It turns out that my carbon offset plan (stealing and burying propane tanks from the neighbor's grils) isn't effective either.
Recycling specifically makes me so sad and angry because there is so much effort going into it, and so much is fraudulent and counterproductive, and I don't know how you move to something sensible. Give up on single-stream, sure. But maybe only separate out aluminum, metal, and glass? Not glass? Is clean paper worth it?
And then I wonder about whether plastic trash means we should be using municipal incinerators for power generation? That gets rid of the plastic trash, but how much of a disposal problem is the ash? Air pollution implications? It's burning fossil fuel, so CO2 at a minimum.
These are all technical questions that competent bureaucrats should be answering, and I don't trust them because that's where "single stream recycling, ship it all to China" came from.
I think electronics manufacturers already pay some kind of up-front mitigation fee for their eventual disposal in California, but more stuff like that.
Is clean paper worth it?
Unless you have a bidet.
I've been involved with our solid waste department for a couple years. In person, they'll say that single stream was a mistake. They also told me that most of our recycled waste goes to Chinese landfills. I started throwing it out because my trash doesn't need to make a journey across the Pacific to reach a landfill.
The answer has to be back at the packaging factory somehow. Consumer-based efforts to reduce packaging predominantly falls on women, so that's also a problem. I think we're looking for product stewardship, where it is the manufacturer's problem from beginning to end.
Ooh, yes. I look at packaging that's changed from the 80s -- plastic spouts on milk cartons, plastic film internal bags instead of waxed paper, and get so annoyed.
Remind me, what numbers are actually recyclable these days? 1 and 2?
We now get our hand soap in a little tablet that gets mixed with water in a reusable pump. And our dishwasher soap comes in the mail in cardboard.
What do people have against bar soap? I hate those pumps, they're always gunked up somehow.
But even bar soap used to come in paper and now it's mostly plastic film.
I used to use bar soap for shampoo.
Wait, I thought we all decided bathing was unnecessary years ago.
Bathing is necessary, using soap is optional.
Germany was a real adjustment to understand what the categories even were. At home you have four bins (or maybe fewer if some are subdivided): packaging, paper recycling, organic waste, and garbage. Packaging can be any material but has the "grüne punkt." I don't understand how packaging recycling works, but the key point is that companies are somehow charged for their packaging waste. Carbonated beverages, regardless of the material, have a deposit and you return them to a machine at the store you purchased them at. Glass bottles for non-carbonated beverages go to glass recycling dropoffs located in weird giant bins at random spots in the city, with separate bins based on the color of the glass.
Needless to say you could never get Americans to do this, because we're not a functioning society.
The UK isn't wildly different from 15.
Domestic waste is handle somewhat differently depending on whether you live in a flat (like me) or a house, but houses in this area each have:
1 x bin for organic waste (green bin)
1 x bin for recycling (big blue bin)
1 x bin for non-recyclable rubbish (big slightly different shade of blue bin)
1 x bin for garden waste (big brown bin)
Our building used to have separate bins for: glass, paper, metal, and plastics, but they've switched back to a single big "recycling" dumpster.
However, I notice our local council has started closing most of the local recycling points, except for a couple of really big ones that are hard to get to, and which require reservations. This is partly COVID related, and partly because they have no money,* and partly because they seem** like right bastards.
* so want to ensure they can charge anyone doing building work, or who is potentially "commercial" for the waste and/or recycling they drop off
** and I say this as a member of the political party which is in control of this council, so I should ostensibly be better disposed towards them ...
Back in the 70s, you could get Americans to return soda bottles for a dime. I remember buying beer in returnable bottles meaning you had a $5 deposit for each case. You'd drink them, use the boxes to hold shelves, then return your furniture at the end of the year to throw a box social.
As of last year, we combine food waste with yard waste and a composter takes it all.
The problem is the big blue bin, because the goods that are worth recycling are too dirty to sort out so the whole stream gets discarded.
re: 17
In Scotland, Barrs (makers of Irn Bru)* was sold in glass bottles and you got 5p (when I was little) and, iirc, 12p (some time in the mid 80s) for bringing one back. We kids would go prospecting for them. You could easily round up enough in an hour or so of walking the streets poking around to buy yourself another bottle, and some sweets to share with your friends.
Seems like they discontinued it:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/aug/20/irn-bru-maker-ends-glass-bottle-returns
* at one time Scotland was one of the only countries in the world where Coke or Pepsi wasn't the top selling soft drink
19: Some states do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Bottle_Bill
The only responsible beverage maker is the Buckfast people.
