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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.
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.
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.
"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?
Plastic bags, for the same volume, also are lighter and less bulky. This makes them cheaper to transport and require less place for storage and less frequent restocking at the check stands.
Plastic bags also don't weaken when they get moist either from being set on a wet surface or because something inside leaks or condenses due to high humidity.
Not to say these makes them worthwhile, but those are advantages.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.
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.
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.
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.
For me the problem is much more:
- I work full-time.
- I pay full taxes.
- One of the things my taxes cover is waste collection and recycling (there's a specific line on a specific tax).
However, for some reason, *I* then have to clean (hot water, scrubbing, soap) and sort (time, effort) my rubbish. I'm all for "community spirit" but I'm also for "I'm *paying* you to do that... either make me do it, or make me pay you to do it, not both".
Then some company gets paid to run ANOTHER set of truck full of rubbish around every house in the city... pick up that stuff separately... take to a separate place... sort it again... to heat it up... to generate a poorer-quality recycled plastic, etc.
(Ironically, there's then a *third* truck that comes on *yet another day* to put up "compostable" rubbish... leaves, food, etc. but not meat, and no eggshells, and no wrapping, no branches or bits of wood, and make sure you bag it in only in authorised compostable bags that you can buy from the council website here...)
Oh, I can get fined / my rubbish punitively NOT collected / etc. if I don't do it properly.
Plus - as the US in this story here - even then, most of the stuff we do that for *does not* get recycled. It gets shipped abroad, to a country that doesn't care and landfilled (but just with a lie on the paperwork). People have been putting GPS trackers in garbage for years now, and it mostly ends up in landfill abroad.
In terms of green credentials, we're really making things *worse*. Not just running three times as many trucks, but cleaning everything twice, sorting only to lump together and then re-sort, and then it ending up in landfill.
I know why. I know exactly why. I got into my local paper for knowing why. The councillor in charge of waste disposal... just happens to OWN the waste disposal / recycling companies. It's a "declared interest". So he actually profits... not just from selling us little silly bags but by having the council pay his companies to do his bidding. Anything good he gets to cherry-pick and recycle (i.e. get paid to give it to a company that actually recycles it). Anything else, he pays to landfill and charges the council, which we pay for from our local taxes.
Check the arrangements in your area, it's surprisingly common. It's a money-making exercise that DECREASES the environmentally friendliness of the whole exercise, without substantially changing the amount that goes into landfill at all.
If we were smart, we'd collect it and burn it. Like the Swedes do. Or is it the Finns? One of them. They have to IMPORT rubbish to burn to fuel their homes because their process is so good that it's cheaper to burn most random rubbish and clean the air that comes out than it is to try to recycle it properly (once you've cherry-picked the easy stuff, which I believe they still do).
If we were really smart, we'd *TAX* products based on how much packaging they contain, while giving *credit* to those places that actually make something out of rubbish that *isn't* just landfilled. If you did it right, one would pay for the other. We'd all pay no more. It would be much more green. Our usage of plastic entirely would drop. And we'd come up with new and innovative ways of using basic packing materials.
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.
The problem is that before you can down-cycle much of this kind of plastic you have to clean it first. That means using large quantities of water and other resources which are getting scarce in many parts of the world such as the western USA because of irresponsible resource use. Once you do clean the plastic garbage up you still get the problem of massive micro an nano plastic particle contamination. Burning the stuff is easier but causes a massive CO2 emissions problem. The glaringly obvious solution is to put an end to the gluttonous frenzy of plastic packaging consumption that we have been on since the end of WWII. It would solve a lot of problems if we could come up with biodegradable plastic substitutes for packaging that could be taken to special facilities and converted into soil or fertiliser through composting. Whoever comes up with a scalable and cost effective way to do that should in my opinion get an automatic Nobel prize in chemistry/biology.
You wont be calling them advantages when your tuna and salmon tastes like plastic.
He was speaking relatively from the packaging user's point of view, of course what are advantages to the packaging user and consumer also makes plastic bags a disaster from an environmental point of view. If you want to make a dent in this problem getting angry won't help. You have to be willing to understand why people use plastics and come up with a material that does the same job at the same cost but that can be more easily recycled or down-cycled, ideally by composting the material. Renewable energy did not become a viable solution to CO2 emissions until it became more cost effective than fossil fuels and that should be a lesson to the entire environmental movement. People won't work to stop the wilful sabotage of their life support system on the spaceship they live on unless it profits them in some way in the short term, they genuinely don't care that if they do nothing they'll choke on their own CO2 emissions farther down the road. Humans are very short sighted and selfish beings.
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.
It's _very_ good quality paper, that is one factor that makes it difficult to forge. US paper has a very distinctive "feel", which people handling money often notice before they notice the print on forged money.
Boss of mine almost 20 years ago gave me a $10 at a restaurant to pay his part of the bill. The instant my fingers touched it I knew it was bogus. I called him on it. He took it back and gave a real one.
Our currency paper is made by Crane. They recently split off the consumer stationery. I have a couple of different thank-you cards from them, and half-letter sheets. Even their consumer cotton rag paper is amazing. I only use this stuff for my closest friends and for select, worthy business. Everybody else gets a text, or a call, or good old Hammermill paper. (I don't use Georgia Pacific, as they've sent production of printer paper to China *and* are part of the Koch emprire. Hammermill is still USA-made.)
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Wow, where do you live where they force you to do that??
Dial back your outrage, bruv. People not relentlessly cleaning your shit up after you is not the same as forcing you to do anything. It's no wonder freedom is genuinely under attack when it's loudest supporters have such a perverted meaning of it.
I live in one of the south London boroughs.
SJW n. One who posts facts.