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Encouragement Without Education Backfires On Recycling Efforts (gizmodo.com)
Longtime Slashdot reader Alok writes: High contamination in recycled garbage, such as plastic bags mixed in with the recyclable plastic waste, are causing major problems for sustainability efforts in U.S. This has been exposed as a big problem recently, due to recent stricter China import rules on importing waste materials that led to changes in the sourcing pipelines. Cities such as Philadelphia have ended up processing nearly half of the recycling garbage using waste-to-energy incinerators instead, where they're being burned alongside garbage. "Today, the average U.S. recyclable load is about 25 percent contaminated," reports Gizmodo. "To make their commodities saleable, material recovery facilities started hiring more 'pickers' and buying more equipment to remove items that shouldn't be in the recycling, in addition to slowing down their processing lines." [C]ommunities like Philadelphia are going have to generate cleaner material that is more marketable," Scott McGrath, Environmental Planning Director at the City of Philadelphia Streets Department, said, adding that the city will be focusing more of its efforts on educating residents about what can and cannot be recycled. McGrath said if Philly can convince residents to stop tossing plastic bags in the recycling bin, that alone would be a big deal.
Anne Germain, Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Affairs at the National Waste and Recycling Association, an industry trade group, said public education was something the recycling industry as a whole had let slide over the years. "We were more about encouraging recycling than saying stop doing this or that," she said. This, combined with the widespread adoption of single stream, has made the public increasingly enthusiastic about throwing everything in their blue bins, resulting in a lot of what Center for American Progress representative Kristina Costa calls "aspirational recycling," or attempting to recycle garbage. "Once you start saying more and more materials are acceptable, it seems that a lot of people start to think everything is acceptable," Germain said, adding that the increased complexity of packaging today compared with a few decades ago has only added to the confusion.
Anne Germain, Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Affairs at the National Waste and Recycling Association, an industry trade group, said public education was something the recycling industry as a whole had let slide over the years. "We were more about encouraging recycling than saying stop doing this or that," she said. This, combined with the widespread adoption of single stream, has made the public increasingly enthusiastic about throwing everything in their blue bins, resulting in a lot of what Center for American Progress representative Kristina Costa calls "aspirational recycling," or attempting to recycle garbage. "Once you start saying more and more materials are acceptable, it seems that a lot of people start to think everything is acceptable," Germain said, adding that the increased complexity of packaging today compared with a few decades ago has only added to the confusion.
You want me to use clean water...which is scarce enough that it has its own problems...to wash my garbage so someone can make money off of it by selling it to China? If you want to sell my garbage, you find a way to clean it yourself.
We used to carefully sort and fill multiple recycling containers with paper, glass, metal, etc. But then they wanted to have only one pickup container, and call it single-stream. So now we're supposed to throw everything in there together. What did they expect?
The ravine at the end of the road takes everything without complaints.
Have gnu, will travel.
Starting around age 6 I was inundated with with messages of "reduce reuse or recycle" "#1 and #2 plastics, metals are recyclable" "captain planet" "ozone hole". We did experiments testing the pH of the "acid rain" in our yards and entered in a database we accessed via dial up on our Apple IIc class computer. We then took all this home and parroted it to our parents and when the recycling bins started showing up on the curb in ~1991 we made our parents recycle. Where i am from the cost of municipal waste handling was offset significantly by recycling. By the early 2000s you could put nearly everything recyclable in the bin and what you couldn't put in the bin you could easily drop off. In 2012 I moved to Utah in our first neighborhood only about 5-10% of homes had blue bins. I asked a long time resident. Turns out the HOA took the recycling bins away because people were just using them as an extra trash cans. I have been diligently recycling since ~1991 and in 2019 I can't help but doubt it's effectiveness because of the people around me. It's disheartening.
What's the problem? You're simply burning the plastics anyway. Find better things to do with it, make pellets out the stuff and melt it back together in useful forms. Pack it up and sell it, better yet, give it away as a cheap form of insulation.
It's what China does anyway, they pack up our garbage and sells it back to us as "green recycled" furniture. If you have purchased cellulose insulation you'll find plenty of plastic worked into it.
