Why are we expected to recycle?

[Oly]

@Larry_Mudd

It’s actually true that a lot of resources are wasted mindlessly 'recycling." This does not detract from the value of sensible recycling, but on some visceral level there is a tendency to think that keeping material out of landfills is always for the best, when it clearly isn’t.
.

Agree.

While there’s plenty out there that says all recycling is a good thing (witness some of the above posts and links), there is little, if anything, that actually demonstrates it with evidence (witness same). I spent at least an hour following some of the references on the Oberlin site, and came up with more of the same.

When a person questions the value/benefit of recycling, the standard offering is some combination of the following: (1) unsupported statements/factoids about how much waste we all produce; (2) unsupported statements/factoids about the environmental benefits of recycling; (3) a listing of all the stuff that can be recycled; and (4) admonitions about the calamities to come if we don’t recycle more. And it is all delivered in a very self righteous tone with plenty of smug side comments.

The Story of Stuff linked to above, and a slew of posts here, are a perfect examples. Blow away all the hyperbole and it boils down to: we (and that really means you) are lazy, stupid, wasteful people; we are destroying “the environment” with our lazy, stupid, wasteful ways; dire calamities will befall us if we don’t change our lazy, stupid, wasteful ways (it’s happening already – the signs are all around us); but then: Wait! There’s hope! We can “save” the environment if we get with the program and recycle.

Replace “wasteful” with “wicked”, “environment” with “holy grace”, and “recycle” with “repent” and it’s straight out of Sunday school. At least religious evangelicals will admit, if not fully embrace, that religious belief is fundamentally a nonrational leap of faith. Recycling evangelicals wholly fail to acknowledge that the “certainty” they espouse about the environmental benefits of recylcing everything demands the same leap. “The idea stands for itself.”

Reducing and reusing – OK. It’s really hard to see how that wouldn’t have a positive environmental impact. But recycling? As mentioned, for some things (aluminum, for instance), recycling really seems to come out ahead, meaning the balance sheet of resource usage and waste production shows a clear benefit for recycling. But for other things, it is less clear. It’s a leap of faith. Does that mean we shouldn’t recycle? Maybe. I don’t know.

I used to recycle religiously, right along side the best of the zealots. Then one day I decided to try to find some real evidence verifying all the good I just knew I was doing. It wasn’t there. I still recycle. For the most part. Out of faith. As always. (And also so as not to be deemed a heretic.) But I’ve stopped all the flagellation.

[Larry_Mudd]

@constanze

Warehousing glass is NOT recycling. I don’t know why it’s not melted down, maybe your energy costs are still too low - but cheap energy isn’t around for ever, even in the US. Get in the habit now, and you won’t be hurt so much when the prices rise.

Where you’re running into trouble is with your assumption that it always consumes less energy to recycle glass. Less energy is used at a manufacturing plant starting with crushed glass rather than sand, but the net benefit is not so clear if you look at the process as a whole.

Most municipalities that collect glass sell it at a loss; otherwise there’s no appeal downstream. (Even still, it’s not super attractive.) Glass is heavy, glass containers are bulky, and recycling programs take a huge efficiency hit by including them. You have more trucks on the road for collection and their fuel economy suffers because of the heavier loads. Consider the energy costs of prepping containers for collection, collecting them and moving them to the depot, sorting and storing them, transporting them again to the recycling plant, and converting them into usable cullet, and you begin to see that glass is far from an ideal material for recycling. Consider more particularly that the equipment used to crush glass containers has a notoriously short service life and needs to be replaced every few years, factor this into the energy/environmental costs, and you will have a harder time getting behind boosting municipal glass recycling. The viability of glass recycling is severely attenuated as the distance between consumers, depot, recycling plant, and manufacturers increases - most urban centers would require a significant change in their infrastructure in order to make it work efficiently.

What clinches it for me is the unintended consequence of accepting glass in a blue box (or equivalent) program - a huge diversion of beverage containers away from deposit+reuse programs and into crude and inefficient recycling, most particularly beer & wine bottles, which are mainly amber & green glass with little to no value as a recycling material. People are lazy, unfortunately – a significant number of people will choose to put the empties from their six-pack into the blue bin rather than returning them to the store to recoup the $0.30, even if they are conscientious enough that they would never consider putting them in the trash. This is not better for the environment, but the blue box gives the consumer an opportunity to feel good about putting those containers into the waste stream.

