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Comment by poster123 | Hacker News Reader

My wife tells me that growing up in India, people would come door to door to collect metal and paper to be recycled -- to make money. That's not practical in the U.S. because people's time is much more valuable. If recycling really made sense, you would not need to mandate it.

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People (like, random people, not officials) still do this for aluminum cans in US states with bottle deposits. They go door-to-door pulling cans out of recycling bins and bringing them to deposit centers en masse. I've seen this both in Boston and in the rural town I grew up in. The guy who frequented my childhood home actually made enough money to leave each "customer" a jar of peanuts each year at Christmas.

And even if you have to pay someone to take recycling it makes sense because the damage to the environment is less than just dumping it in a landfill. That's a cost that's externalized by manufacturers and not easily recouped without mandatory recycling. (The alternative is to tax manufacturers and importers for all the trash they generate, equivalent to the environmental damage it causes. Bottle bills effectively combine these two approaches.)

> pulling cans out of recycling bins

That's illegal in my area, and I assume in most areas with recycling programs. You want to pick up stray cans and recycle them then that's one thing, but pulling them out of recycling bins is considered theft.

It’s kind of funny. The waste management firms worked with the city to require recycling. So now every home has to pay an additional fee for a recycling bin plus pick up. And of course the management company only wants to be in this particular business if they can sell the materials on to someone else. As soon as China stopped buying our recyclables WMNW started asking the city for permission to just stick everything in a landfill.

I am required to sort my trash, compost, and recyclables. I’m supposed to wash and peel labels. I have to pay to have it picked up. The least that should happen is that the waste management company be required to actually recycle this stuff.

See... we've known for ages that recycling is a bit of a losing proposition: otherwise we'd get paid for our used TP rolls like we do with aluminium cans.

The distribution of labour in this case makes the economics even worse. The scenario you describe is a (I'm guessing, you're on HN), well-paid highly education citizen literally washing garbage before throwing it out, and paying for the privilege of an inefficient disposal system that requires routine intervention... I think an end-to-end total cost accounting wouldn't look too favorable.

Penn and Teller (of all people) actually covered the recycling situation in detail some years back, so in spite of the fact that I myself am a conscientious recycler I know that a lot of this is probably wasted effort. But in my situation it effectively doubles my weekly waste disposal capacity, which I've used to great effect over the years.

BTW, our local recycler doesn't require a lot of effort on our part, nor do they have a lot of restrictions on what we try to recycle. No food scraps, no plastic bags, and no styrofoam, but that's about it. Also no washing, no label removing, and no sorting on our part.

Penn & Teller Bullshit! - (2-05) - 205 - Recycling

https://vimeo.com/216389085

Theft from whom? From the house/apartment, or from the recycling company?

Also note the decision that law enforcement could go through peoples' trash cans on the curb, because... I'm not sure the exact legal reasoning. But if the reasoning is "because it's not their property any more, it's the trash company's", well, did law enforcement get permission from the trash company? Somehow I doubt it.

This happens all over San Francisco. If it's illegal, it seems to be completely unenforced.

Definitely unenforced and definitely illegal.

https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/faq/

As long as the cost of pollution from creating the products isn't baked into the cost of the price consumers pay, it will always seem not worth it to individuals. The problem is that we have so much pollution now its affecting us at a planetary level.

This is a good situation for the government to come in and mandate a solution instead of letting the tragedy of the commons play out. A better solution might be mandating that pollution costs are baked into the product's costs, but doing nothing is just going to hurt everyone

In my CA neighbourhood, metal scrap collection cars will come around on trash day. All the neighbours know that bulky items with high metal content can be left separate from their trash and it will get picked up.

People in the US totally recycle metal, but paradoxically it is never encouraged since the economic incentives are so large. For example: One of the main reasons that abandoned buildings in Detroit decay so quickly is that they are generally stripped of their wiring and plumbing since copper and lead are so easy to turn into money.

http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260

I definitely remember this being a thing in small-town America in the 1980's -- particularly with aluminum cans, which I suppose is one of the more valuable recyclables. Schools and churches would ask people to save their cans and bring them in as a fundraiser, and you'd sometimes see people walking up and down the highway picking up the cans thrown out by litterbugs.

And yet today I have to pay someone to haul away my valuable materials. :)

When I was a kid (mid eighties UK) everyone got their milk delivered nightly in glass bottles which, when empty, were left out for collection by the milkman on the next delivery. Nearly waste free (foil caps aside), efficient and not too expensive, albeit slightly more expensive than supermarket. We've taken several steps backwards in that regard.

American children did the same thing in WWII (for the war effort, not money). In that case there was no mandate, either - it was all community-organized and sometimes highly competitive.

> My wife tells me that growing up in India.

She's correct. This still exists in smaller cities. I did this with all my books when I went last time.

There are a ton of people on the fringes that make extra cash hauling scrap metal, at least when the prices make sense. I had a couple uncles that would regularly go out "junking", picking up old cars and stoves and stuff.

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