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Single stream should mean that the people I pay to handle my waste handle it in the appropriate way. Screw sorting, screw cleaning shit- why the fuck can't we pay for the curbside service we actually want?
It's not as bad in the county I live in as it is in a certain nearby city, but they keep tightening up the rules on what is and is not 'recyclable', and then they want me to sit there at the sink and wash things out like a ziplock bag? Ridiculous. What I think needs to happen is more packaging, food wrap, and so on, needs to be made from biodegradable materials, preferably that enrich the soil, that you 'recycle' by putting them in the ground. More durable things of course can't really be made from materials like that but single-use things should be. Also things like these 'K-cups', single-use for making coffee, are just the stupidest thing I've ever seen. How hard is it, really, to use a coffee press, for instance, and wash it out after you're done using it? I've been doing that for years now, for a single 16-ounce cup of coffee, and it really doesn't take that much effort.
How profitable are landfills? Every item that gets recycled isn't costing money to dispose.
I don't know how the rest of the world works, but recycling makes no sense here in Canada.
We get 2 recycling bins. "Paper" and "Containers".
Where you do put cardboard boxes? Is cardboard paper? Not sure, but I guess a box is a container. But what about paper containers?
Are cloths just containers that contain people? Wood definitely is not paper, but you think you could recyclable it without first building it into some form of container.
You would think that you would separate recyclables by material type not use. Why would a glass vase be recyclable but a glass coaster not be?
TL;DR: Either give up or just shove everything in the "Container" bin because pretty much everything is a container.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
they gave me a recycling bin and then cut back on garbage service to try and force me to use it. So half the time the regular garbage can was full (often one the same day as pickup from the overflow of last week). Eventually folks got tired of it and used the recycling bin as trash pickup.
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We used to have paper bags that were made from trees grown for the purpose but that upset some people.
So you had a whole bunch of people that felt really good about getting them banned.
Oops fewer tree farms bu now we have lots waste plastic bags that are nearly useless to begin with and can't be reused at all.
"Encouragement Without Education Backfires On Recycling Efforts"
Our local recycling program education was "dumbed down" so much it is laughable. They accept #1 and #2 plastics ONLY. This is not uncommon. But because "the populous" was too "stupid" to understand that, they completely removed that information and replaced it with this: "jars, jugs, and plastic bottles with caps". O M G. So that means a TON of plastics that ARE recyclable don't meet that stupid description, and a TON of plastics that DO meet the description are not. Biggest #2 plastic thing I have? Washing machine liquid bottle. Is that a jug? Is that a plastic bottle with cap? What a waste. Same thing with my large #2 liquid soap bottles and #2 plastic liquid deodorant bottles. The list goes on and on. All are recyclable... but not according to their horrible description.
I even Emailed them to complain, and they simply couldn't understand why I would be confused. Instead they quoted "when in doubt, throw it out" (AKA- no not even try to recycle half or more of your eligible recyclables).
Same thing on the "paper" side. Instead of describing the exact attributes of what they want, they changed it to: "cardboard, paper, food boxes, food & beverage cartons". What is a magazine? What is a windowed envelope? Many food "boxes" are heavily waxed, contain metal, or contain plastic... do those count? My protein drink "carton" is waxed paper but has a PLASTIC spout and cap on it. Is that acceptable?
Controversy and disappointment for another ritual of the green religion today. It's almost like these schemes designed by people with a deep emotional need to feel good about themselves are all completely pointless.
Translation: Its your fault other people go though your trash making a mess if you dont pay to lock it. Check your privilege cis-white-scum..
Go look in recycle bins in minority neighborhoods and compare to majority white neighborhoods and report back. The truth may hurt but it's still the truth. We can discuss why this is the case but facts are facts.
If it is too exspensive for government to sort recyclables from non recyclables why should we bear the cost with our time.
An AI enhanced sorting machine perhaps with spectrometer will ultimately solve this.
The tendency with waste haulers' PR is to blame their customers. This is a bit of a ruse as the deeper problem is that producers of goods have little or no responsibility for the costs of recycling/disposal. China's "National Sword" initiative is a rational response to not needing foreign imports, waste processing companies are rationally responding to the lack of domestic markets, and the lack of domestic markets is an institutional outcome of legacy externalities.