The best practice for glass containers is re-use. We would do better to legislate for expanded deposit laws, extending beyond beverage containers to standardized general-purpose jars, and better educate consumers about the environmental impact of various packaging options, so that they may be more inclined to choose a product with a lower environmental impact package than glass. If you can choose between artichoke hearts that come in an aluminum can and one that comes in a glass jar, the “green” choice is the can. If you buy the jar you may feel just as much better about recycling it, but it ain’t necessarily so.

That person is an idiot that needs better education, but not typical for recycling movement.

In my experience, this sort of thinking (Recycle everything!") is fairly typical of people who think in terms of a “recycling movement.” In order to have a movement, you need an ideology. Ideologies are useful for directing the behavior of masses of people, but they are often based on broad general principles which may not always stand up to close scrutiny.

Actually, it’s an indication why you need better critical thinking skills in the education program.

On this point we are in earnest agreement.

It is entirely possible that at some point in the future glass will be recycled everywhere in such a way that there is a tangible environmental and economic benefit. Technology may improve, infrastructure may be reorganized, etc. As it is, in many areas the negligible or negative energy savings makes it a poor choice, so far there is little in the way of concern about our reserves of that precious natural resource sand, and glass is basically inert in a landfill.

This is reasonable heresy, and not in any way out of line with educated thinking about waste management and environmentalism.

[constanze]

@Oly

Reducing and reusing – OK. It’s really hard to see how that wouldn’t have a positive environmental impact. But recycling? As mentioned, for some things (aluminum, for instance), recycling really seems to come out ahead, meaning the balance sheet of resource usage and waste production shows a clear benefit for recycling. But for other things, it is less clear. It’s a leap of faith. Does that mean we shouldn’t recycle? Maybe. I don’t know.

I used to recycle religiously, right along side the best of the zealots. Then one day I decided to try to find some real evidence verifying all the good I just knew I was doing. It wasn’t there. I still recycle. For the most part. Out of faith. As always. (And also so as not to be deemed a heretic.) But I’ve stopped all the flagellation.

I guess we come at this from different viewpoints. I start with the ethical attitude that protecting the enviroment is a good thing; and then I apply facts from respected groups to that.

I’m sorry to hear that you can’t find good facts - I don’t know if you simply haven’t heard of respectable nature groups doing research in the US, or if there aren’t any. Since you have already handwaved away the European numbers because “things are different in the US”, providing the German-language studies won’t help.

But if your basic attitude is that your own comfort comes first, or whatever else, and you want to find an excuse not to recycle, then it’s easy to argue dishonestly by taking the most eccentric people in favour of recycling as typical advocates. Or use two different ways of accounting for the energy. Or demand that recycling is not only slightly better (with room for improvement as we work with it) than the traditional way, but be miles better.

Or you can concentrate on only the energy itself and ignore all the other costs associated with dumping trash, and declare that if more energy is spent recycling, then it’s not worth it (and since energy is so cheap in the US anyway…)

Here’s a question for you: Coltan is a rare mineral contained in the ore Tantal. It’s crucially important for making of the semiconductors in cell phones and others. 80% of the known world wide amount of Tantal (and thus Coltan) is in the Congo, where a civil war has been going on for some time, including child soldiers and terrible brutality.
Because most cell phones (and other computer stuff) is thrown away instead of being recycled, and the demand rises at the same time in the computer industry, the price for Coltan has skyrocketed. This has aggravated the situation in the Congo - which party has control of the mines can get a huge amount of money (with almost slave labor) and buy new and dangerous weapons with them.

Now, I’m NOT saying recycling cell phones will stop the civil war - that was going on before. It won’t stop sales of weapons. But it will help lower the damage, just like the blood diamondshave slowly gone back.

So my question to you: do you think it worthwhile to spend some effort of putting your old cell phone in an envelope to send to a recycling company to save some Coltan, and maybe some people’s life in the Congo - or do you think that the US doesn’t save energy, so it’s not worth it?

[constanze]

@Markxxx

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.

I concede that I overestimated Americans. If your citizens are that dumb and uneducated about health and safety issues that they toss their trash out of the windows (have Americans never heard of the pest problem with rats??? We stopped that after the Middle Ages!) you have a lot of work to do with educating people!

[constanze]

@Oly

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).

