But you have to admit having people sort plastics into recycling bins and then having the recycling company sort them again is a pretty inefficient way to get to the landfill.
Likewise a lot is the “sorting” people do when they throw out their trash is pretty bad. For example, a plastic bottle the cap on can’t be properly cleaned so it doesn’t get recycled. A pizza box in a stack of cardboard ruins the entire batch.
Planet Money did a really interesting two episode series on recycling. That goes into why things are ending up in landfills and why we continue to practice the ritual of splitting our trash.
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/12/741283641/episode-926-so-shou...
The rest actually doesn't go to landfill, but gets incinerated.
Here's a TED talk (from 2011, not sure what's changed if anything) about this: https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle?language=en
And a key quote: "Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. We see above-ground mines. And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place."
From a realistic POV, yes, make people put plastic in a “landfill” bin, from a psych POV, make them do busywork so we feel better about ourselves.
You can apply backpressure to the stream by buying things not wrapped in plastic in the first place. It’ll take some time for the signal to have an impact, but if enough people selected less-packaged goods, the market would fix the supply chain over time.
Also, if you pick items with less packaging up-front, then you don’t need to do as much work sorting waste on the back end!
Which is terrible. They could be putting that effort into actually doing something that helps. Or at least have their time back.
https://liveworkgermany.com/2017/05/how-does-the-german-pfan...
I wonder hoy effective this Pfand system is against littering. When I go to germany for a trip with the family I always find the streets clean, and I bet this is not because the germans clean streets lot, but as a consequence they don't litter instead.
Not only was this supposed to be sorted between paper/plastic/glass/metal, but also between different types of plastic? That was never going to happen on an individual basis. And what about huge apartment buildings and hotels?
The only way recycling would have made sense was if it was all being sorted at the waste facility, which if it was, wouldn't have required people to sort it individually. Hence, the whole thing was a sham from the beginning.