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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."
From TFA:
I wouldn't think Cleveland would spend money on "smart trash carts" unless there were some truth to this claim.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Depends on where you live. Some places don't have easy access to landfills anymore and it's cheaper to subsidize recycling than to landfill.
And some places just believe it's the right thing to do and pay the costs anyway.
Ticket for not taking out trash, ticket for taking out trash too early, ticket for not taking containers in early enough, ticket for too much weight in trash. Is this really helping out the environment or just a hidden way to increase taxes? I do note that their metric of success is how many tickets they issue.
Alles in ordnung
Excessive regulation http://www.freedomworks.org/publications/the-danger-of-over-regulation
When it becomes naturally profitable to recycle people will do so themselves. Right now I don't throw away aluminum, stainless steel, brass, copper, lead, steel, some types of glass and several plastics plus newspapers. I use the glass, plastic and newspapers myself. I've found two places that will compete for the stainless, copper, lead and brass which I happen to come across and make my collection and transport costs worthwhile. The steel and aluminum go to another salvager which is reasonably close and pays well. I do this for my own benefit and will keep doing it regardless of the states insistence I line their pockets.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
That show (in general, and that episode in particular) are about as much proof of that assertion as something your cousin's friend's older brother said. Penn and Teller don't give you evidence, they insult things instead. (Check out their argument about subsidies. There are many pros and cons to be stated for such things, but they don't really do either. They give Teller a gun to rob Penn and then throw the cash around. Logic in action, Bullshit style!)
Seriously, I wanted to like this show, but it's total crap. It's entertainment rather than education. It's bullshit itself.
On the other hand, a quick Google search yielded this: http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/benefit_vs_cost.htm (and many other links). A balanced view. Recycling isn't always the answer and it's certainly not the only answer, but it's not bullshit, either.
Who said anything about knocking on doors? They just have to look through the trash you've put out on the curb... which, last I recall, anyone else could legally do just as easily.
I'm wondering how long it will be until my recyclables are considered public property even if I don't put them in the recycling bin.
"I'm sorry sir, it is now illegal to sell your aluminum cans yourself, you must by law dispose of them in the bin to subsidize the cost of disposing of the non-recyclables, and the part of the "recyclable" stuff that we lose money on."
Oh, get over your entitlement mentality already. You use the waste disposal service, you play by their rules. Don't like it? Buy your own damn landfill. It's not your God-given right to fill ours' up with recyclables.
Can people opt out of trash collection in the city?
Out in the country, you can opt for alternative trash collection. You can pay one of any number of companies to pick up your trash or you can take it to the dump yourself. When you live in the city, you have no choice.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Because government prefers to pass the onus on to citizens rather than take responsibility. Besides, they already have too much to do. Clearly citizens' time is less valuable than those who get paid to sort garbage.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
What a great solution, and as always, fixing the wrong problem just because we have a technology to do it. We penalize people for having more than a certain fraction of recyclables in the trash, but do nothing about how much absolute amount of trash there is.
Every kind of recycling incentive program we have is a bandaid to what is really needed -- the prices of things that reflect their true cost to society.
Yes, and the people running the disposal service have rights too, including the right to run their service they way they wish.
It's funny how the people who claim oppression are always so willing to tread on the rights of others. "Everyone has to give me what I want, how I want, when I want, for the price I want, because I have rights!"
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Hey, it's your choice. You could vote in favor of higher taxes (or disposal fees) to cover the cost of hiring trash sorters. I prefer to pay lower taxes/fees and do it myself.
.sig withheld by request
I've heard comments like this before (including from representatives of cities where recycling is required). Why are materials other than paper not handled along these lines:
- Shred/chop/smash the material.
- Run the small pieces through a rinse to take care of e.g. unrinsed bottles.
- Vibrate or centrifuge the material so the it's sorted by mass.
- Skim off the different types of plastic (or metal, etc.) in layers.
? I'm no expert, but I would think that sorting by mass would be a pretty accurate way of separating the types of raw material. Isn't that more or less how junkyards handle metal recycling of old cars?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I'm old enough to remember when people didn't litter like they do today...when graffiti was rare-to-unknown...when people took their trash out and brought in the empty barrels and containers promptly.
Puh-lese. Littering is MUCH less prevalent than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Remember the PSA they used to run on TV with the crying Indian? I do, and I remember how much worse the litter used to be back in those days.
