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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

There's the in-home cost. My mother-in-law would run the cans and bottles through the dishwasher before putting them in the rcycle bin. The energy, hot water, soap constituted a catastrophic reversal of any possible gain from the recycling.

Just driving the truck around the neighborhood to pick up the bins is a cost in diesel, human resources (which translate to carbon at some level).

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On a related note:

I live in a city where trash collection rates are tied to how big of a trashcan you have. Along with recycling and compost collection programs, this is intended to deter people from overusing the landfill.

BUT, as a result of having a very small trashcan (to minimize my personal cost) I end up putting the can out every week if the can is even 1/4 full, as I occasionally have a heavy week due to an event or seasonal cleaning and I don't want to have garbage around the place for extra week(s). The desired effect on my waste habits, i.e. reducing the amount of landfill trash I ultimately produce, is negligible.

Therefore the garbage truck must stop at my house roughly twice as often as it would if there was no disincentive cost to having a large can. If enough other people in my city operate like I do, then we're running a significant amount of extra trucks and labor for virtually no benefit.

>My mother-in-law would run the cans and bottles through the dishwasher before putting them in the rcycle bin.

That seems to be the issue, not the recycling program.

> Just driving the truck around the neighborhood to pick up the bins is a cost in diesel, human resources (which translate to carbon at some level).

The same truck would still drive arround though if you didn't have recycling program, it will just be a black truck instead of a green one.

How many folks are derailing recycling out of a misconception of the issues involved? Most I would guess.

Not sure what black/green means. We have separate recycling pickup vehicles around here. They wouldn't run at all if there were no recycling.

But then your garbage truck (black) would have to pick up all the recycling that the green truck used to pick up. So unless your current black trucks are never full then you would either need more black trucks or they would need to make 2x the trips.

Not the previous poster, but it seems "black" represents garbage truck whilst "green" represents recycling.

The argument they were making is if your garbage weren't going to a recycling plant, it would be going to a landfill. Either way, the same amount of waste has to be transported from your home, so the same number of trucks would still be driving around.

Recycling is a trivial number of trucks. And far as I know, they don't crush the material. Also they keep it separate (paper/glass/metal) and the sections probably never fill evenly. So a pretty inefficient operation is my guess.

That may be with the recycling operation were you live, but everywhere I have lived it's been one bin type, one truck, dump the bin and go. The only time I have had to do more than separate paper from non-paper was back when I also had to hand-carry recyclables to a drop spot.

>That seems to be the issue, not the recycling program.

The recycling program requires the cans be clean, so someone, somewhere is washing them.

Efficiently, in huge washers. Not four or five bottles at a time in a consumer dishwasher.

In our household we wash our glass and metal packaging for recycling in the old-fashioned way, with water and suds in the sink alongside the rest of the post-dinner washing up. It's a lot quicker than a dishwasher, uses a lot less water and detergent, and quite relaxing and therapeutic in its own weird way. (Takes time out to shine halo)

It turns out that you're nearly always using less water, soap and electricity if you wash using a dishwasher rather than by hand.

https://www.treehugger.com/kitchen-design/built-in-dishwashe...

> The same truck would still drive arround though if you didn't have recycling program, it will just be a black truck instead of a green one.

It might not depending on the system in place. Many recycling programs require two truck routes to separately collect the trash and recycling. This doubles the amount of trucks and human labor but the trash load produced by each property stays the same.

In NYC there are separate routes and trucks to collect recycling. Saw the same thing in San Diego. One truck does the trash route, and some time later comes the recycling truck.

For us, the recycling only gets picked up every two weeks, so that will be 50% more driving, not double.

Also, if the garbage trucks fill up slower, there should be some reduction in trips to empty them.

In most of the UK now, recycling is collected more frequently than non-recycling. For us, non-recycling is only collected every 2 weeks, and the bin issued for it is half the size of the recycling bin.

Food waste is still collected weekly, and is sent to an anaerobic digestion plant.

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