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Comment by idbehold | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps we should start doing something like what Taiwan did with their trash: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/

> The trucks only accept trash bags officially sanctioned by the government of Taiwan which come in a distinctive blue color, complete with an official seal. The bags range in price and size, from 3 liters to 120 liters. The most popular bag is 25 liters (similar to a tiny bathroom wastebasket liner), which costs about $5 for a pack of 20. This effectively makes a pay-as-you-waste model, incentivizing citizens to recycle and compost as much as possible since those services are offered for free. The musical garbage trucks are tailed by a recycling truck, where workers help the residents sort their recyclables and compost into thirteen distinct bins. Should people fail to sort their materials properly, the government will fine them up to $200.

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Targets the wrong place. It may reduce contamination of recycling streams, but does nothing to encourage less production.

Perhaps a combination approach: $5 for a pack of small bin liners, or return your waste to the shop for free.

If Tesco were filled with piles of consumer waste given back to them I posit the problem would be on the way to being solved within weeks.

> If Tesco were filled with piles of consumer waste given back to them

I vaguely remember seeing something about this happening in Germany where households are charged by the amount of rubbish that has to be collected. So people unwrap things in the shop and leave the packaging behind.

Honestly, companies really ought to be charged for the disposal of all that packaging they choke their products with. There seems to be no back pressure stopping manufacturers from wrapping a 10g USB stick in 400g of plastic packaging/advertising.

In Germany we had rules that shops have to take back packaging, but especially with online shops this just wasn't used enough, so now the shop or manufacturer has to pay a (weight-based) fee for all the packaging they give to consumers. Pretty small though from what I've heard.

I’d be in favor of requiring manufacturers to take back unneeded product packaging, paying for postage if necessary.

EDIT: Reading more of this thread, it looks like everyone is suggesting this, so my comment does not add much.

So why is this obvious solution not implemented?

> So why is this obvious solution not implemented?

I have no inside information but I think it is because manufacturers will collude to add this as a visible added cost to the cost of the product. Consumers will think stuff became more expensive because of some idiots in DC/Brussels.

It's a collective action problem like any other. Collusion on a wide scale in competitive markets is pretty damn difficult, since one company can change their manufacturing processes to produce less waste and suddenly undercut everyone else's prices. "Passing the whole price increase onto the consumer" rarely withstands scrutiny, excluding cases with very low demand elasticity or very oligarchic suppliers. Neither of these are the case for the vast majority of packaged goods that are sold.

The incentive to minimize their packaging already exists though, both in shipping costs and just the material costs.

At least here, experience showed that people do not bring stuff back, I don't think mailing it back would be any better: if they don't want to bring packaging to the store, will they carry it to the post office to mail back?

It also seems like a massive environmental waste to ship individual packages of garbage around, when you can handle it locally just as well, and have manufacturers pay for it.

Because mailing garbage is a terrible idea. It's worse for the environment that almost all other options.

So is driving your garbage back to the store where you bought something.

The whole process, taken as a whole, just doesn't make any environmental sense.

Unless it's a store that you have to drive to anyway. For example, my dry cleaner years ago used to "recycle" hangers. You could bring back your hangers from the previous time and get like 2 to 10 cents off your current order for each hanger you returned. (Don't recall the exact amount, probably closer to 2 cents if I think about it.) This was nice because you were going there anyway, and also because you didn't end up with a closet full of empty hangers!

This is also what we did with soda cans when I lived in Michigan. You'd pay 10 cents extra per can, and then get it back when you returned them. If you didn't return them, the state had 10 cents to use to clean up waste produced by that can. If you did, you got your money back and the can got recycled. It seemed to work pretty well. I remember a year after they started the program noting how much cleaner the roads seemed because people were going out and picking up cans to return them and fewer people were throwing them out their car windows.

Most plastic waste is from weekly groceries. No one in their right mind would make a special trip to take the junk back, simply take a black sack with the previous week's garbage when next going shopping. It would be no additional cost and minimal inconvenience.

