Fueled by Caffeine said:I miss the organics recycling in Seattle.
The good part is that about 50% of people can compost the stuff at home with no issue. Its not necessarily made into something useful, but it stays out of landfills. The bad part is that 99% of those 50% won't do it anyway. The other bad part is that 50% of people can't do it anyway (urban dwellers)
In reply to ProDarwin :
There are community rules limiting composting. But it still happens even in my very high end neighborhood. The trouble is spring clean up and fall leaf raking produces such high volume material we have to haul the excess to the city operated compost pile.
That’s actually a good thing. It gives a person a job checking that requirements are met. And provides residents with free compost.
In addition they have tree chipping equipment so when trees/ limbs are blown down or otherwise removed, even that is recycled for residents.
When our recycling started, it was a lot of work. Everything had to be separated. Newsprint was separate from magazines and each had to be tie in a bundle.
Today, everything goes into one container
I think this still has the record for most hate mail at the NY Times.
And from another website.
You have to scroll down a distance for trash/recycling.
Pay attention to the blue colored map in the trash section. 
Anything metal including the hangers my work uniforms come on go in a bin that I add to random scrap runs, plastic and cardboard get recycled. Our town has a sorting center that will also take yard waste, books, old TVs (small fee there) and glass. They will only pick up cardboard and plastic in separate bins though
When I was in the Army stationed in Germany, there were 3 dumpster sized bins on the curb: Glass, Metal, Plastic. The glass had 2 sides, Clear and Other. It was mandatory and pretty easy. There was also a place called a Wertstoffhof (Recycling Center) where people dropped off furniture and household items to be re-used. My wife and I picked up some decent antique furniture there that the locals had considered old and out of style.
Here in small town Oklahoma there is a guy with a truck that runs a 'Pay to Recycle' business, but I suspect that in the end, it all goes to the same place. I wish that it was easier. Now I haul my own paper and cardboard (if I don't burn it in the woodstove along with waste oil). Anything else to recycle goes in my current parts car to eventually be hauled away to the crusher.
Metal is easy. Any metal, aluminium, tin, whatever. Recycle it. End of discussion.
Plastic and glass are tougher. And, it depends on what was in it. A glass or plastic soda pop container is easy. A glass or plastic jar of peanut butter is tricker. It might take me 10 minutes of rinsing and scrubbing to get the peanut butter residue out. Is that worth it? Compound that with the fact that we have well water- so every minute that water's running is a minute that the 240VAC, 15A well pump needs to run. Our dishwasher won't clean that out effectively, either.
Another problem is oil. Our recycling center specifically states that NO plastic that contained motor oil can be recycled. It's contaminated and must be landfilled.
China, who buys most of our recycling, has gotten stricter on their quality standards, and won't take contaminated material.
There's a problem with those who flat refuse to recycle. But there's another problem with the people who think that everything can be recycled and just toss stuff willy nilly into the blue bins. Potentially contaminating the good recyclables. Our municipality says not to recycle pizza boxes, or other paper that's contacted food.
We do compost most of our scraps, except for meat and dairy.
My local county recently ended their recycling program because the pool of foreign buyers dried up. I do still recycle paper products, but it's a shame seeing how much more full our garbage can is for the weekly pick up.
This is why I'm inclined to agree with the poster earlier who stated it takes legislation to force it to happen properly.
As long as the easy button is either a) throw it in the trash (even if it could be recycled) or b) throw it in the recycling bin (even if contaminated), you can be pretty sure that 90%+ of the public will take those options.
I don't have the solution, but I hope something better than the current system comes along.
In reply to ProDarwin :
Europe already has passed legislation against single use plastics. Going out in the ocean to gather it up is too expensive and not gathering it up means fishing will decline greatly.
Trash has value, get enough, find the markets for it and you can be rich.
I'm a little late to the game on this one, but I wanted to chime in.
I'm also a pretty fanatical recycler. We have a big mixed recycling bin that gets picked up every two weeks and it's always pretty full. Lord knows it's a rough couple weeks if we miss a pick up! We pay a bit of money to participate in the city composting program. That's the second-largest part of our wastes stream, and we really like how well it's worked out. Our trash can is often almost empty and sometimes we skip a week putting it out. Most of our trash is plastic bags/film/wrappers.
