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."
Here's the episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzLebC0mjCQ
In brief: Most of the items we separate don't get recycled because nobody buys the trash (i.e. there's no market for used paper or used milk jugs). Precious metal like aluminum and copper is the only thing they succeed in selling. But the rest? The city then has no choice but to dump the goods in the landfill anyway.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Have you ever visited a place that has poor/no trash pickup or where people leave their trash out all the time? It's not an environmental thing, it's an aesthetic and sanitary issue. Garbage attracts animals and disease. Trash piling up on the streets is ugly.
Also, as the article states, "Cleveland pays $30 a ton to dump garbage in landfills, but earns $26 a ton for recyclables." Garbage removal is a shared resource, so the costs should be spread fairly. I guess the fairest thing would be to weigh everyone's garbage, but I doubt anyone would be a fan of that.
In the little town where I live, we pay $2 per bag of garbage picked up at the curb (kerb). Recycle is collected free. The more aggressively I recycle, the less I pay in "bag tags" to the slimy city council, who spend it on new pickup trucks for their greasy-haired hillbilly workers to drive around in all day just doing nothing at all ... oh, was I going on a bit? Anyway, we compost for the same reason -- it costs us less in garbage fees and also garners some nice greenie points and a pat on the back.
Beer, liquor and wine containers all have refundable deposits where I live, so they don't go into the recycle anyway.
If we could reduce the amount of bloody tim-horton cups littering the streets of Ontario, it would be a better place to live.
Doh.
In England it is quite rare (but not unusual) to see little collections of black refuse bags by the roadside in residential areas. Each bag has a small white ticket affixed to it, notifying the owner that their rubbish won't be collected unless it fits completely within the approved bin on the right day, which is once every two weeks. If the approved bin is overflowing, if its lid will not close, then the bags will be pulled out of it and left behind, each with a ticket attached. Sometimes they will remain there for weeks. Ironically, this is done "to help the environment". It certainly helps the local rat population; other parts of the environment may not be so lucky. The usual response is to put your rubbish in other people's bins, minus identifying documents, so they will have to deal with the mess that's left outside their houses when the city doesn't collect it (I don't do this, but it has happened to me a few times).
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Why is it we insist upon such complicated schemes for getting people to recycle? A good old fashion deposit scheme seems a much more effective alternative, although it does require something be done at the state or federal level, and a whole lot less intrusive. It works like this...
Require any store that sell beverage containers to accept them in return for cash or credit.
Require any large store that sells them provide automated reverse vending machines (Tomra) at the front of the store and they must pay out cash.
Barcodes must be attached to the product and intact for there to be a refund.
Raise the deposit on various items until you meet specific recycling rate targets.
Make defrauding the machine a felony.
This is hardly an original idea, but it works. You can easily achieve 80+% recycling rates for bottles and cans.
Downside - the usual bitching from the usual people that either hate the idea that they might be helping out their fellow man or vested interests like bottlers that think it will impact sales.
Some here are old enough to remember getting paid by the pound for aluminum cans. But, now I find myself paying for the service of recycling my recyclables. Recyclable materials have economic value, do they not? And, I paid for them when I bought the original products that utilized them, did they not? And he who receives the recycled material from me will extract economic value from them, will he not? That seems like a case study of win-win&win economics&environmentalism.
So how exactly did the get-paid-for-recycling model fail?
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
IMHO it would be far more efficient to take care of the separation at the plant rather than at the house. There is a lot of waste that goes into:
1) Cleaning
2) Separating into bins
3) Separate trash routes to pick it up
4) storage and special handling of non-valuable recycling materials
I went on a tour of a high tech landfill once, they basically stored the non-valuable materials (e.g. glass, plastics) and when the bins were full, it went in the landfill.
There is no way they earn $26/ton for recyclables, unless they are getting it via grants, tax breaks, etc.. and other neat financial tricks to make you think they make money, when in actuality it is the tax base subsidizing the cost of the financial waste.
If the cost of the process of gathering and recycling can't be self sustainable, you are lighting a stack of your own money on fire when you do recycle it.
So, naysayers, instead of just telling me i'm wrong, show me the energy balance equation that proves me wrong. Because shredding and compacting
trash has been and appears to still be the most efficient waste management solution.
In my city, yes you can opt out of city trash collection although you'll need to provide evidence that you've contracted with another waste disposal service.
This sounds great, and I'm sure Penn and Teller are very smart, but if it costing Cleveland less to recycle than it is for them to dispose of the trash, then isn't that the market working perfectly? So what if 90% of the stuff that gets put in a single-stream recycling bin still ends up in a landfill? That's still 10% less than was going in before, and the city could make money off of it.
Libertarians and conservatives love to carp about government waste, but then you have a clear example like this where the government has a plan in place to reduce waste and suddenly it's Orwellian.
I don't know about the GP, but where I live some of the cities mandate that all homeowners buy garbage pickup service from a single private company (if there is more than one contracted, they have "territories"). If you do not buy garbage service from this company, you get fined.
In the case of my particular city, you can haul your own garbage, but the city requires that the garbage company report anyone whose garbage service is discontinued. If you are on that list, your property is subject to inspection for compliance by the public works office.
This garbage company only picks up recyclables once every two weeks, which is not often enough given the amount of recyclables I have. So, I put overflow recyclables into the trash can that is emptied weekly once my recycle bin is full. I'd rather have them recycled. Further, according to the city ordinances it is illegal to possess garbage on your property for more than 7 days. My recyclable waste is "garbage"... so the city's contracted service doesn't even allow me to meet the letter of the law.
I see other posts mentioning how waste companies break (or nearly break) even or even make a profit selling the recyclables. Why the hell don't they pick up weekly, then?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
That sounds like a very sane idea. The layers will be imperfect, and some materials with have similar densities, so will end up mixed in a single layer.
There is a relatively easy solution for that though, namely heat the resulting mixture up slowly. At various points the different components will melt, and can be drained out, and end up in different containers based on the type.
The biggest problem with such a system though is that all glass colors will get mixed, so you will end up with odd color glass, which could really only be made into brown glass. A similar issue would occur with colored plastics.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
You think the smart bins are going to last 16 years? Do you really need it spelled out for you?