Slashdot Mirror
Smart Trash Carts Tell If You Haven't Been Recycling
Starting next year Cleveland residents face paying a $100 fine if they don't recycle, and the city's new high-tech trash cans will keep track if they don't. The new cans are embedded with radio frequency identification chips and bar codes which keep track of how often residents take them to the curb. If the chip shows you haven't brought your recycle can out in a while, a lucky trash supervisor will go through your can looking for recyclables. From the article: "Trash carts containing more than 10 percent recyclable material could lead to a $100 fine, according to Waste Collection Commissioner Ronnie Owens. Recyclables include glass, metal cans, plastic bottles, paper and cardboard."
I work for a waste collection company. We collect and SELL over a THOUSAND tonnes of paper products every month.
Things might be different in your area but here our multi-million company is quiet profitable from it.
Paper/Cardboard is like any other commodity. the price fluctuates.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Well, in other news, it is illegal to collect your own rainwater in Washington state. You MUST pay for city water. Dunno about digging a well. It all has to do with "disrupting" the watershed."
In Liberty, Rene
Of course, lots of resources on the web about this as well as "garbage recycling deniers" but a good summary page is here: http://www.uos.harvard.edu/fmo/recycling/myths.shtml
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Recycling, in limited forms, is reasonable. But for the most part it is a PR game and has no real impact on anything.
Post-consumer materials, like plastic, is almost never recycled because of the contamination issues. A water bottle can be recycled but if one neck ring from a cap gets into the mix the entire batch is worthless. As of yet, this level of sorting and handling removing neck rings and caps can only be done by hand - at union wages for the most part. This eliminates any reason for recycling water bottles or milk containers - it costs maybe 100x what the recycled materials would be worth to sort them to that level.
Paper is one of those iffy items. If you have a source of clean paper and can sort out coated papers from uncoated (magazines from newspapers, for example) recycling it makes sense and the pulp from processing uncoated paper can be used in a large variety of materials. Unfortunately, getting coated paper into the mix changes things enough that it can only be used in a few applications. So we are back to a very complicated sorting scheme if it is post-consumer. Another problem with post-consumer is "dirty" paper. Food waste mixed in or other contaminates again seriously limits the utility of recycled materials, so much so that it is almost always just dumped.
So anyone talking about post-consumer paper recycing is almost always dealing with clean products like newspapers that can be sorted or office materials that often do not need to be. They aren't talking about taking a mix of papers from curbside recycling efforts because the costs to process that are large and the markets for the output very restricted.
Metals, especially aluminum, have been profitable for quite a while. So much so that there are machines that can sort out the metal containers - by type - quickly. Glass containers can be cleaned and sorted but the value is far less there because of different types of glass being mixed in and the general impracticality of sorting it.
So what happens to curbside recycling materials? I seriously doubt anyone is hand-sorting and dealing with contamination issues like neck rings. A sorting machine to pick out the metal bits is easy and should be a part of any recycling effort. Glass is probably a big question mark. Paper? Almost certainly it is dumped.
When people had to sort their own stuff it gave the impression of it being more valuable, but the contamination issues were still there preventing most of the stuff from being used.
While Penn and Teller's presentation on this may be a bit dated, from everything I see they are still mostly right. It is a feel-good program for both people recycling and for municipalities. The limited amount of materials that are recovered from the recycling stream do earn enough to make it almost - but not quite - worth doing. But the PR value is priceless.
Penn and Teller are cool but keep in mind they're also stooges for the Cato Institute, which offers it's own mixtures of truth and bullshit.
This show is admittedly and unrepentantly biased, which makes it a poor source of reference.
Supposedly their last episode will be entitled " 'Bullshit!' is Bullshit! ", explaining all this. We'll see.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I'm fairly sure that an unrestricted anonymous waste disposal service wasn't guaranteed in the constitution.
The Constitution does not "guarantee" what you and I may do. It only restricts what the government may do. Do you understand that?
The 10th Amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Therefore, I have the power and the right to create unrestricted anonymous waste disposal. It's a guaranteed right of mine and I may provide that service.
The Constitution does not have to give me that power. I have it.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Colorado's water laws are probably similar.
It isn't so you "have to purchase city water", it has to do with how water rights work. Because Colorado supplies water to something like 18 states, often the water that fills our rivers is already owned by someone who lives in Kansas, Arizona, or wherever. Water rights are based on age, the oldest rights are the best rights. When someone with water rights needs water, they make a call for that water and it gets released from a reservoir. If people collect their own rainwater, they are reducing the supply available to those who already own water rights.
I don't necessarily agree with this concept, but that's how it works. Out of all the things I would do if I could travel back in time, the first thing I would do is buy as many water rights in Colorado as I possibly could.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I think you mean the 9th Amendment...
The 9th Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
You've missed the point entirely. The quoted myth is arguing that most or all trash gets sorted anyway. This is not remotely true. The Cleveland authorities look through some people's trash to see whether it contains recyclable materials, not to actually perform the separation for them.
Another non sequitur. If 40% of the population is doing something, I'd say it's pretty popular, wouldn't you? But that's not even a majority.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Not true. Glass is generally profitable to recycle, and is in significant demand.
Similarly, PETE (#1) plastic and HDPE (#2) plastic are also generally worth recycling. In some cases, #5, too. Most of the other stuff... not so much.
Either way, though, even if the city just dumps it in a landfill, that's still better than you dumping it in a landfill. When they dump it in a landfill, they're creating a huge pile of segregated plastic. If we get to the point that we're short on petroleum and it makes sense to find every shred of plastic we can for recycling, those piles will be a gold mine. Your random bottle in the middle of your trash will still be worthless.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.