As far as cleanliness goes, I just heard an interesting report on the local NPR station. The recycling rep interviewed said that they don't mind a jar with the peanut butter not perfectly cleaned, but they do very much mind the half-full can of beans! He also talks about how you don't need to separate out junk mail windows. Scrap metal is a no-no, and I'm probably the offender behind that rule... Other interesting things too, but that's the 5 sec version. Here's the story:
There's lots of talk recently about China "not accepting" recycling anymore. Evidently that's not really the case. They tightened their allowable "trash" contaminating the scrap. So the company in the interview upgraded some equipment and met that stricter standard.
I know some worry that recycling just gets land-filled regardless. He said their scrap rate runs about 10%. Not bad.
Enough of me paraphrasing a radio story.
A good read on the recycling industry - particularly how it operates in China - is "Junkyard Planet" by Adam Minter. The author is the son of a scrap-yard owner, and digs deep into the industry. A very good read.
In reply to TVR Scott :
I don't understand why scrap metal is a no-no. And what does that entail? I sometimes toss nails, screws, bottle caps, etc into the recycling bin. Also mason jar lids.
if I save the stuff and take it to the metal recyclers with all my big scrap metal (car parts) they still give me 5 cents a pound for it. One year I saved all my tin cans and took them with the scrap metal. A year's worth of tin cans was worth about $2. So now I just toss them in with the rest of the recycling. I do separate out the aluminum, because that's worth some money.
In reply to volvoclearinghouse :
That's a good point and I've thought about that quite a bit. I have to think it's probably a couple factors, and most of this comes back to the fact that these recycling places aren't doing all this to be nice. They're doing it to sell the end result as a commodity.
So with that in mind, they probably don't get enough scrap to sell in container-loads. Though I'll bet they do send their scrap to one of the local scrap yards in a big roll-off. But from the municipal perspective, their equipment probably isn't set up to separate or reduce industrial/automotive scrap.
Hulu has Penn & Teller's "Bullsh*t!" episodes. They do one on recycling that illustrates how overblown the effectiveness of it is. I'm not opposed to doing what is reasonable to cut down on trash but like most mandated things the truth doesn't match the advertising.
A good rule of thumb is that if somebody's paying for the material to be recycled, it's probably effective for the environment in terms of how much energy it takes to recycle it. Metal, lead-acid batteries, etc - all of these are pretty effective things to recycle.
But if you have to pay somebody to take it? There's a good chance that recycling it takes a lot of energy and chemicals to recycle it, and it may really just end up dumped in a third world country somewhere.
In reply to MadScientistMatt :
This is the case with almost all recycling right now. That was my whole point, and that book "Junkyard Planet" goes into detail a lot further. None of these municipalities are recycling just to be "big government". They're doing it because they sell the separated end product and make a profit. Why would a Chinese company buy scrap plastic, ship it over the Pacific, and then throw it in a landfill? There's a demand, and the recyclers supply that demand.
A good exception to this market-based recycling would be for my composting program that I pay to participate in. I'd argue that it's in the early stages and I'm helping to move the program forward. And if I had a compost pile in my yard then my dog would just eat it.
MadScientistMatt said:A good rule of thumb is that if somebody's paying for the material to be recycled, it's probably effective for the environment in terms of how much energy it takes to recycle it. Metal, lead-acid batteries, etc - all of these are pretty effective things to recycle.
But if you have to pay somebody to take it? There's a good chance that recycling it takes a lot of energy and chemicals to recycle it, and it may really just end up dumped in a third world country somewhere.
Let’s be honest, some recycling is just to keep it out of landfills. Landfills are filling up and new ones wind up being further and further away.
Putting it in old warehouses/factories concentrates that product to make it easier/ faster to supply to needs. Plastics for example take a very long time to decompose but can be ground up and made into countless new items. That only works though if there are massive amounts of material to use.
We used to produce a 96 gallon drum of garbage a week, every week. Due to recycling and some lifestyle changes, we produce about 1/3 a drum a week, most of which is cat littler.
Recycling is easy where we live. They recycle appliances, electronics, tires, light bulbs, paint and chemicals in one section of the facility. On the other side, there are large bins for construction waste, cardboard, household recycling and garbage. Smaller bins for shellfish shells, organic food waste. clothes, shoes and so on. If it can get recycled, we bring it up there. Here is a list.
Beyond taking care of our own stuff, we also pick up trash while we're out walking and bring that to be recycled (bottles, fishing line, cans) or throw it out.
Doing these things have set a lifelong example for out kids that has them conditioned not to be litterbug shiny happy people. I figure even if a fraction of this stuff is being recycled, it's way better than none of it getting recycled.
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