Probably not. Who picks up your trash? Our WM rep said nothing gets “recycled” since china stopped taking it.
We fired WM because they’re huge and evil and we hired Chicago Disposal instead. Nothing gets recycled. You’re wasting your effort.
1 Like
Pre-pandemic we had 2 garbage trucks come through, one for regular garbage and the other for recycling. Now everything gets dumped into the same truck. I don’t even know why I have a separate recycling garbage can in my house.
In NY (and probably other places where bottle deposits are a thing) there’s a sizable group of people who make a meager living picking through trash in the middle of the night for a whole 5 cents per bottle or can. Hopefully at least that stuff gets reused or recycled since it’s carefully separated by hand and delivered to specific collection locations.
1 Like
We have new upstate neighbors who recently paid $750,000 for a house they visit maybe twice a month. They can’t be bothered to do anything to keep the bears out of their trash. And because the bears spread their trash all over the road, I also know they can’t be bothered to recycle. If I was running a sanitation business and noticed that many of my customers couldn’t be bothered to separate their trash from their recycling, I’d toss it all into the same truck too.
@daedelus, in NYC there are a lot of people who walk around on trash night pulling bottles and cans that have a deposit. Some people leave the deposit stuff on the top of the bin for them. Not sure that happens as much in the rest of the state.
Couple of years ago we were on a long skinny dirt road decent up state. I was in front and could see motion from the right moving to intersect the trail. It looked like it was moving uphill but was going to fast. My brain decided it was a rider on another trail that was going to join ours and that I was just reading the slope wrong. Then 160lbs of black black fur crashed through the brush and started running down the trail in front of me. I still hadn’t figured it out thinking he must be riding with his dog while I tried to find the rider to avoid hitting him. Then I realized I was chasing a bear down the mountain at about as fast as either of us could go.
Anyway the only reason I sort the cans and bottles out is to save them for the people who collect them.
7 Likes
it absolutely happens in binghamton. one night i put out a big bag labeled and a dirtbag couple walking by had their evenings made by it.
1 Like
We’ve all bought in to the idea that it’s either
A) the individual’s fault that something doesn’t get recycled (wrong bin, not clean enough, etc)
Or
B) the city/county’s fault something doesn’t get recycled
When in reality it is
A) the plastic producers who don’t make an effort to make things easily recyclable (mixed materials types that are difficult to separate, putting the recycling logo on everything even though they know many localities can’t recycle many of the things
And
B) folks who use raw materials who don’t make an effort to use recycled materials
14 Likes
Never blame a company because capitalism
6 Likes
I recently listened to an interview with the very elderly man who was responsible for putting the 
on all the plastics so that people didn’t feel bad about using it. He said that he now sees the error of his late mid-century ways but that’s probably easy to say when you’re rich and retired.
3 Likes
Why is this recycling chat now?
Our commercial waste pickup person wouldn’t take our cardboard last week and said “we don’t do recycling” even though they are a single stream waste company and have been picking our recycling up for 3 years. The guy a few days later took it without any fuss.
Doubt they actually recycle anything but gotta keep the optics up
1 Like
Well yes recycling is a pr campaign designed by the petrochemical giants.
6 Likes
That’s the one.
3 Likes
2 Likes
What is needed for plastic recycling
Like, assuming the world is perfect and all plastic is properly sorted - what is the current technology that could be used to recycle, what is the desired output?
Afaik plastic waste streams that are actually recycled are typically converted into another item with the same chemical properties. So, decking (shredded, sintered, dyed), bags (shredded, woven, dyed), carpet pads, and similar where being brown and kinda shitty isn’t a problem. These are mostly from clean industrial waste streams (not your food-stained clamshell).
Ideally the plastic, which is mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, could be digested and turned into a new plastic but with current technologies this is cost-prohibitive.
From what I know they just sort by type of plastic and melt that shit down to make raw pellets or similar that can then be melted again and made into whatever you want. The problem is that a) sorting and cleaning and all that crap is expensive so it’s often not worth it financially unless there is a special incentive and b) the plastic you get at the end is worse quality than virgin so you can’t keep the cycle going indefinitely. But that’s just from tidbits of info I picked up here and there.
4 Likes
yeah, just searched that above link for this quote
Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can’t be reused more than once or twice.
It’s a fuckin scam and the plastic giants should be made to pay for environmental damages
1 Like
Or burned at the stake atop massive piles of single use plastics.
2 Likes
Plastics are polymers. Basically a mess of fibers. When you melt them/shred them, you shorten the length of the fibers so the next thing you produce won’t have the same structural integrity as the last thing.
1 Like
Yup basically the difference between UHMWPE and regular plastic bags. Same monomer structure just different numbers of repeat units.
1 Like