In New York, Making Ends Meet on a 5-Cent Recycling Deposit
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This makes a tremendous mess, and the city recycling trucks often won't pick up the the bags once they have been shredded, and it creates litter up and down the street -- it probably costs 5x as much to clean up after the homeless as they get off of the bottle deposits, and this is after they've already performed the labor of separating the solid waste stream.
1: Ordinary people have to find the deposit so small as to not be worthwhile, so they chuck the cans in with their normal recycling rather than returning them to claim the deposit.
2: The recycling has to go out in bags rather than bins or carts.
I'm in Michigan and even our 10¢ deposit, which was impressive in the 1970s, has ceased to be worthwhile for many people. We should've upped it to 25¢ a decade ago, and expanded it to include juice and other noncarbonated things, but I digress!
However, my city uses a big rolling bin for recycling, so there's no bag to slice open. If someone wanted to root through the bin, they could do so without making a mess.
(And if they decided to dump the bin on the street, after once occurrence I'd be sitting on the porch on trash night with a blunderbuss full o' rock-salt...)
#2: Manhattan is super dense, and there's no place to put that many bins. Bags scale better than bins anyway, and a lot of buildings use trash compactors which work far better with bags. Finally, there's not enough room between parked cars to get bins from the sidewalk to the street easily.
It also has the effect that almost everyone in my area leaves their trash cans on the street, because if you put them somewhere near your house the homeless people will find it, and invite themselves up onto your property.
If it was me I'd put the deposit to 10¢. More people would actually return them, and those who depends on it to make the ends meet wouldn't need to gather as much to make the same amount.
The first $.05 bottle deposit law was created in 1972. That would be equivalent to about $.30 today. That would be a much more compelling amount for a modern day citizen to recycle for.
Exactly what you described is what happens: If the purchaser doesn't recycle the cans, someone else will. Charities and other people will ask for cans to recycle, and some people will comb through trashcans to get a couple of bucks of empties.
It sounds ridiculous, but there were even cases in Europe of « fake » bottles manufactured exclusively for getting a refund by the multi-million.
i.e. if it wasn't obvious, that would have way too much fraud.
When a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/05/fraudster-made...
On Ontario, Canada it's simply a way of life that you bring in a box of empty beer bottles and put them on a rack on your way into the beer store in replacement for the box of full beer you're about to pick up. So in that way you only ever pay the deposit once.
And the Beer Stores that replace them often don’t take bottles back.
At least in Toronto anyway.
Meanwhile more and more liquor and beer sales are coming through the Liquor stores, which collect deposits on everything but give no refunds.
The Natural Resources Defense Council noted that expanding the bottle deposit would "punch a hole in the economic model of curbside recycling." That's because recyclers "want the good stuff, we want the metal and the good plastics."
Whether a can is recycled by curbside pickup or by bringing it to a redemption center probably doesn't really matter environmentally. Curbside might have an advantage if they can more efficiently collect them (using less fuel and such). In this case, removing valuable recyclables like metal and good plastics from the curbside stream means making curbside recycling less valuable overall. It's transferring money from the city to the individuals collecting the cans.
I'm definitely not faulting the people collecting the cans. They're trying to make ends meet in a city that can be tough. However, for the environment, the bottle deposit doesn't seem to be a tax that helps out recycling - it's a tax that hurts recycling.
If the state expands the bottle deposit to include more bottles, it will remove more high-value recyclables from the curbside recycling stream. Those high-value recyclables subsidize the recycling of less valuable recyclables. That means that we lose the funding for a lot of our recycling.
It's ultimately a poor use of human time to just be moving things around. Rather than entering the curbside stream and getting recycled, people do a lot of more labor so that they...get recycled. The end result is the same, but there's more human labor used, more fuel used, more costs paid, etc. And it makes curbside recycling of other items less economical.
That being said, this article shows the German version of that, and it looks identical:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/30/has-germany-hi...
The action described also seems identical the the US version:
>Almost all German supermarkets have sophisticated “reverse vending machines” that will weigh and scan your bottle to match against a list of acceptable shapes and sizes.