It's how recycling used to work. There were big skips for glass, paper, textiles etc in most supermarket car parks. They were well utilised by shoppers before entering the store. Before that we used to return the empties for reuse within the store.

If a campaign of returns caused supermarkets to restrict suppliers, and create less in the first place, I would do so diligently.

>It may reduce contamination of recycling streams, but does nothing to encourage less production.

Sure it does. If you're going to slapped with a $200 fine every time you screw up with your recycling, and you have to pay by the bag to throw stuff in the landfill, if you have half a brain, you're going to think twice about every purchase you make, and if you really need it. That $1 water bottle that costs you $200 because your kid threw it in the wrong bin is going to make you not want to give your kid another disposable water bottle.

Producers only produce as much product as consumers purchase. Less consumption will result in less production.

Or it may just create perverse incentives fir people to throw everything in landfill. Not 100% sure where to put that $1 drink bottle, throw in the trash and don't risk a $200.

Not sure how that could be prevented.

Throwing recyclable goods in to the landfill bag nets you a fine. That's the whole point - you sort correctly, or you pay up. If you are unable to sort your trash - you don't buy stuff. The landfill bags are for non-recyclable items.

That makes no sense as policy. 1 cubic metre of landfill space costs the same whether you fill it with "recyclable" or "non-recyclable" items.

It’s not perfect but it tries to price an externality back in. Consumers may demand better packaging if this was a thing in the US, providing manufacturers to improve their waste level.

They do it really straightforwardly where I live in Wales. Garbage is collected every six weeks, from a 120L wheelie bin. Recycling (six streams) is collected weekly. Either you recycle, or you drown in trash.

Less production means less growth - means less future revenue - which means less chance of paying off all those loans predicated on consumption growth patterns.

Also - consumption isn’t all bad. There’s many poor people who can’t afford much, and we very much are promising a better life where they can consume goods and lead healthy lives (goods such as medicine, clean water and chocolate as much as Coca Cola in a plastic bottle)

And also - if people were charged for old school packaging, costs would go up. People wouldn’t buy as much and this would start a new round of economic troubles.

At its price point, I suspect that plastic is so cheap, that even with all the pollution and waste being collected, it’s still ends up with positive utility.

There’s a report on carry bags which shows reusable cloth bags have significantly higher environmental impact because of the cost of production costs, water use and eventual decay into some carbon gas like Methane.

Is careful sorting of trash/recycling really a good use of time?

Seems better to put that effort towards development of techniques to sort en-masse. Likely controversial, but I think there is also an argument for simply throwing hard-to-recycle items in a landfill. If consumption continues to increase, it will likely become economically viable to eventually mine those landfills for raw materials.

I'd say yes it is a good use of our time. I really want ours to be the generation that stops punting problems out to the next generation. I'd be happy if my friend's children don't need to grow up worrying about how to deal with oceans filled with plastics, global warming induced fire storms and flooded coastal cities.

I'm pretty careful about following my city's recyling guidelines, but I don't think recycling is always the right way to handle a material. It doesn't neccessary solve the problems you mentioned.

Improperly sorted plastics are burried in a landfill. They will not fill the ocean with plastic whether recycled or trashed. Global warming is mostly a matter of energy usage, so recycling only helps that when it's more energy-efficient than the alternative.

The fact that beaches around the world are covered in huge quantities of washed up plastic suggests that someone, somewhere is dumping an awful lot of it into the ocean. (And not just in Asia)

It's mostly Asia dumping.

Isn't our generation the most overworked, least-amount-of-free-time one? How does this extra job fit into that major issue?

By exercising other parts of your brain you let those used for work recover.

I'm hoping this is sarcasm. If not, I don't need the government assigning me work to "exercise other parts of my brain" thanks.

Putting a coke bottle in a recycling vs trash can does nothing to reduce its probability of ending up in the ocean. But doubling the number of trucks picking up waste at my house does double the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.

Trucks in my local area of London pickup both mixed recycleables and landfill waste in a single visit - waste is separated into two bins, and the truck has two separate receptacles for waste. No extra ongoing emissions, streams are kept separate, and the household overhead of sorting is negligible.