Don't get me wrong. There are still an awful lot of slobs out there who litter. But from what I see in the areas I travel the problem is better than in the "good old days."
non-Recycling fines sound like a great revenue opportunity for the city
They may get contracts, but recycling is largely a huge failure as many cities/companies end up land-filling the recyclables along with the trash.
There is no real market for most this stuff except cardboard and metals. (Its already in the form it will be recycled into).
If recycling pays, as the slogan claims, you would expect some trickle back to the consumer. You would expect some waste-bill reduction. Instead we see punitive measures designed to enforce feel good regulations.
It doesn't pay, its almost always tax payer funded, and the separation process could be automated at dump sites for less money than duplicate pickup runs and enforcement actions.
If ever anything needed a good coat of technology this is it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
We've got a deposit scheme here (Netherlands) and it works a treat. Doesn't take much effort, and you further reduce the amount of land lost to land fills. What's not to love about it?
This is typical environmentalist religion. Everyone has to make a sacrifice, which "doesn't take much effort" according to its adherents, and in return you get some feelgood (less "land lost to landfills"). Here's how I see it. You are wasting the time of millions of people. Sure it's only a few minutes per week per per person, but it adds up. My take is that proper recycling is probably around five minutes a week per person. For a thousand people, that's 83 hours of labor per week, about two full time jobs in the States, except nobody is getting paid.
Further, most of these items weren't worth recycling in the first place, or they'd be recycled anyway. Keep in mind that unlike trash disposal, you need a lot of people to handle recycled materials. There's more waste streams to keep track of and someone has to sort the trash. Down the road, I imagine everything will get automated (including tough tasks like sorting milk jugs from PET soda containers), but when that happens, you won't need to sort the trash at all. And for many items, you don't gain any energy advantage from recycling.
For example, recycling newspaper or plastics still looks to be a net loss (especially if everything gets mixed too much).
Further, even if you don't have landfill space locally (almost never a problem in the US, but might be a legitimate problem in the Netherlands, due to notorious high land costs), you can always ship your trash (via rail or ship, which is pretty cheap) somewhere else that does have the space (say Eastern Europe or Northern Africa, for example). Now for some reason, people don't like "exporting the pollution", but it is a legitimate solution that can waste less of our collective resources than a recycling program does and can be environmentally sound as well (especially if you move the "pollution" to a place where it has less environmental impact).
Now let me explain that last claim a bit more. So far, I've just shown that we have a significant loss of labor and hidden costs in the recycling infrastructure. How do I go from there to claiming that we can have an environmentally sound solution. It's worth noting here that wasting peoples' time has an environmental cost to it. You need more people to do the same thing, and all of those people generate pollution. So just ignoring the costs of recycling infrastructure, we still are losing the labor of something like two people per thousand just from the "not much effort" of sorting garbage. That means a bit more pollution. Similarly, just wasting money has an environmental cost to it for similar reasons. To do the same work, you need to spend more and that means a greater diversion of resources in order to do so. That in turn means greater environmental harm.
These are hidden opportunity costs. We don't see how much more efficient and less polluting society could be, but we do see the savings in landfill space. From a municipality's point of view, that's all that matters. Landfills are unpopular. Recycling programs despite their costs are popular.
"What a moronic statement."
Oh really? Funny how it always comes back up.
If you outlawed coffee tables, then people who own coffee tables are criminals by definition.
The difference is that a gun - or a sword, or a knife, or any other weapon - is designed to change the balance of power in a fight.
If you outlaw guns (or swords, or knives), then the vast majority of the population becomes UNARMED. This makes it that much easier for an armed criminal - already a scofflaw - to commit crimes. The statistics bear it out; in Britain, police outlawed guns, and outlawed any knife which could possibly be drawable and usable in a fight. The result? Massively increased knife crime. Their low numbers of gun crime are related to a general disdain for guns societally (hunting with guns having been an "elite" occupation), but gun crime is now on the rise there despite the incredibly restrictive laws.
Washington, DC outlawed guns, and during the period when they were outlawed, they spent several years as the gun-crime capital of the US.
Perhaps we should rephrase it for people like you. Does "If you outlaw weapons, you disarm the populace while doing precisely Jack Crap to prevent criminals who don't give a shit about the law from getting weapons" work better for you?