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Comment by lukeschlather | Hacker News Reader

> Even in San Francisco, Reed kept pointing out items that aren’t easily recyclable but that keep showing up at the Recology plant: soy-sauce packets and pizza boxes

This is funny, because I was just at SFO yesterday where I got Sushi while waiting for my flight, and was confused by the lack of garbage receptacle. There was a "cans/bottles" recycling bin and a compost bin. A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.) So there's a fair amount of institutional negligence going on.

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Do what most people do: pick a bin at random and throw everything in there.

It's likely everything goes to the same place anyway (and the bins are a lie) or there's a separation process that will handle it for you.

Before you downvote me: am I wrong? What else should a consumer in this situation reasonably do?

I take literally 2-3 seconds to scan the sign, but if I can’t figure it out, I default to trash. Our recycling systems are totally broken.

The thing that irks me a bit is that most of all that separation to "recycling, compost, trash" is mostly for virtue signalling anyway, from both the store and customers. "Early era" recycling made a lot of sense, where the effort to separate high value, easy-to-decontaminate items (like aluminum cans and glass bottles) made sense. The economics and ecological aspects never made much sense once we went to large scale single stream recycling, but China's willingness to be the world's garbage can postponed that for a bit.

I think it would make a lot more sense if the bins were just "glass bottles", "aluminum cans" and "everything else", but then people would feel less good about all the stuff they throw away.

Frankly, glass isn't worth recycling either. It's heavy, making it expensive to haul around, and the energy savings vs. using new silica is minimal at best, even without taking the extensive processing required to make it clean enough to use again in to account. Locally, crushed glass is used as landfill cover, which is a good use for it. But there is far more glass than there is a market for it.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/dec/26/spokanes-recycl... just as an example.

Aluminum is absolutely worth it, due to the crazy-high energy requirements of otherwise separating it from oxygen during ore processing. And we do a very good job of lead recycling- something like 99%+ of lead from lead-acid batteries is recovered, which (IMO) shows that things like core charges work great.

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/battery-council-inter...

In general, though, consumer-level recycling isn't the good that people think it is. What is needed is inexpensive trash collection and sanitation infrastructure. Make it too expensive, and people just illegally dump, which causes huge problems.

This isn't as exciting for most people to talk about compared to recycling, but that doesn't make it not true. The reason that 9o% of the plastics in the world's oceans come from a few rivers in asia isn't because of plastics per se, for example- it's because the cities along these rivers have zero waste management beyond 'throw it in the river and call it a day'. Collecting and burying plastics in a managed landfill is a perhaps-surprising solid ecological choice. Plastics make for strong and light packaging, and there's a real carbon cost in hauling things around. And the carbon in the plastic in a landfill somewhere isn't going anywhere.

Final note: doing a proper accounting of what actually is the best method of dealing with a waste stream is really, really hard, and I don't blame anyone for making what turn out to be incorrect assumptions, even when trying to do the right thing based on the current best evidence. All we can do is learn from it and try again.

Upvoted for accuracy. Even people that put recyclables in the bins throw dirty containers in which are later separated and put in a landfill.

Recology constantly complains about this. Who wants to spend 5 min washing an old peanut butter jar so it’s clean enough to recycle?

The answer is very few people.

I find it amazing how people throw filthy containers and even food trash, used napkins, teabags in with recycling (because it's "compostable"). It just contaminates the whole lot.

I am pretty sure I heard a Recology employee say on KQED don't worry if the plastic recyclables are dirty, put them in the recycling like that anyway.

> the bins are a lie

I've definitely seen facilities workers throwing everything into the same bag.

In Japan they collect different types of trash on different days at firmly set times at dedicated spots; if you miss the day/time or aren't quick enough to get to the spot prior to collection, you have to keep that trash for another week. It was quite an experience when I lived in Kyoto (near Tō-ji temple) to observe/take part in this process.

Also in Tokyo people seemed to be employed at the housing complex level to make sure the trash is going into the best place possible for recycling or incineration.

> A sign announced "Don't worry, everything you purchased in the food court is either recyclable or compostable!" There's no way the soy packets were either recyclable or compostable. (Not to mention the plastic tray with metallic-looking designs on it, and the foil bag of wasabi peas.)

To be fair to the sign, I'm betting you weren't charged for the soy packets. You didn't even receive ownership of the tray.

Amazing how many people think "single stream recycling" means the recyclables get sorted from the garbage!

Sometimes I wonder if the large institutions with just recycle + compost bins know that all your waste just ends up in the trash anyway, and they're just labeling the trash bins as "recycle" and "compost" to make eco-conscious consumers feel better.

Sands convention center in Las Vegas just has trash cans that are marked with a label indicating the whole waste stream has recyclables sorted out of it. who knows what the truth is.

What's the issue with pizza boxes?

They're often soaked in grease. My community won't accept them for recycling either.

Mine tells me to put them in the compost bin.

Still teaching the family though.

Saturated with grease

As others pointed out, they're soaked with grease. In fact, the problem is so bad that enough pizza boxes bundled with clean cardboard has spoiled entire ton-sized bundles of cardboard shipped to China.

Cardboard is valuable to recycle, but our inability to remove contaminated cardboard from the recycling stream has really caused major issues. Because of that, China has stopped accepting paper and cardboard products from the US for their recycling operations.

Mine usually have a second cardboard sheet in them, so the rest of the box remains pristine.

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