So dumping not only normal household waste, but things like batteries which contain Cadmium, into a land dump - I don’t have time to look up the whole list of dangerous stuff that’s collected seperatly here - and leaks into the ground water table is not a toxin? I really don’t know how to convince you if you don’t want to accept basic facts. Scientists have measured dangerously high concentrations of toxins in and around landfills all over - that’s why they are working on special flowers and plants that draw specific toxins out of the contaminated earth and store them in their leaves. (And then these plants have to be specially stored).

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.

With that attitude to start with, I don’t see what kind of facts could convince you. It sounds as if everything from an enviromental agency is out - no matter how serious the scientists working for them are - and everything European is out, because the US is so big compared to Europe. What other facts would convince you?

[constanze]

@Sateryn76

I read the facts, and it’s pretty slim on “facts”

It doesn’t cover anything about the efficiency of recycling - it’s great that we can make insulation from paper, but at what cost?

How do you measure cost - in dollars or in KWh of electricity saved? Since eletricity is (at the moment) cheaper in the US than Europe, it’s easy to come out as a loss counting this way; but every KWh saved , even if it’s just cents, is worthwhile. Likewise, if you don’t have to saw a tree into bits for insulation, you can use that tree to make houses and furniture (although some furniture can be made from cardboard, too…)

Paper and lumber companies are the only group planting new trees on a massive scale, and then properly maintaining those forests. Landfill operators are the only companies committed to producing green space on a large scale.

Wrong, at least outside the US. Have you really never heard of enviromental groups and other org.s re-foresting places? Paper companies don’t plant natural forests (though, if forced to by law like over here, can farm natural forests in a sustainable way); they are only interested in fast-growing trees, monoculture.

As for landfill companies - if you are serious, you are naive. Putting a green cover on a bunch of dangerous chemicals that will seep into the ground over the next decades is not “producing green space” at all.

[constanze]

@Sateryn76

But, I see nothing in there about the marginal cost of recycling - the cost to run a different fleet of garbage trucks, labor costs, the sorting costs, the costs of educating about and enforcing recycling, etc. That may be a group of “facts”, but it’s missing a whole lot of other facts - so the full cost isn’t told.

Because, as I said, sorting is done by the citizens before collecting, not afterwards by employees. (And of course in the last decades companies have developed automatic sorting machines). As for the cost of different fleets of garbage trucks and so on - the volume overall is the same, whether one big truck comes on Monday for all the trash, or one mid-size truck comes on Monday for waste, on Wednesday for glass and on Friday for paper. If glass is not recycled, it still has to be moved to the landfill, it doesn’t roll there by itself (or do you simply smash it to bits so it doesn’t count?) This is in fact an example of disingenious counting by those like you who don’t want to recycle to add the costs of removal to recycling but not to the old way.

As for education - given that American city dwellers still don’t understand why trash shouldn’t be dropped in the street, you have a long way to go anyway. See, recylcing isn’t a stand alone concept, but integrated into a larger concept of education and prevention: you educate the people about what to do with trash for health and safety reasons - no littering, no burning treated wood, etc. You collect dangerous stuff that shouldn’t go into the landfill, like batteries and energy saving lamps and computers and so on. Once you have collected them so stuff doesn’t leak out, you can as well save raw materials and recycle them, or use the computers to teach unemployed people new skills or whatever.

And, because this is done at a municipal level, that means that there are less resources available for other municipal duties.

Well, you start a system and then it runs with far less money. Most municipialties in Germany make money with recycling because raw materials cost more money, so the factories buy the recycled stuff. Those communities who sold their trash collection company to a private company are now seeing how much money they are loosing.

I note that you are in Europe - please also understand that the USA has much less population density, and much more open land, so recycling in the USA has reached a point where it is necessary.

Oh, I didn’t know that places like NY or LA were sparsely settled. Rather, my impression was that both the East and West Coast are very densly populated.:dubious: So either they need place to burn the garbage (and you have to take out all the stuff that can produce Dioxin or other toxins when being burnt) or you have to drive a long long way with the trucks to get away from NY to the landfill.
But even in the emptier places just dumping into a landfill and forgetting about it is a cheap, but not a good solution. Unless you sort out all the dangerous stuff, it will leak into your ground, and possibly into your water table - given how irresponsibly the US is already sucking dry the water table in many areas, this sounds like a very bad idea.

[Mangetout]

@tctreece

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 happy to be taxed more for this to happen?

1. People are lazy. For the general population, it is a very difficult thing for them to have two separate trash cans and use discretion.