>If your bottle is not on the retailer’s list, the machine spits the container back at you. If it matches, the bottle goes down a chute for either recycling or shredding, and the machine hands you a voucher with the added-up Pfand that you can then cash in at the till.
The first system makes ecological sense, the second one not so much (but it reduced litter for sure).
There are reusable and disposable plastic bottles. The disposable ones are of really thin plastic and crushed, yes. The reusable ones are put into crates and return to the factories so that they can be cleaned and refilled. You can actually look through the machine and see the stacks of crates in the room behind them.
Many glas bottles (e.g. for beer, water and more) are reusable, too. They’re treated like reusable plastic bottles. Disposable glas does not have a deposit on it. You take those to a bottle bank (? containers on the street you throw them into), which is emptied once every two weeks (not too sure on the frequency).
Cans are the only type that is always crushed on return, afaik.
Here, have a random statistic - they talk about the decrease in percentage of beverages offered in reusable packaging: https://de.statista.com/infografik/amp/8077/anteil-von-einwe... It’s apparently “only” 42% for reusables, compared to 56% for disposable ones. It’s not perfect, but It’s better than what pretty much everybody else in the world is doing.
Edit: turns out the statistica link is not so random - it’s based on data published by the federal environmental agency. More (in German) here: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/verbrauch-von-g...
The deposit for single use on the other hand is mandatory (intended primarily to remove the convenience disadvantage of refillables) and is the realm of discount and/or novelty beverages. It was only introduced somewhat recently (post 2k) which means that most supermarkets have separate reverse vending machines if they automate returns: those for refillable, which need a large storage area in the back for the big volume of whole bottles and crates and those for single-use which can be placed anywhere because the containers are crushed.
By removing aluminum cans from curbside recycling, they're just adding additional steps and labor to recycling the cans.
Looking into the German system, it's really just glass bottles that can be refilled. Glass bottles are pretty uncommon in the US except for beer (and even with beer, I find cans way more common). You're definitely right that recycling centers aren't looking for glass (probably because it's energy intensive), but they are really looking for aluminum (because it's so easy to recycle).
The number of re-used bottles is down 30% in Germany in the decade after the bottle deposit scheme was created in Germany. Almost all bottles are getting returned (97-99%), but stores have been moving away from refillable glass bottles.
Yep, cleaning and refilling is great for glass, but glass is pretty uncommon in the US. Their use is steadily declining in Germany too and less than half are re-usable today. That might mean that it still makes sense to run this in Germany, but does it make sense to have a deposit for non-reusable bottles?
Whether an aluminum can goes into curbside recycling or is returned to a store for a deposit doesn't make much of a difference - it's going to be made into recycled aluminum. A glass bottle might be simply cleaned and refilled. So, we don't care where an aluminum can goes as long as it's recycled. We do care that a glass bottle is returned. So it makes sense to maybe put a 15 cent deposit on the glass bottle that can be redeemed while it might make sense to simply put a 5 cent tax on the aluminum can which you can't get back.
But some of this is culturally relative. Some places have big problems with people littering bottles and cans. A bottle deposit means that people won't just throw the bottle on the ground - or if they do, someone else will collect it for the deposit. The Irish plastic bag fee helps the environment because it got people to stop using so many plastic bags, but one of the most visible differences is the lack of plastic bag litter all over town.
Given Germany's high level of re-usable bottles, the return scheme probably makes more sense there. Articles also indicate that there may have been problems with bottle litter of non-reusable bottles and the deposit gives people an incentive to redeem the bottles (even if they're collected by Pfandsammler rather than the original owner). However, given the US' low rate of refillable glass, it seems to make less sense here. At least in my area of the States, it's illegal to drink alcohol in public and soda is the only other item with a bottle deposit. Seltzer, sports drinks, bottled water, etc. don't have a deposit. Still, we don't have a lot of cans and bottles becoming litter so we aren't as worried about that. As such, it seems more worthwhile to have the aluminum recycled efficiently via curbside pickup rather than individual transported, counted, etc. just to end up with the same fate.