There is an entirely separate, less frequent service that collects organic waste, so there’s probably some overhead there.

Assigning me a chore that benefits a business that I pay a service fee for is unacceptable. I'm paying them to take away my waste. If they want to sort it or alphabetize it or apply the Dewey decimal system they're welcome to. But I won't do chores for someone else without an employment agreement and adequate compensation.

Do you feel the same way about putting your trash in bins (or even bags), as opposed to leaving individual items strewn about your lawn for them to pick up? Do you feel the same way about getting your car to the mechanic instead of having him pick it up from wherever you left it?

The line you're drawing to define "labor done on behalf of a paid service provider" is laughably ridiculous. The service they provide is "picking up sorted bins of trash". You're not "doing their work for them" to meet the terms of the paid service agreement.

I can get the car picked-up for repair if I want to. Where can I subscribe for a service "picking up unsorted garbage"? The problem is that garbage collectors are granted monopoly and use it to extract free labor from customers.

This is govt monopoly btw, not some private monopoly like Google (which is earned and can go away).

No one stops anyone from providing that service.

Maybe it depends on the city, but often it's a municipal government granted monopoly. E.g. in San Francisco it's Recology.

https://www.aoausa.com/magazine/?p=4982

I bet, each city, that enforces waste sorting, has a monopoly.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I meant is a sorting service, not a collection service.

I feel the same way. There need to more options to waste management. I don't want to feel obligated to sort out trash. Take my trash, sort it out and bill me.

This is insanity on stilts.

Interestingly, many of the things that we've though would be huge problems in the future turned out to be non-issues or much less of an issue than we thought. A few examples:

-Population crisis

-Peak oil & oil crisis

-Global cooling concern in the 1970s

-Ozone crisis

-Rainforest crisis

-Worldwide food shortage

You mean to say that we have stopped cutting down entire rainforests??? Do tell me when this miracle happened?

How about the fact that we are going to be 10 billion by the end of the century?

And the only reason that we have managed to avoid a food shortage has been the increase in the use of fertilizers which in turn is depleting the soil at a faster rate than ever before turning arable land into dust bowls and rivers becoming so polluted by the chemicals that there are massive extinction events in the population of fish all around the world?

Same for the oil crisis, the shale oil has stopped the crisis in its tracks but only for a short amount of time as the demand keeps on rising and inevitably the price per liter/gallon is going to be back to what it was before the GFC. Also, fracking is polluting the soil more than ever before.

In short most of the crises that you mentioned have not been solved, but simply delayed.

Eventually, they will catch up with us and somebody is going to have to pay? But who? Most likely taxpayers as always.

What I find baffling is what are you going to say to your kids/ grand-kids when they ask you where the forests went? Why is the air so polluted? Why are the rivers so toxic and completely empty?

Should I go on?

I'd highly recommend checking out "Enlightenment Now". Lots of interesting points in there but one of the most eye-opening is that many environmental problems are best solved indirectly.

People generally don't want to live in smog/pollution if they have a choice but will do whatever it takes to survive even if that means harming the environment.

For example, no amount of lecturing or rainforest protests are going to stop people that depend on slash & burn for survival. Best option is to open up trade, provide GMOs & fertilizer, and provide economic opportunity so they have options other than slash & burn.

You also see this with China, they've made huge progress environmentally, mostly because they can now afford to.

I believe some of them can't be mixed, like if you throw something oily and paper in the same bin, the paper can't be used anymore. Also plastic bags make things very difficult to sort, and are difficult to separate from other things.

I'm skeptical that it will ever be economical in a scalable way to mine landfills, but I don't know enough to dispute it.

Whoever's first to figure out garbage mining will be phenomenally wealthy.

Yes it is a good use of time. Our community (400K) has a green bin program as well as recycling. Green bins are for organic waste. Our community's landfill diversion rate is 81%. Landfill waste only needs to be picked up once every two weeks. We are looking to increase landfill diversion rate through textile recycling.

So yes it is good because it is the only solution we have on hand that is effective. Development of reclamation techniques should be done in parallel to landfill diversion.

Single-stream recycling is pretty wasteful, so probably.

