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Comment by blurbleblurble | Hacker News Reader

I am dismayed at how little people care about this. If more people (not even everyone) had some basic knowledge of plastics and the will to rinse the containers they recycle, sorting would be much more efficient. But I'd be willing to bet that most people use their recycling bin as a kind of funny second trash can. I know my roommates do. We got fined and they still put dirty paper towels and plastic containers with food on them in the recycling bin (since technically these are made out of recyclable materials). Effectively though, the recycling is being used like a special garbage can.

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why can't this be solved at the recycling center? why do individuals need to deal with this at all? several municipalities handle separation at the waste center. seems on all accounts a win.

one place to monitor for doing it correctly.

one place to easily apply advancements in solutions.

no need to try to herd cats (no need to try to get millions of people to follow exactly the correct proceedures). I watched teams of supposedly smart colleagues be unable to correctly separate their trash. if the average HN reader can't do it why would anyone expect to general population to ever be any better at it?

Why not just package everything in literal money? People would dutifully rinse everything.

Funny, but good idea. I remember when glass used to have a deposit value on it. We still get local milk in refundable glass containers.

That works pretty well. The only catch is that you have to mandate the deposit on all bottles, not just glass ones. Otherwise it's cheaper to just sell everything in plastics. Some countries do it. It might work for phones/laptops too. Small deposit, most of the used stuff ends up delivered to the place of your choice. Like the shopping trolley system.

^If you already have big publicly accessible bottle recycle places, these will the raided.

It still does in Germany, The Netherlands and many other countries in the EU. The glass scanners are automated. You put everything in, it scans the barcodes and gives you a ticket you can use to pay for groceries.

It works this way in the US as well, at least in my state though many have not implemented such a program.

they might rinse. they still wouldn't separate correctly.

> We got fined and they still put dirty paper towels and plastic containers with food on them in the recycling bin (since technically these are made out of recyclable materials).

This is a machine vision, machine learning, and robotics problem. If this isn't worth developing, the problem is that recycling isn't worth enough money.

In addition, if a little bit of food destroys your recycling operation, then your recycling operation needs more R&D, not legislating consumer behavior.

It isn't 'worth enough money' because the cost is externalised -- someone, sometime, will pay the cost.

And it's not legislation, it's you having to pay massive waste disposal fees. Next time your trash gets selected for personal auditing (by that nice computer vision algorithm) and your municipal waste fee doubles, you will be incentivised to wash your recyclables.

Solutions which require universal virtue are usually doomed.

I think so too. Maybe a way around is if you think of it as being largely carrots and sticks. When the stick is big enough the results can be comparable to those of universal virtue.

That is true. But that way lies totalitarianism.

Like democracy. Works fine, if everyone spends an inordinate amount of time informing themselves.

The problem here in Oregon is not presorting the recycling.

The centers can’t sort to the level of “purity” required and people don’t realize how truly problematic it is to be lazy in presorting.

I honestly didn’t think it was that big of a deal to let some plastic bags make it in to recycling. I know better now, mainly due to local npr reporting.

There is not much to solve laziness, but sorting tech has room to advance.

Well we pay ~40% tax on our salary, I expect government use this money wisely and take care of things like that so I don't have to waste time after a long day of work and rinsing food containers before throwing them in recycling bin.

...bad idea. Here (ireland), we said that too. They said, fine then we'll privatize garbage. Now they don't collect the garbage anymore, but private companies make us sort the garbage into expensive bags that you buy from the garbage companies. They're even stricter on the sorting. Just do your best and say nuttin!

As it is, it seems highly unlikely my children are going to be able to put a roof over their heads let alone reproduce. Personally, I feel no guilt leaving a environmentally trashed planet for the children of globalists and those who've profited handsomely over collectively ignoring what's going on in the world.

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