I don’t want to talk too poorly about recycling because it is good and we should do it. But a lot of the ‘recycling’ we do doesn’t actually get recycled and acts like a pacifier that lets us believe we’re doing more than we are.
This bothers me so much. I’m that guy who washes my containers and checks with the city to see what can and can’t be recycled. But I live in an apartment building and when I take my recycling to the bin, it’s invariably filled with half full takeout containers and a million other things that can’t be recycled. They probably throw the whole bin in the landfill. It’s infuriating.
Yeah same in my apartment. Bins are filled with incorrect items, and clearly dirty. I bring all my organized and clean recycling but know deep down its just going to a landfill or be burned.
On top of that, the bin categories are weird and it’s really confusing. IE there is a bin that says “Bottles and Cans”, and another that says “Paper and Cardboard”. What about other plastics?
People will do whatever is easiest, even if they are decent people. We need better policies and systems to
forceincentivize people to follow the rules.Edit: typos
Yeah honestly can they open up more “Beer Store”-style recycling drop offs? That way they could not process the useless/dirty stuff and keep the good stuff?
Maybe give out like 1 cent per X grams of plastic to incentivize people?
That or we can go full Taiwan and basically force people/companies to do things properly.
Most of the time it’s because people don’t bother to recycle correctly. Many people don’t wash their recycle and get rid of the food residue. Too much of that from one household and a whole truckload of recycle becomes useless.
Is it good? Do you have a comprehensive analysis?
The recycling program exists in part to manipulate us as consumers and cause us to spend more money on waste. Post-war, post-depression consumers were extremely uncomfortable with waste for moral and ethical reasons. The recycling program was a way of convincing them that it was okay to be wasteful as consumers.
But it’s a lie. Waste sent to recycling and then thrown in a landfill is even worse than waste that is simply thrown in a landfill in the first place. Even if we can show that despite the overhead, enough waste is diverted and reused or recycled to break even, we’re still behind on the game, because consumers were successfully induced to waste more than they would have if the program had not existed. It needs to do much better than break even to overcome the additional consumer waste, and I don’t think that it can.
Of course, people are not the same today, and if we took away the recycling program, they wouldn’t suddenly revert to acting like survivors of the depression. The damage has been done. Entire generations have been raised watching their parents throw consumer waste into the recycling bin like that magically absolves them of all responsibility. A generation raised to something doesn’t change. And there isn’t time to change their children.
Sadly true.
Seems like a lot of the daily recycling items get put into shipping containers and offloaded to some other countries that don’t have the same environmental laws. Just another process that is all smoke and mirrors.
In Winnipeg some of the glass collected by the blue box program ends up getting crushed into sand that is used for road building and maintenance at the landfill.
Which servers the second “R” (re-use), and also reduces the need to quarry and transport fresh material for that roadbuilding.
Sure, it’s not being remanufactured into new glass products, but it is still better than what used to happen.
Nice to see another refugee from r/Winnipeg over here. I’m hoping that community grows quickly to replace the one on the old platform.
Considering so much “recycling” ends up in landfills… I sure hope they’re at least keeping it sorted in the landfill to make it easier for landfill mining in future generations.
