more possibilities for recycling simply because our landfill sites are getting close to full. We have no more room to bury our waste so we have to try and find more ways to recycle the bulk of it.
No real cite, but supposedly recycling certain materials (most plastics I think) isn’t quite worth it. Wikipedia has a summary, but I don’t know if half the links are biased or not. Recycling is still useful, but the assertion that we have limited landfill space everywhere is not very accurate.
My hometown had an awesome recycling program. They took metal, plastic of all numbers and shapes, and glass of all colors unsorted. They also took green waste, and even pizza boxes(!!!) in the green bin. Just about the only thing they didn’t take was plastic bags.
Landfill is a problem in California, not because of the scarcity of land (only scarce near the cities with all the trash), but the problem of destroying the ground water with poisons from insecticides, old fluorescent bulbs, batteries of all sizes, computers, lead-shielded TVs, anything with old lead-based paint on it (like that old barn mentioned above) and on and on.
Dumps have to be dug to bedrock or have concrete lined pans.
Each city has a quota, I think maybe 30% of trash and garden refuse must be diverted to recycling. Like I said in the OP, I’ve seen a lot of picky rules, but still see people ignore them, so I guess locally they don’t reject bad mixes very often.
I think many towns have gone to a conveyor system. It’s like an airport luggage carosel with people around it waiting for their type of stuff and pushing it into their particular bin.
Volume makes everything worthwhile.
If they bury things in Michigan, which has one of the highest beverage deposits, they are probably burying money the municipality could recoup from the state.
In Michigan, though, we don’t have a lot of ground water issues in the urban areas as our water comes from the Great Lakes. Plus, you know, it’s treated.
I can’t conjecture to how many deposit items we bury; even lazy I saves all those deposits – it pays for my coffee club which only accepts cash.
Where I live if you put the wrong things in the recycling bin you get a nasty little yellow note with check boxes the recycler guys check telling you what you did wrong. The implied treat being… I dunno… they’ll come kill your family if you recycle the wrong thing again.
If what you did isn’t in one of the check boxes they have a space to write it in. I got gigged for putting my cigarette boxes in the recycling. Hello? This is California! We don’t want your filthy containers that have touched cigarettes!
Since this is GQ, I won’t go into what I think happens to a lot of my recycling which they take probably only to make me feel good.
The offending items are contaminants and must be removed. Contaminants can be sorted out by hand (think conveyor belts) or the removal can be automated (plastics screened out of recycled paper for instance). For recylced paper, the process is usually automated but some companies also hand sort too.
It costs money to remove contaminants and then to dispose of them. And it reduces the yield.
There are some who benefit of course. Operators at some companies carefully guard access to the “trash trap” (where the reject materials go) because some items (paper money for example) come through in good shape.
The margin of profit is low for recycled paper (not sure about plastics and metals but would guess the same) and all it takes is increased cost of contaminant removal, recycled materials themselves, throw in some higher energy prices, and it becomes a money losing proposition. In the end, recycling has to make economic good sense.
Many companies grade incoming materials and pay less for heavily contaminated materials. New technologies are allowing more of a mix. An example is magazines mixed in with newsprint. Some companies can use these together now whereas they formerly had to separate them or risk problems.
My dad is retired and his home office window has a good view of the street and he can see as the recycling truck comes around the street each week. He reports seeing them toss each of the separated bins of recycling stuff (paper, glass, plastic) into the same portal on the truck. With nothing but time on his hands, he called the city, repeatedly (as well as the recycling company) and while they admitted that wasn’t what they were supposed to do (there are 3 separate portals for the 3 types of recyclables) that’s the way they do it and then they sort things out at the dump. They didn’t care and told him to stop calling and bothering them.
This was what I’m thinking happens in a lot of communities - that all recyclables can be combined as they must be hand sorted anyway. In fact, Pleasanton California realized this at one point and asked people to stop sorting into 6 small baskets and put all recyclables into one blue trash bag with handle ties that they give you. Then everything went to a conveyor hand sort system. Regular trash isn’t buried in the city, but hauled some miles to Altamont Pass where the regional dump is.
When they stopped asking individuals to do the sorting the total recycling rose sharply. The value of the recycling rose as well, and the costs to haul non-recyclables fell. Seemed like a win-win to me. Less work for the residents, more recycled, and less cost to the city.
Yet some of the environmentalists still weren’t happy, because they thought the old user-unfriendly method would remind people of how much stuff they still bought in unnecessary packaging. I doubt this. Fie on the overscolders!
