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
The only smart trashcan I've ever seen was Oscar the grouch. Considering how "smart" the power meters(and authorities) are in most cities, this will probably be a flop.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
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!