But you have to admit having people sort plastics into recycling bins and then having the recycling company sort them again is a pretty inefficient way to get to the landfill.
From what I heard it’s largely due to a concern that admitting recycling doesn’t work would make it extremely difficult to get it back up and working again once the issues have been addressed.
Likewise a lot is the “sorting” people do when they throw out their trash is pretty bad. For example, a plastic bottle the cap on can’t be properly cleaned so it doesn’t get recycled. A pizza box in a stack of cardboard ruins the entire batch.
Planet Money did a really interesting two episode series on recycling. That goes into why things are ending up in landfills and why we continue to practice the ritual of splitting our trash.
When I worked in an office I frequently pulled pizza boxes out of the recycling bin. Even highly educated professionals don't seem to understand the rules.
Come to Switzerland, we have well over 90% success rate here. Also: some people complain the total amount of recycled material is only a fraction of European average. Oh well...
Basing on the fact that materials not recycled by local companies, say TetraPak, are not accepted in collection: I always assumed they actually get recycled.
The rest actually doesn't go to landfill, but gets incinerated.
I view plastics in landfills to be temporary. I think one day it will make economic sense to dig it up and use it, and pre-sorting it probably makes that day closer.
And a key quote:
"Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. We see above-ground mines. And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place."
If you look at it from the “environmentalism as a religion” metaphor, sorting the trash is sort of a ritual penance sort of like the rosary. In Germany there are 8 different trash cans in many places, and churches are closing left and right. People need to feel like they are atoning for their sins.
I wonder hoy effective this Pfand system is against littering.
When I go to germany for a trip with the family I always find the streets clean, and I bet this is not because the germans clean streets lot, but as a consequence they don't litter instead.
done their part to require a whole other diesel-burning truck to come pick their waste. Even though modern factory equipment can easily sort the garbage automatically at scale. I mean, farms have cameras fast enough to pick out single seeds out of fast-moving conveyor belts. This whole debacle should have been forced on the industry, not consumers.
If what we're doing is bad, surely it would be better to know that it is bad and be forced to internalize that and deal with the consequences (even be inspired to come up with alternatives!) rather than just being tricked into thinking everything's daisies, no?
So long as we’re using plastics (hence the sorting and “recycling”), the better alternative in terms of what to do with post-usage (non-usage is moot given it’s in the stream already), is to bury it and sequester carbon. Actually recycling it doesn’t sequester carbon and it’s energy negative.
> non-usage is moot given it’s in the stream already
You can apply backpressure to the stream by buying things not wrapped in plastic in the first place. It’ll take some time for the signal to have an impact, but if enough people selected less-packaged goods, the market would fix the supply chain over time.
Also, if you pick items with less packaging up-front, then you don’t need to do as much work sorting waste on the back end!
We shouldn't create huge bureaucracies and pointless busy work to make people feel better. Pretending it's going to be recycled would also undermine efforts to reduce packaging.
Well, it did make me feel like I was "doing my bit". But knowing now that recycled material ends up in landfill, often getting shipped around the world first... well, now I feel cheated, disheartened, and basically like an idiot.
I don't understand why people fell for the political ploy though. Even as a kid, the logistics of it never made sense. How could we trust everyone in a society (except maybe Japan and Singapore) to spend their time to sort their trash properly? Which means all the trash would have to be sorted at the waste facility anyway to make sure it wasn't contaminated with non recyclables...in which case why were individuals asked to sort it in the first place?
Not only was this supposed to be sorted between paper/plastic/glass/metal, but also between different types of plastic? That was never going to happen on an individual basis. And what about huge apartment buildings and hotels?
The only way recycling would have made sense was if it was all being sorted at the waste facility, which if it was, wouldn't have required people to sort it individually. Hence, the whole thing was a sham from the beginning.
I'm interpretating this as governments having set up these schemes to fool people into thinking they are doing their bit, so they won't push as strongly for other environmental reforms?
You'd hope that the sort would be less intensive though. You might not need as many eyes to check that all the inappropriate stuff is out of the stream.