Oh you must be british. In America, slag is worth money. The scrap yard will PAY YOU to take it. I'll even do you a favor and come get all the slag you can find and haul it away FOR FREE, son. Tell me that ain't a great deal.
How are we supposed to get it right when it's complicated and we never receive a single bit of feedback?
In my condo complex, people honestly don't understand that some bins are for recycling and some are for trash. Signs are up in multiple languages and yet you'll see a christmas tree or old sofa tossed into the recycling.
people honestly don't understand that some bins are for recycling and some are for trash.
The problem is apathy, not ignorance. Some people do care, but enough people don't, that they screw it up for all of us.
Recycling is not going to work if it relies on mass altruism. We need to either make it profitable (as it is for aluminum) or we need robots to sort the trash.
This isn't an issue with education. It's an issue with being overly ambitious. Simplify recycling programs, and the quality of the goods will increase. Things like municipalities putting cameras on garbage trucks to scan for recyclables in garbage cans encouraged people to err on the side of recycling over throwing in the garbage. The green zealots created this problem by over pushing people to recycle. What's needed is to just focus on high value items. Too much in the recycle bin resulted in contamination and the trashing of entire truck loads. This is great example of how doing less can result in doing more.
This is why you need to be pragmatic and practical. You can't just govern by feeling and what sounds great on paper. You need to look at what will actually work and set limits on ambitions. Ambition is great, but sometimes a more conservative voice raising questions helps find the right balance and compromise that does the greater good.
Save the environment by running twice as many fuel burning trucks to pick it up... Every bill increase is blamed on 'increased recycling costs'... The whole thing is a mess and a boondoggle.
About as hard as washing out a goddamned ziploc bag, you hypocritcal son of a bitch.
I would love to know how to recycle properly, but nobody can codify the rules. It changes not only state-by-state and town-by-town but also by what company does the recycling.
And they don't even tell you what's recyclable; instead of telling us a plastic code, it's by shape, which makes no sense. Wouldn't it all be shredded during the recycling process? Why would shape even matter with that?
And instead of separating types, they simply combine everything and sort later on, which might make sense in transportation costs, but is immensely more costly down the line.
They did this to themselves by enacting bad policies!
Just put up a sign asking them to please put everything they don't want back in its place.
You'll probably want to write that sign in Spanish, and whatever language hobos speak /s
I don't think I've ever heard of an effort focused up stream to make more products curb-side single-stream recyclable. Education is good, but let's do something to make more products curb-side recyclable.
So if you make recycling shit more difficult than just throwing it in the trash, fuck it...I'm throwing it in the trash. *You* fucking figure it out...it's not my job to sort rubbish so the waste company can make more $$$...they already have a guaranteed profit percentage built into their city/county contract around here, and have for decades.
I suspect it would be better for the environment to burn all this stuff for energy rather than ship it to China to be processed. Those cargo ships are very heavy polluters. Somebody should do the math.
With fire.
I think only metal, paper, and glass is worthwhile to recycle anyway.
A warm feeling obviously isn't enough because it's not directly connected to actually doing things right. How about 10% by weight of my plastics back as 3D printer filament? Plus the threat of losing access to that service if I keep contaminating it.
Earlier curbside recycling efforts required the producer of the waste to separate it (paper, glass, metal, plastics). Then someone thought, "oh, that's too hard." So they switched to this brain-damaged "put it all in one can, and we'll separate it after we dump it in the truck" nonsense. In an effort to make recycling easy for the individual producing the waste, they've made it almost impossible for the processor.
The solution that works is more complicated for the waste producers, but it makes the system viable. Separate streams for paper, for glass, for metals, and for numbered plastics. Maybe even separate the metals ahead of time too.
Recycling is not going to work if it relies on mass altruism. We need to either make it profitable (as it is for aluminum) or we need robots to sort the trash.
There are plenty of stuff in our society that works just fine without relying on either of those.
Start with some sever fines or jail time for people who intentionally sabotage recycling and you won't see christmas trees and sofas in the recycling anymore.