People are lazy for all sorts of reasons. People need to be less lazy. It’s really not that difficult, certainly not ‘very’ difficult, for anyone of reasonable intelligence and moral fibre to do.

2. 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.

Because some of the recyclables are ruined when you mix them the stuff in household refuse, some will require a greater level of processing (for example, washing), some will be difficult to separate, and the job is dirty, hazardous and probably inefficient because of all of the above. It’s not a clean or consistent mix - handling it is going to be difficult and labour intensive.

3. 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.

If you want things unmixed, surely it’s most efficient to keep them separate, rather than pick them apart. Why do you think it would be?

[TriPolar]

The question is still about the value of recycling overall, not the sorting. Only metal and paper recycling have a net benefit, and not just in pure monetary terms either. Recycled materials have a minimal effect on landfill capacity, which we are not running out of either. Landfill capacity problems are related to the energy cost of transportating waste to the landfill sites. As it is, sorting is necessary to seperate non-recyclable items, and different types of metals and plastics. As has been mentioned in this thread, glass is not worth recycling. Most of the plastic has no use either, and no economic benefit.
We should be recycling aluminum for the economic advantage, and relieving energy costs for producing new aluminum. We should be recycling paper for the same reasons. We should be recycling or seperating highly toxic materials.
The successful recycling efforts have mainly involved returnable deposits on materials like bottles and car batteries. Increasing the deposits will make the system pay for itself, even with materials that don’t need recycling in the first place.
As for the waste that doesn’t need recycling, we should burn it as long as we are burning coal, oil, and gas that have worse environmental impact. I wonder why the government hasn’t funded more trash burning power plants that reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, and eliminate landfill capacity problems. It’s almost as if the politicians are being paid by the fossil fuel providers to eliminate competition. But then I would have to believe politicians were dishonest, so I guess that can’t be the reason.

[rocking_chair]

@AboutAsWeirdAsYouCanGet

plastic

I thought they were turning plastic into polarfleece?

number 1 pet plastic. mostly pop bottles.

[Baron_Greenback]

@tctreece

1. People are lazy. For the general population, it is a very difficult thing for them to have two separate trash cans and use discretion.

Where do you live that that is such a difficulty?

Is it a difficulty moving body mass, or is it a comprehension thing?

[Do_Not_Taunt]

@Larry_Mudd

What clinches it for me is the unintended consequence of accepting glass in a blue box (or equivalent) program - a huge diversion of beverage containers away from deposit+reuse programs and into crude and inefficient recycling, most particularly beer & wine bottles, which are mainly amber & green glass with little to no value as a recycling material. People are lazy, unfortunately – a significant number of people will choose to put the empties from their six-pack into the blue bin rather than returning them to the store to recoup the $0.30, even if they are conscientious enough that they would never consider putting them in the trash. This is not better for the environment, but the blue box gives the consumer an opportunity to feel good about putting those containers into the waste stream.

It was my understanding that, today (in the US at least), recollected bottles for a deposit are recycled, not reused. Do you live in an area where glass bottles are actually cleaned and reused? If so, where are you, if you don’t mind me asking? Honest question: I didn’t think we did this anymore.

[constanze]

@Larry_Mudd

In my experience, this sort of thinking (Recycle everything!") is fairly typical of people who think in terms of a “recycling movement.” In order to have a movement, you need an ideology. Ideologies are useful for directing the behavior of masses of people, but they are often based on broad general principles which may not always stand up to close scrutiny.

I’m using terms like “recycling movement” only when talking English with Americans, not in my own language. In my own country, everbody who’s not an illiterate, anti-social white trash person understands the basic idea that recycling (re-using, avoiding) is good, littering very bad, and trash bad. That’s because they agree with the philosophy that we are a community who help each other and the enviroment.

Because of this basic agreement, the merits of each individual solution can then be discussed based on facts. For example, the BUND did some research some years back, looking at several factors like hygiene, not altering the product (brown glass bottles better than clear ones, because of sunlight), energy cost of production and transport, for different containers for food, mostly milk. Their conclusion was that for distances over 100 km (from dairy to supermarket), tetrapacks are better than re-usable glass bottles despite their problems because of the weight issue - more weight means more gasoline.
Of course, really green is to buy regional.
However, with Americans, a large portion has the “I won’t lift a finger to help somebody/ something, if there is no immediate benefit to me” philosophy. To combat this, we need ideology first.

