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Comment by jogundas | Hacker News Reader

I am yet to be convinced that domestic recycling is the way to go, as opposed to putting all the trash to one huge landfill and subsequently unleashing mining robots on it.

It seems to me that sorting stuff (recycling) at home is prone to errors to such a high degree that it is just a feel-good thing, as opposed to something useful for the environment.

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In Cambridge, UK, we get somewhere close to that with 3 bins:

- Green, for compostable waste (food, leaves, shredded paper, etc.)

- Blue, for recyclable waste (pretty much anything made of plastic, foil, paper/cardboard or glass)

- Black, for everything else

The only things you really have to watch out for are things like plasticised foil and styrofoam. Batteries can be tied to the top of the blue bin in a plastic bag.

It works really well, and you basically just have to know what's recyclable and what isn't (which is usually written on the packaging anyway).

I think our local authority is a bit ahead of the rest of the country on this, though. Most places in the UK still make you sort glass from paper, etc.

This is my local system too, and it seems eminently sensible. Worth noting that the blue stuff will go through a process similar to the Raspberry Pi sorter, but on an industrial scale, so it's somewhat similar to the idea of sending mining robots into separate things out after the fact, but made much easier by not having food and babies nappies smeared all over the cardboard boxes.

In Vienna, Austria there is an incineration plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration) which burns trash to produce energy. As I understand it, they can't just burn everything at once otherwise they can't control the combustion temperature, which then produces harmful byproducts which must be cleaned out between burns, thus reducing the effectiveness. Perhaps a few plastic bottles here and there mixed inside isn't so bad, but if everyone were to do it, it would cause issues? I do know there are "trash-checkers" who dig through trash cans to find, document and fine offenders (it's apparently a fairly well-paid job too).

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