If we want society to improve we have to stop giving assholes an advantage.
It shouldn't be beneficial to ruin everything for everyone else.
The problem isn't that they don't understand, the problem is that they don't give a shit.
Start handing out fines and you will see improvement. Some people don't function properly without being beaten when malfunctioning.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
don't get me wrong, in theory and in a perfect world with pristine materials and perfect sorting recycling is a great idea. The problem is that the advocates of it have always known that we do not live in that perfect world and it would always be ineffective and cost-prohibitive. Recycling has been a wasteful ideological tool for propagandists. They never told the public the truth about what would be required, what the tradeoffs would be and how much money the taxpayer would get soaked for, because there was a political agenda and recycling was a critical PR and re-education part of the effort. It never mattered to the advocates that much of what was "recycled" was actually going straight into landfills or incinerators (or being shipped to 3rd world countries to be dumped or incinerated) and they were certainly never inclined to tell the public.
It simply does not pay to recycle USED plastics because they are not heated high enough to bake-out any impurities during processing. There are also too many types of plastics and every region seems to have a different list of which plastics codes are accepted. It's one matter to have manufacturers mold-in a recycling code number and another thing entirely to have all the members of the public memorize a list of which codes they local authority accepts and then get them to clean their plastics and squint and try to locate and then figure out tiny codes often in blurry moldings.
Glass is the best for recycling - nearly all grades can be melted together and the stuff can be turned into things like bottles that are non-critical in their materials requirements, average people can generally easily identify glass and therefore submit the proper stuff, and the process is even often (but not always) cost-effective.
Steel, Aluminum and copper are pretty good - they certainly melt at a high enough temperature to cook out impurities and can be done at reasonable cost, but the average member of the public cannot tell metals apart and certainly cannot ID alloys.
Paper is ok for recycling as long as its not contaminated with residue of other materials like food or cleaning chemicals or glue that was used to attack it to oother things. The problem is, nobody tells the public this, and so people throw ALL their paper into the bin including magazines that have staples, finishes ranging from soft and fuzzy to glossy and coated, and then there's the publications and junk mail loaded with ad snot.
If we were actually smart, we would have the public sort grossly into just "metal", "glass", "paper", and "electronic" and then bury those groups into massive well-documented and lined landfills, and then a century or more from now when the tech exists large robots could go to those locations to harvest raw materials if there are sufficient shortages to make it economical. We should stop wasting huge piles of tax dollars on the current fakery.
This is already called dumping, is already illegal, and is already unenforced.
Stop suggesting more fines, more laws, more penalties. God, I hope you're not a parent. Education, not punishment.
I had the same thought when they introduced the charge for bags in the UK to counter the one use thing (even though they are basically universal bin liners anyway), why not just switch the material of the bags to something that is recyclable and boom, problem solved. It's probably more expensive and might get charged anyway but at least you could then recycle them. Or what ever happened to paper bags? At least they are biodegradable.
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What the hell
All recyclables there go into one blue bin, with the material types separated ta a central facility. The sorting process still requires some human assistance, but at a steadily diminishing rate with time as automation improves.
There, fixed that for you. Encouraging uneducated people is a stupid idea, unless you're encouraging them to get an education.
Hobos speak English.
Start with some sever fines or jail time for people who intentionally sabotage recycling and you won't see christmas trees and sofas in the recycling anymore.
That requires catching them first.
Who don't give a shit about anybody, and therefore can't be bothered to sort their recyling out properly. Who'd a thunk it?
This is just one of the results of the endless lies of the Jewish media, and the cretins who believe it.
I refuse to participate in the genocide of my own people.
I want white people to continue to exist.
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Just like that.
To kick-off this loop: Cities implement lazy recycling programs.
Those programs are inefficient and wasteful. Rumors spread about how silly those programs are. Less intelligent people assume all recycling programs are silly. Rumors spread about how silly recycling in general is. People begin to care even less. Inefficiency and wastefulness increases. Repeat this loop.
The majority of recycling containers in the Midwest (some of the windiest parts of the country) are still small, open-top bins. What happens on trash day? All of your trash blows out of your bin.