It is entirely possible that at some point in the future glass will be recycled everywhere in such a way that there is a tangible environmental and economic benefit. Technology may improve, infrastructure may be reorganized, etc. As it is, in many areas the negligible or negative energy savings makes it a poor choice, so far there is little in the way of concern about our reserves of that precious natural resource sand, and glass is basically inert in a landfill.

However, by dissing recycling now because it’s not perfect, you are stifling any development into that direction, and you are making it more difficult in the future. People don’t want to seperate and recycle because it’s too much bother and “not worth it”. If somebody discovers a wonderful new technology that is so much better 20 years in the future, you have to spend a lot of effort teaching people why they should recycle. And maybe that wonderful 1000 % better technology is not available 20 years, but 50 years in the future.

Meanwhile, the enviroment continues to get worse because the current tech. is not 1000 % better, only 10 % better than the old way, and people stay lazy.

Start educating and convincing people now, get them to comply will take 20 years anyway.

[constanze]

@Do_Not_Taunt

It was my understanding that, today (in the US at least), recollected bottles for a deposit are recycled, not reused. Do you live in an area where glass bottles are actually cleaned and reused? If so, where are you, if you don’t mind me asking? Honest question: I didn’t think we did this anymore.

Why not? Cleaning glass bottles is the most energy efficient solution compared to making new ones. One bottle can last up to 50 cycles, average is over 20. The only point to watch is the distances - trucking bottles for thousands of kilomters is wasteful again.
But the same holds true if you truck the bottles to a landfill far away.

[constanze]

@TriPolar

The question is still about the value of recycling overall, not the sorting. Only metal and paper recycling have a net benefit, and not just in pure monetary terms either.

You didn’t answer directly my question from post #43, so I will assume this is your indirect answer. Since you only talk about paper and metal, this means you don’t care at all about the effect of dangerous chemicals onto the enviroment, the effect of rare earth mining in Congo, or anything besides yourself in the short term.
Because egoists who have long-term thinking know that being careful to fellow humans and the enviroment is not only liberal humanism, but also makes sense in the long term. Henry Ford offered shorter working hours and higher wages not because he was a communist (he wasn’t) but because it paid off in the long term. People passed food and water regulation laws not only because the enviroment is pretty to look at, but because it’s better for their own health.

Recycled materials have a minimal effect on landfill capacity, which we are not running out of either.

You must have missed several posters saying that landfill costs money, too.

Landfill capacity problems are related to the energy cost of transportating waste to the landfill sites.

What about all those materials that shouldn’t go into a landfill, like batteries or certain chemicals, because they leach into the ground (and the water tableau)? Do you not care, or do you sort them out? At what stage?

As it is, sorting is necessary to seperate non-recyclable items, and different types of metals and plastics. As has been mentioned in this thread, glass is not worth recycling. Most of the plastic has no use either, and no economic benefit.

Did you miss that plastic is made from oil, and, if pure (which certain types are), can be recycled into other plastic products, which saves oil.

We should be recycling aluminum for the economic advantage, and relieving energy costs for producing new aluminum. We should be recycling paper for the same reasons. We should be recycling or seperating highly toxic materials.

If you seperate toxic materials anyway, selling them to recylcing companies is only a small step. That’s what communities earn money with here - the city service is obliged to collect trash and litter for health and hygiene reasons, and to seperate it (or let the citizens seperate it) for health and enviroment reasons. Selling the stuff afterwards to the specalized companies earns them money. The companies get the stuff cheap and sell the extracted raw materials at a higher price to the factories, earning money. The factories get the raw materials - esp. those who are scarce! - cheaper than newly mined materials, so they save money. Everybody’s happy. And because recycling is a big business, companies are developing better machines for sorting, manufactorers are developing different production methods (like constructing a product in a way so it can be easily taken apart at the end of its lifecycle, or using thermo-memorable plastics), and technology marches on.

As for the waste that doesn’t need recycling, we should burn it as long as we are burning coal, oil, and gas that have worse environmental impact. I wonder why the government hasn’t funded more trash burning power plants that reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, and eliminate landfill capacity problems. It’s almost as if the politicians are being paid by the fossil fuel providers to eliminate competition. But then I would have to believe politicians were dishonest, so I guess that can’t be the reason.