If everyone is personally familiar with the effort that goes into sorting trash/recycling, then they may be more likely to reduce their trash usage.

Is mining something from a landfill really a good use of time?

Only if it can be automated in the future.

> Is careful sorting of trash/recycling really a good use of time?

Price mechanisms let you answer that question yourself. Say you have 5 bags' worth of rubbish of which 3 bags' worth is recyclable. You can either spend the time to sort the one from the other, or you can pay for 2 extra bags.

Switzerland does this too, the bags have a little stamp or sticker that costs $5. There are also 10 different bins to presort waste. It works quite well. They put a lot of effort into the design and ease of use at the collection stations (which are free vs the for pay garbage). It's called "polluter pays".

They also enforce like Taiwan, $10,000 find for illegal dumping. And they actually look through your trash for bills and letters with your address. The Swiss don't seem to love the system, more like tolerate it.

Cool pictures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management_in_Switzerlan...

There's a picture of the 10 bin recycling thing halfway down this page:

https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-make-Kathmandu-a-clean-city

This is a very bad idea, because people will just throw out trash in the environment. It is a thousand times better to have trash thrown in a proper dump rather than on the street, in a back alley or in the wilderness. Most of the plastic trash that is causing problems is improperly dumped trash.

These kinds of punitive policies have a very obvious side-effect. You dump the garbage in a ravine or stream, or somewhere easy to dump. And so what if you get caught. You get fined a few hundred dollars, where you saved 5x that by dumping.

The problem with recycling is it's recycling... There's a reason why the phrase is "Reduce, Reuse, and finally Recycle".

The upstream firms are Reducing their costs with little regard to reducing environmental impact.

The upstream firms guarantee you can't reuse - it's a missed sale.

So, you percolate through the layers, and then recycling is this all important thing.

This. Where I used to live the only scrap yard would only accept nonferrous metals and the towns would charge for scrap metal. Washing machines on the side of the road was a routine sight, or it was until a new scrap yard that would accept just about anything metal opened up.

edit: I'm struggling to wrap my mind around why this is getting down-voted. I'm providing a real world example of the behavior the person I'm replying to described. I'm not endorsing dumping things on the side of the road. Do people seriously not believe that above a certain price point people will illegally dump their trash and risk the fine?

I mean with scrap metal or whatever it's one thing, but your weekly trash? Unless the cost is exorbitant people are probably just going to pay to have the bags for their trash. Like I think in Japan they were about $5; I'm not going to start trucking my fish bones to the local stream to save five bucks.

It all really depends on how much painpoint there is regarding refuse/recycling.

The more rules, fines, restrictions the state implements, the less people will comply. And lack of compliance means stuff is thrown away in others' yards, dumped on the commons, or otherwise hidden to the nature of the trash.

Because of onerousness with local ordnances with regarding paint, many people just end up hiding the containers in dog food bags. I've seen quite a few of those already in the local dumpster.

I see this a lot across British Columbia Lower Mainland, but rather with old mattresses and soft furniture. It's relatively expensive to recycle those, so people just dump them in bushes and even on random people's front yards.

Holy moly! Thirteen bins!!

Still not clear how people are prevented from throwing garbage into the recycle bins. Is the recyclable stuff not placed in bags and therefore easy to be vetted by the staff?

Japan (Sapporo) has a similar system- recycling was placed directly in bins (I don't think there were 13, but there were several).

Norway and the Netherlands are successfully trialling waste-to-energy with carbon capture. If some waste cannot be economically recycled, why not use it as fuel for electricity generation?

We're still going to need some amount of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. A yoghurt pot or a pizza box might not be recyclable using current processes, but it's perfectly good fuel.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021... http://www.vivis.de/phocadownload/Download/2017_eaa/2017_EaA...

> the residents sort their recyclables and compost into thirteen distinct bins

13. There's a moment you have to choose between the fine and getting the fuck out of stupid land. Around 3 different bins will do it for me: consumers waste is nothing compared to industrial waste. Trash sorting is the little act which help some people feel good but helps a lot less than not going on their annual holiday to the other side of the world. It's green theatre.