Cities should be issuing out enclosed, multi-compartment containers for different recyclables and compostables. Why pay for someone to do that at the recycling facility? The amount of actual trash is very little if sorted properly from the beginning.
There's probably a thousand ways recycling programs could be improved, but there's no market incentive, and little to no public funding going to it.
So everyone at every household has to sort out plastic bags and every other damn thing. The cumulative cost of that is enormous. Much cheaper and more effective, as events like this show, is to fix it in far fewer places and figure out a new way to handle plastic bags in there to prevent them from clogging the machine as it is designed now. I'm sure some some person somewhere has an answer to this, it is just taking a long time to implement since the small number of waste companies have far more focused political clout than the widely dispersed households who are asked to bear the cost. It is a story as old as the hills.
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No joke, if those people looking for unlocked trash cans all died, as you insist they will, then that problem solved itself.
What about this solution is inhumane or deplorable?
Perhaps it's the best help someone can get when they're constantly doing things that leads them to be a dreg of society?
We're harangued about how we are dumping plastic in the ocean, how we need to ban plastic straws and other terrible plastic products, because America is destroying the oceans.
Well, I have two main thoughts on that. One is that 'Murrica could be taken out of existence tomorrow, and it wouldn't put a dent in the plastic problem, with the possible exception of microspheres.
Second, when people are being browbeat about how they are destroying the planet because of their plastics, yeah - you are going to find a lot of plastic bags in the recycling bin.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And old age immigrant neighborhoods. Besides who ever gets actually fined?
The real problem is cities cant now just pay someone to ship it overseas, and a tenfold increase means they must be seen - and spend dollars recycling or burning. Private enterprise who had it easy with predictable costs now risk loosing their shirts if stuck during a price swings - or as in Australia, ste storage facility mountain was shut down when it was 300% overloaded and a fire hazard.
So it is nice to the the outsourcing model fail - when cheap overseas labour is removed.
You can put all kinds of stuff there. Someday somebody may even find it economical to get it out.
The value of any material must be greater than the cost to transport, sort and manage the material. Economics is simple science: costs minus expenses. If you don't profit you go out of business.
Recycling is not going to work if it relies on mass altruism.
It's amazing how disparate groups of people don't all have the same values, isn't it?
Or, more likely, when the fines are handed out, we'll see public outrage and lawsuits. My wife was an environmental scientist, and I still have to fight with her to recycle properly.
The more trucks that are used by the recycling companies, the fewer are needed to cart around raw materials to needed to make new plastic. If we increase our use of recycled goods, we proportionately decrease our use of newly manufactured goods. The trucks are just being repurposed.
I have a small rectangular container that fits nicely in my fridge door for compostables. Being in the fridge keeps flies away until I am ready to take the whole lot outside. I have expanded to two full size composters in the back yard because one wasn't quite keeping up with a family of 4. Get some really nice soil out of them every year!
My water & sewage bill is over $300/month, and it's going up again. It's enough to make me want to go back to well water and a septic tank. But I had to give up well water due to contamination from fracking.
Meanwhile my local Pennsylvania township has decided to start charging us per trash can, and we have to buy their trash cans. But recycling is free.
Reap what you sow...
Ban plastic bags unless they're compostable. Train robots to sort recyclables. Tax on plastic (or on petrol) to pay for it.
If you call that stealing, I assume you regard the garbage you produce as your private property. So why don't you take your fucking property back and recycle it yourself?
The truth is recycling has always been a scam. It was really a remote landfill in China, and now they are done with land filling it. So the reality bites, and you have to deal with the fact that no one wants this stuff. There is no cycle.
It's not stealing. Once your bins hit the curb, anything inside of them are considered abandoned.
I've caught people rummaging through my bins before and told them that I didn't mind them taking things from them, but to not make noise or a mess of things inside or outside of the bins. So far they have respected my command but if they ever demonstrate insubordination, then I will have them arrested.
So by that logic, I should just be able to walk off with your garbage cans, right? I need some new ones anyhow, mine are getting dented and rusty.
This isn't about people not washing their recyclables, it's about non-recycleable items being mixed in with recyclable items.