Has it been considered to take our tax money, create thousands of new jobs, and hire people to sift through our trash? A few of the reasons that this might be better than the current system include:
People are lazy. For the general population, it is a very difficult thing for them to have two separate trash cans and use discretion.
It’s less complex. Instead of having two systems, one for trash and one for recyclables, why not have just one system where the two are distinguished between once it’s all collected.
It would be way more efficient. Currently, we recycle a very small percentage of what we throw away, while most of what we throw away is recyclable.
Aside from that, there are so many reasons why recycling makes more sense than not recycling. For a really fun video that illustrates my point, check out this website and click on the center link that says Watch Now - on the Story of Stuff.
Eye opening to say the least, but a great way for today’s culture to see the issue visually.
For things like paper and cardboard, being mixed with wet trash probably make it un-recoverable.
2.IIRC, glass is only marginally worth recycling, so having an extra step probably makes it a net loss, rather than have the consumer do it for “free”.
3.Aluminum and steel are both relatively easy to seperate and it might be worth doing. Most of the cost of aluminum is the huge amount electricity it takes to refine, making it one of the best recycling options.
I think that a better option would be to charge consumers by weight for their trash and collect recycling for free. (i.e. tax-support for recycling) That gives a monetary incentive for recycling as much as possible.
Toronto does that, sort of. There are three sizes of garbage can that you can get from the city, with three different prices, but you can get any size of recycling container you like without paying extra.
This is pretty much what happens in a lot of places. You toss garbage in bags that require paid bag-tags; they pick up recyclables for free. The idea of the bag-tags is to discourage garbage production by making it more expensive, but if you make the bag-tags too expensive, people will start tossing garbage on the side of the road, and then you have to go clean it up, so there’s a bit of a balancing act there as well. Plus, if you encourage home composting or provide a separate composting pickup, that reduces the total garbage output as well. It’s gotten to the point where the only things I toss are plastic wraps and food containers, and used kitty litter. Everything else–paper, cans, bottles, food waste, cardboard–is recycled or composted.
A lot of the drive for this is because landfilling has gotten very expensive–for a time, Toronto was trucking its garbage to Michigan! The next frontier is ‘source reduction’: mandating the redesign of packaging so that waste is reduced, or mandating that companies take back their packaging. This hasn’t gotten very far on this side of the pond.
Oh, God, source reduction - I’m a fairly diligent recycler (mostly because it takes little effort when the system is set up properly, which it has finally become here), producing about a Safeway bag of garbage a week, but since I’m also a fairly lazy cook, far too much of my household waste is food packaging. I hate buying a package of danish and being left with a huge plastic clamshell (which we can actually recycle now, but still).
I agree that people are lazy, but I don’t agree that recycling is a difficult thing. I think it’s a difficult thing only if you aren’t bought in to the idea that it’s a necessary thing to do.
Most recycling is an inefficient ‘feel-good’ policy. Metals are worth recycling, and you can get money for metal. But glass and plastic are mostly a waste of time, but they don’t have to be. Some of them could be recycled, others could be processed to minimize environmental damage, others could be burned to get energy. Paper is recycled heavily, but the result is less reusable material with each recycling pass, but as print media fails, the demand should be reduced somewhat.
I’m not sure of the sources on this, but I’ve seen reports that the process to make soda bottles transparent ruins them for recycling purposes and makes the plastics hazardous to humans and the environment. Whether true or not, it says something about us as a people that we pay more than twice as much to get a soft drink in a clear plastic bottle instead of an aluminum can. Price difference I’ve seen lately: plastic bottle - 6 cents per ounce, aluminum can - 2.5 cents per ounce
What about people like me that live in big cities (Chicago). I live in a building with 40 or 50 flats. How are you gonna make them seperate their trash?
I don’t understand how trash collection from 40-50 apartments is different than collection from 40-50 houses. Other than the trash truck making 50 stops and picking up 50 recycle bins, it will make one stop. But whether you’re in a house or an apartment you still have to make the conscious choice to separate your trash and deliver it to the proper pick-up spot.