If 25 Liters is a “tiny” bathroom trash can I shudder to think what is used in the kitchen.

Right. We put 3 liter bags into our tiny bathroom trash can, and 25 liter bags into the big kitchen trash can.

We have the pay-as-you-throw waste model in my city in GA. I think it works very well. We also have a very liberal recycling policy. I think these things really changed my family's trash habits for the better.

This model of only accepting trash in official bags, or requiring a pre-paid sticker/tag for each bin/bag collected is quite common around the world. Certainly not unique to Taiwan.

It sounds similar to the Japanese model. But it requires serious changes to the type of goods produced. For instance, Japanese drink bottles have labels that can easily be removed because the bottle, cap, and label are recycled separately. It's not like you just start categorizing the trash and you're done.

Also, the way waste management is handled at the municipal level definitely complicates things for us.

In Vancouver we have standardized waste bins which come in different sizes, and the amount you pay the city annually for waste collection depends on the size of bin you choose.

(Recyclables are handled separately and there's no charge for them regardless of the volume you're leaving for collection.)

This system is a great incentive for people to put all sorts of stuff into recycling that they shouldn't.

I'm not sure what it's like in Vancouver, but in Niagara Falls if the garbage people see something in your recycle bins that isn't supposed to be there they don't pick up the bin and leave a note saying what was wrong.

If anyone is interested in seeing these crazy garbage trucks, I have a video. You can hear them coming from far away.

https://youtu.be/BtpWn6PuDX0

This works pretty well in Germany too, and in Palo Alto, but it causes people in the UK and in eastern California (and likely other places too) to just dump their trash by the side of the road.

That pay-as-you-go system is used in Wellington, NZ as well.

Recycling bags are free, but you have to pay for landfill bags (around $2). That way, there's an incentive to recycle as you save money.

Japan has a similar bag system too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv68j5KQUU4

25 liters is like a medium to large kitchen trash.

Given an estimated 13 liters per person per week in the household here, $5 for 20 isn't providing a whole lot of incentive.

Pay per bag is not uncommon in the US where trash is collected by private companies. Many charge for each bag they pick up.

-removed by author-

Because no city had ever passed laws that the President doesn’t like.

And the President is also in charge of local waste disposal, as we all know.

-removed by author-

> the executive branch followed certain norms around this, until this administration

Which norms? Which administration didn't act differently than all others? Reagan firing the FAA unionizers was a new one.

Obama said he couldn't “waive away the law Congress put in place.” DHS went and legalized a few million anyway, years later. Sounds very familiar, but somehow different?

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it sounds awfully revisionist.

which costs about $5 for a pack of 20

I’ve never understood why recycling wasn’t self-sustaining, isn’t there value in the raw material?

When I was young reusing was the thing; a glass milk bottle went back to the dairy was sterilised and used again the next day. One bottle, with a recyclable aluminium foil lid, could be used again and again and again. Nowadays we make a glass bottle, use it once, then melt it down and make a slightly different bottle, and we think that’s green!

Ridiculous isn't it? We even kept milk bottle tops and handed in the aluminium foil, and the daily milk was delivered in an electric vehicle.

Bottles got reused enough times (a little less with milk bottles) that older Coke, other pop, and beer bottles started to look rather archaeological from going through the lines 40+ times.

It's always cheaper to make new packaging than recycle old one. It's extremely hard to make any sort of business out of recycling old material. Like you said, reusing would help - but glass has the issue of being very heavy so you're burning more fuel to move it around, while it only takes a drop of oil to make a new plastic bottle that weighs 1/20 of an equivalent glass one.

I'd love to see all drinks being sold exclusively in glass bottles that you have to pay a deposit for - that's how it was when I was a kid in Poland, you had to pay a little bit extra for the bottle and you'd get it back when returning it.

My college room mates and I were still doing this with Miller High Life bottles as late as 2003-2004. If you collected a dozen cases you'd have enough returnables for a free case of beer!