In the Czech republic they have little beer windows at supermarkets where you hand in bottles to get the deposit back. Some have little machine/conveyor things that accept and count the bottles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation#Czech_Republic
I remember using one of those in Denmark in 1992.
We have those reverse vending machines in MA too, and had them in NY- Are they uncommon outside the northeast and Czechia?
Probably not. We still have public service announcements reminding minors to throw their empties out of the car window to avoid arrest for underage drinking.
Michigan had $.10 deposits in the late 90s at least. It was a local point of pride because other states were only a nickel. We once had a giant pile of cans stolen from our backyard that we'd been saving to pay for a party, which was when I realized what a big deal this was. What I remember is how it incentivized cleaning up.
We don't have any of that here because bottle deposits are against freedom.
There's a new-ish store here that sells bulk goods in reusable glass jars. We've been getting a lot of our pantry staples there. You can bring your own jar even. I don't know how scalable the business model is, but I think that's what an alternative packaging and distribution system looks like.
There's a whole Seinfeld episode about 27.
If you can defend your cans, you are "King of the Castle."
17: we still have that, but I no longer return them to the store. People due pick cans up off the street for that reason.
I don't know how scalable the business model is, but I think that's what an alternative packaging and distribution system looks like.
That sounds not far removed from the food co-op I remember as a kid (which has since grown into being much more like a normal grocery store -- albeit a very good one).
We adopted container deposits here a few years back to reduce litter. In a fine example of the law of unintended consequences, we now have rubbish getting strewn everywhere by people going through the cans looking for returnable containers. Sigh.
You could have an economist explain that if there was anything of value, it would have been taken already.
Yeah, that'll probably work almost as well as having an epidemiologist tell them they ought to get their shots so they won't get sick and die.
That's because economists are saying that if vaccination was effective, it would cost more.
Megan: 100% excellent observation, and one that I think I'll adopt. Unless it is *obviously* and *trivially* recyclable, just trash it. Better in a landfill, than in a bloody river.
The river is closer and, despite progress, still pretty dirty anyway.
Inspired by this thread, I threw away the empty jar of pickles.
To the bottle deposit thing upthread, yes, MI still has bottle deposits. Due to the pandemic, bottle returns were closed for a long period, and everyone had a growing collection of empties in their basement. The returns reopened, and they capped it at something like 500 bottles per trip (!).
I bet there are dozens of garages that smell like Busch Light.
WTH! They have you -mail- your recyclables to them? That's *madness*. Yeah: this is a grift, alright.
That's why, if you drop a bottle and break it, they say you "Dropped a dime."
I really appreciate the systems in Europe that requires any shop that sells electronic items (or batteries) to accept the same back for recycling/disposal. It makes it a lot easier as a consumer to dispose of them appropriately.
I agree with 6: It seems clear that the solution is pushing the incentives upstream - to the vendor, to the manufacturer - rather than depending on dealing with the issue at the end with the consumer/home recycling.
46: if you're talking about deposits, you take them to the supermarket. The weird thing I used to see was that if you had a soda type that a store didn't sell, they did not have to take your bottle.
47: Yep. It seems sort of not worth it to keep rinsed out beer bottles for weeks or months to get $3, but folks who grew up here are very insistent about it.
Aren't they mostly Juggalos in that part of the country?
48- Michigan pay phones used to have the option to insert a crushed can but since widespread cell phone availability the empties just pile up everywhere.
29. In MA the state Health Department has interpreted the Federal Guidelines on food to forbid grocery customers bringing their own containers.
To be fair, a lot of the packaging we see today (=plastic) is there because of previous food scares. If it isn't "sanitized for your protection" a lot of people won't touch it. Presumably that's the origin of the above interpretation on containers as well.
50. I think that's still true. They also don't accept anything whose barcode can't be read by the machine (at least that's how the local grocery store and liquor store work where I live).
Public health is the enemy of everything good.
That's what the covid-deniers keep saying.
I tried, but they won't let me live in the liquor store.
I recently read an odd book, Rubbish!, by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, published by University of Arizona Press and about their landfill archaeology program. There was some interesting stuff on the ability to tell socioeconomic status by trash, the failure of stuff to break down in landfills, etc., but the most interesting thing about it to me was a window into the mind of an environmentalist in 1993: lots of discussion of landfill placement and solid waste recycling (they are skeptics), literally no discussion of greenhouse gases.