If it’s too complicated for apartment dwellers…I propose waste chutes. That sounds awesome (until someone throws their baby down one…)
I don’t see what the difficulty is. Doesn’t the building already have an area where you drop off the trash? Just install large recycling bins there, one for each type of recyclable.
You should see the trash room in Japanese apartments and condos - separate bins for “combustible” waste (mostly kitchen waste), non-combustible non-recyclable waste, paper, glass, recyclable plastic, metals, and maybe batteries and spray cans.
For some things, like aluminum, it seems to make sense, in that recycling those materials can be shown to use fewer resources and produce less waste than just cycling them. For others (ie. most) things, it’s not so clear. At the very least credible evidence is lacking. At least by my research, which I admit is not professional or exhaustive by any means, but on the level of someone who just wants to be basically informed about the rational reasons and evidence justifying the things we are told we should do. If someone can produce some evidence for the positive gain of recycling, I’m all ears. Please note, however, one thing I do not want is another sermon of unsupported onslaughts about how we’re trashing “the environment”, filling it with “toxins”, and are just plain bad horrible people - like www.storyofstuff.com (all due respect to the linker in a previous post).
As far as I can tell (and I’d love to be proven wrong) RECYCLING as a general practice and moral imperative is an ideology, a folk belief, a New Religion. A boondoggle.
There’s a huge difference with blocks of flats. Where I live there are 40+ flats. OK so let’s say we put out three garbage bins. Garbage, Plastic, Paper.
I sort and recycle my garbage, while the other 39 tenants just toss their trash into whatever bin they feel like
Now you have to pay someone to seperate it? In my case the 40+ flats take up three bins of garbage alone. You’d have to have six bins in a Chicago alley? You’d never fit it back there.
The only alternative is to have pick up every single day and reduce it back to three bins.
People in cities aren’t going to cooperate. Heck half the time people in my neighborhood just toss their garbage out of the window. This is why neighborhoods in Chicago have rats and all other sorts of issues.
With a private residence you can see if that home is or is not complying with the recycling laws. With 40+ flats there’s no way to force compliance with recycling.
No, there really is no way to make people stop living like savages. I live in a fairly clean city, and I still occasionally see people doing things like dumping their McDonald’s bag out their car window at a stoplight. I wanted to pick up the bag and throw it right back through her window.
Well, the proposed development of “brilliant” weapons (guided weapons which make the “launch/do-not-launch” decision on their own, based on a set of criteria) offers us a way to deal with these people. A big sign every so often saying “Penalty for littering considerably more severe than $1000 fine” and launch criteria that check to avoid collateral damage to bystanders, and aside from an occasional WHOOSH-BOOOM! and some wreckage, our cities would be pretty clean – and recidivism would be WAY down.
The more trash we recycle, the fewer landfills we need. And while landfills may not be hugely expensive, it still costs real money to create and operate a landfill. There’s also a political degree of difficulty in creating new landfills, in that nobody wants a landfill near to where they live.
So even if recycling costs money, there’s still a net gain if recycling costs less than filling up existing landfills more rapidly, and having to dig more landfills sooner than we’d have to in the absence of recycling.
It’s not just city-dwellers that you can’t force to recycle properly at the moment, tho.
In my sleepy suburb, we pay extra now for the privilege of recycling. I think an extra $2/mo to have a bin, which everyone has to have whether they use it or not.
In my neighborhood, I’d say about 75% of the people use it.
Then, of the people who use it, you can plainly see that they aren’t doing it right. The pamphlet we all got about what to recycle clearly states that you are to bundle up paper and put it next to the bin. Half of the folks here stuff their pizza boxes and empty soda cases in with their plastics. Also, we’re only supposed to recycle #1 and #2 plastics (along with glass and metal) but I see all kinds of weird plastics in the bins. Mostly #5 - stuff like yogurt containers.
Right now, it seems to me that people who want to recycle will recycle. Then a bunch of those people will get it wrong. The easier it is, the better people will get at it.
If an apartment-dweller wants to recycle, they certainly can and will. People in the city are no better or worse than people in the suburbs when it comes to recycling.