Similar for the plastic beer pitchers at UW-Madison's terrace. You'd pay like a $1 deposit on the pitcher, if you bring the pitcher back, you get the dollar. Drunk kids or the indifferent would leave their plastic pitcher and some enterprising person would come by pick it up and return it for cash. There is a lake nearby, so it's important these didn't make it in the lake.

The deposit system seemed to be pretty effective. Folks took an active role.

Maybe there are modern day systems that could be developed. I wonder if people would subscribe to a Uber/UPS like system for fluids like beer, soda, milk, yogurt or water? Comes in sterilized glass bottles using an electric vehicle. I suppose it could be reusable plastic, but for folks paying a premium, glass would be nice. Something like $50 month for a couple cases of beer, going up in price as you order more.

A festival in Brisbane, Australia had exactly the same approach.

The festival was Parklife and I think it was back in 2012?

$1 price increase on all cups, bottles and food containers. If you brought the item back (it didn't have to be yours!), you got a $1 back per item. It started off as coupons so you could purchase other goods with the coupon but at the end of the festival you could cash them in.

Never in my life have I gone to a one-dayer EDM festival and went home with significantly more money than I started with.

The economics of the choice being, the festival didn't need to pay for cleaners on significant overtime rates. And we're incentivised because I made a fucking profit from an EDM festival!

For the life of me I can't find an article on the event.

Needless to say after some choice after market vitamins, I was motivated to clean the venue during artists I wasn't too interested in. I was also incentivised since the festival was held in my cities Botanical Gardens which are around the corner from my office.

At the end of the festival, not a scrap of rubbish could be found.

It wasn't an absolute success though. Some people started fishing rubbish out of bins to get their own coin back towards the end...

I wish this myth would die, or we fully priced-in the externality cost of plastic recycling.

Look into the roughly 15 step process of recycling those cheap plastic bottles, including pressurised steam, abrasive steps, cold and hot water, and chopping into pieces before yet more washing. It is probably vastly more expensive in energy costs, especially when after all that it's still common to lose batches to contamination. It's miles from returning bottles into the same supply chain and the factory having as first step washing and rinsing the old bottles.

Broken ones were recycled in place, and they were already of exactly the correct type and colour.

Why do they clean it before shredding?

This process starts with the shredding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyF9MxlcItw

And then giant bales of plastic chips are hand sorted by color in China!

Going entirely on memory, so I may have misrepresented a bit or been out of order. I seem to remember there's an initial automated sort and wash before shredding to remove dead mice, contamination from single stream recycling, assorted junk thrown in the wrong bin and so on. Then after shredding there's washing and rinsing stages, and a steam and abrasive stage to remove glue and labels etc. It left me quite astonished how incredibly involved it is when I looked into it.

Hand sorting? This really is fundamentally broken isn't it?

It was the same in Spain, we carried the casco in the basket (of course not plastic, but hemp)... only the meat and the fish were wrapped in waxed paper and of course the cans, but there were only a few products that weren't fresh.

Now there's an absurd mass of plastics.

Recycling is only economically viable if:

cost of production from raw material > production from recycled material

and

value of recycle material > cost of recycling

My guess on milk bottles is some kind of sanitation and product liability issue.

Yeah, except you can pull the policy levers to change the results.

Some recyclables are really valuable (metal, quality cardboard), but others that we really want to recycle aren't particularly (plastics, glass). Also, morons throw shocking amounts of obvious trash into the recycling stream, which is a huge pain for recyclers, and thus can significantly devalue what should otherwise be a profitable stream of recycling.

What's obvious trash? I look at the labeling on recycling and compost cans in my area and I honestly have no clue what I can recycle and what I can't. My choices are to throw away potential recyclables or recycle trash. People aren't morons, you've just built a bad system.

And to clarify, I'm talking about recycling bins in fast food restaurants and grocery store delis. I've got a pile of used paper and plastic that I just ate off of. What of it can I recycle? The labels are usually either out of date or incomplete or both. And none of the plastics have discernible labeling to help.

It's basically the worst system I can imagine.

There's ambiguous stuff to be sure. But I'm talking about people who throw food scraps, furniture, car tires, ash, bbq coals, construction debris, etc in the recycling. Yes, I've seen all of those things go into the recycling bins and more.