We burn a lot of trash here (partly because of space, partly to get energy and heat), and there are two big problems (and probably smaller ones)
Arsenic and dioxins. Trash ovens are very hot (over 1 000 C), so a lot of stuff can create dioxins, which you have to sort out beforehand. And some stuff contains arsenic, which we also don’t want to be blown in the air.

[Do_Not_Taunt]

@constanze

@Do_Not_Taunt

It was my understanding that, today (in the US at least), recollected bottles for a deposit are recycled, not reused. Do you live in an area where glass bottles are actually cleaned and reused? If so, where are you, if you don’t mind me asking? Honest question: I didn’t think we did this anymore.

Why not? Cleaning glass bottles is the most energy efficient solution compared to making new ones. One bottle can last up to 50 cycles, average is over 20. The only point to watch is the distances - trucking bottles for thousands of kilomters is wasteful again.
But the same holds true if you truck the bottles to a landfill far away.

Beats me - I was asking a factual question if this actually happens in the US today, not a value-judgment question about whether it’s good or not.

[Motorgirl]

@Do_Not_Taunt

@constanze

Why not? Cleaning glass bottles is the most energy efficient solution compared to making new ones. One bottle can last up to 50 cycles, average is over 20. The only point to watch is the distances - trucking bottles for thousands of kilomters is wasteful again.
But the same holds true if you truck the bottles to a landfill far away.

Beats me - I was asking a factual question if this actually happens in the US today, not a value-judgment question about whether it’s good or not.

Other than a few very small and very local exceptions (tiny local dairies) the practice of cleaning and refilling deposit bottles disappeared at least a decade ago, and was on the decline for 20-30 years. I doubt that the infrastructure needed to clean & refill even exists anymore. Certainly not for national manufacturers such as Coca Cola, Anheuser Busch, Sam Adams, etc, who make up the bulk of bottle manufacturing. I can’t recall the last time I saw the distinctive pale ring on a reused beer bottle.

As for why, I have no idea. In the 80s when I worked in a supermarket as a teen, we had separate areas for storing bottles that were being picked up for reuse vs. recycling. So it used to exist and used to be standard for some of the national companies.

[johnpost]

reusable glass bottles are thick walled to withstand handling by people and machines. these might be found in delivered milk or reusable deposit long neck beer bottles.

disposable bottles are thin walled and are not intended to be reused. these can be recycled and may be deposit items in some areas to promote recycling.

[bashere]

@Motorgirl

@Do_Not_Taunt

Beats me - I was asking a factual question if this actually happens in the US today, not a value-judgment question about whether it’s good or not.

Other than a few very small and very local exceptions (tiny local dairies) the practice of cleaning and refilling deposit bottles disappeared at least a decade ago, and was on the decline for 20-30 years. I doubt that the infrastructure needed to clean & refill even exists anymore. Certainly not for national manufacturers such as Coca Cola, Anheuser Busch, Sam Adams, etc, who make up the bulk of bottle manufacturing. I can’t recall the last time I saw the distinctive pale ring on a reused beer bottle.

As for why, I have no idea. In the 80s when I worked in a supermarket as a teen, we had separate areas for storing bottles that were being picked up for reuse vs. recycling. So it used to exist and used to be standard for some of the national companies.

Ontario, Canada certainly does (I assume the rest of the provinces do, too, but The Beer Store is a provincial thing and they handle it here).

They claim, in this link that they get back 95% of the industry standard bottles. These are reused, although apparently only 12 to 15 times (the Germans have better bottles, apparently)

Note that this diversion is new as of 2007, so there were a solid 20 years where we didn’t do this much.

[Cheshire_Human]

@constanze

As for the waste that doesn’t need recycling, we should burn it as long as we are burning coal, oil, and gas that have worse environmental impact. I wonder why the government hasn’t funded more trash burning power plants that reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, and eliminate landfill capacity problems. It’s almost as if the politicians are being paid by the fossil fuel providers to eliminate competition. But then I would have to believe politicians were dishonest, so I guess that can’t be the reason.

We burn a lot of trash here (partly because of space, partly to get energy and heat), and there are two big problems (and probably smaller ones)
Arsenic and dioxins. Trash ovens are very hot (over 1 000 C), so a lot of stuff can create dioxins, which you have to sort out beforehand. And some stuff contains arsenic, which we also don’t want to be blown in the air.

[bolding mine]

[nitpick]
High temperatures destroy dioxin and other organic toxins, not produce them. That’s why incinerators are designed to work at that high temperature.
[/nitpick]