Tricky. The first three should be recyclable: good scraps can be composted, timber and metal in furniture can be recycled, and car tyres can be recycled.

You're being WAY too charitable to end users. People aren't talking about the compost bin. They're talking about the recycle bin. The one for glass, paper, plastics, and cans.

We have a trash bin, yard waste bin, and recycle bin where I live, and I've seen neighbors dump their grass clippings into the recycle bin. I've had family members toss paper plates along with the half eaten hamburger on them into my recycling (NOT compost) bin because the plate is paper.

I don't see how recycling paper products helps anything. Paper = carbon. There is too much carbon in the atmosphere now. Throwing paper away sequesters it from release into the atmosphere and drives up demand for timber - a renewable resource, which removes carbon from the atmosphere.

So much this. The one at my previous office wanted "clean plastic". What's "clean plastic"? Is an empty soda bottle clean? Is an empty salad container clean? Is cling wrap from a sandwich clean?

I'm an environmentally conscious nerd. If my demographic can't figure out how the system works, what do you expect from the general public?

Of course only the trash bin was full at all times.

From what I was told, the food remains on salad or sandwitch container will be destroyed in the process of dealing with separated trash. Theoretically, you dont have to care about it much.

However, it can smell pretty quickly and bugs like it, so if you plan to collect plastic for multiple days especially if it is hot, then you clean it up.

Wow, Clean up trash before we throw it?

We're throwing away our time is all we're doing. Looks like no one here values time. Sorting into 13 bins, etc. We need govt to get out of the way so someone can figure this out and make money (their incentive to figure it out).

Govt's not going to figure this out for us. It has no incentive to.

I just wrote that you don't have to do it, provided you take it out often enough or don't mind smell.

Useless outrage.

Cat litter, needles, food, yard waste, diapers, etc.

Lower your expectations a bit, the people doing the worst aren't wondering what to do with a clean plastic fork.

There is non obvious trash, like "paper" coffee cups that are not actually recyclable.

You have to look at it holistically. In one system everything is thrown in the trash.

In another system you separate out recyclables to be sold, and to reduce how much trash needs to be disposed of. Now you need multiple bins, you need to ensure that trash is not mixed into the recyclables, different trucks or more trucks, more staff.

The cost of labor, the cost of disposing of trash, the capital costs to implement the system, and the income from recycling all effects whether it is sustainable.

They still do that in Spain. It really is unfortunate it's not a standard practice everywhere. With most areas having local bottling plants, it really shouldn't cost /that/ much more to ship bottles back. Regardless, I would love to see us switch back to glass. Even if the bottle doesn't make it's way back into circulation, it will never be an environmental hazard. It's inert and breaks down into sand eventually.

Now you doubled CO2 emissions of your fleet and incentivize people to litter or dump in public trash cans.

A better solution would be human or robotic waste sorting at the dump, or clean incineration.

Agree completely. Saw it firsthand in Fiji. City trash fee just drives people to dump in the bushes. My suggestion of adding dumpsters was met with concerns about reducing tax revenues. Yeah, they don't have dumpsters because they are afraid people will put trash in them, FFS :(

I’ve teavelled entire Taiwan by car and did not notice any excessive dumping.

Yes, and that's a dataset of n=1. Things like littering have a million different factors go into them, including culture. It's not unreasonable to think that in other cultures, increasing the incentive to litter would in fact increase litter.

An exponential fine on littering would, however, absolutely destroy any incentives on littering. Starting with $10^n, where n is the n'th time you are caught littering. Also a corporate fine for dumping trash and waste illegally, $1000^n.

It really is not hard to take care of your environment!

I have to counter regarding incentives with my own annecdote. I was buying a lot of sparkling water and got tired of collecting and recycling the empties. I bought a popular carbonating unit.

I suspect culture will have a huge impact on how well the solution works.

I would love robotic waste sorting, I hope someone is working on that!

Perhaps a color coding for different materials would make consumer and robotic sorting simpler.

This or a very primitive 4 bit rfid

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