This doesn't mean that it makes economic sense to do the same thing 50 years on.
In Denmark, only the plastic and metal collected by returned deposits is considered clean enough for reuse as food packaging.
Knowing this, I will give my empty bottles to the people roaming the streets rather than put them in the recycling bin. (I rarely have enough for me to think it's worth returning them myself.)
Deposits drive economic decisions, especially if they go up. If you were paying a $0.25 deposit on a 12-pack of soda, perhaps you’d choose a more efficient larger package.
Curbside recycling is a mess anyway.
that's a very keynesian way to say employers don't want to pay living wages. why are you putting that spin on it?
>There is a massive amount of demand for low skilled labor
that means they're not alluding to manufacturing trade deficits (which you point out has greatly shrunk since nafta etc) but other industries.
Honest question.
But what happens when those are the only jobs available for someone who _needs_ a living wage? I don’t know the answer.
An example comes to mind of someone who gets caught needing to work two or three of these jobs just to make rent, who doesn’t have time to get educated, because there is no spare time. I would like to think that this is where some outside intervention supplements that persons income so they can devote a few hours a week to learning a trade. In my limited experience with state programs for this, it feels nigh impossible.
The root of the problem is that a "living wage" in New York City is way, way too high. This is because the rent is too high, which is in no small part because of local housing policy, which does not want to see more apartments built, preferring to play games with rent control. (And economists are fractious in general, but the consensus position that rent control is destructive is as strong as the consensus of climate scientists on anthropocentric global warming.)
(In part this reluctance to build is because of other broken policy, such as the transit-construction policy, which means that new subways to these new apartments are impossibly unaffordable.)
But referring to it with the "living wage" mindset, we set about blaming employers for being evil, instead of fixing the broken housing policy. The consequence is that people who needed the higher wage to begin with are even more likely to be unemployed, as their employment is no longer profitable, and entry-level positions (for people who didn't get a fancy college degree in engineering, anyway) are unavailable.
There are other policy failures, of course. For instance, New York's education policy continues to fail its most vulnerable population, preventing them from obtaining skills that would render their labor more valuable.
Not really, maybe you have the connotation between "living wage mindset" and "blame employers as evil". But as an American living abroad in Switzerland, where a strong currency exists but is undesirable, no federal minimum wage exists, no local minimum wage exists (except in 1 Canton), and labour is well represented in the political economy (>50% workers under coverage of various Collective Bargaining Agreements), it's clear there's a lot of wiggle room where things are not black and white, where we could try to push for a culture that both respects the commons and community as well as individual freedom. This different mindset and culture is why a "livable wage" works here despite the lack of regulation and without workers demonizing employers and vice versa.
I don't think such a mindset could be adopted by most Americans but it certainly shows there's no reason for a black-and-white mindset of "livable wage advocates" == "employer haters".
First off, that's not quite what they said. They said, "that labor will never be available to US residents. Quite a different thing than "employers". The math changes when you, US citizen, have to sign the checks, with your own money, earned from a 'real' employer.
Now the dollar policy in theory matters. With a stronger dollar, it's harder for US citizens to buy and sell goods domestically and it's cheaper to buy them abroad. Cheap Asian electronics, more expensive American goods. Applies to labor as well. Employers found it cheaper at some point to outsource labor whenever they could abroad.
That's the theory. Reality is that the dollar hasn't been strong for some time now. Employers still outsource labor where the trade-off is worth it. But the trade-off isn't always worth it anymore. Jobs are coming back to America. But not the jobs that would pay a living wage to someone who would sell that labor gathering cans off the street.
That would require the dollar to fall another order of magnitude, totally upending global commerce and jettisoning the idea of the dollar being the global reserve currency even deader than it already is as we fritter away our goodwill and the de facto hegemony it provided. The dollar floats on the public markets and there's been no political will to do anything more than pay lip service to strong dollar policy.
America has never been kind to its underclass, temporarily embarrassed millionaires they must be like the rest of us. The problem is our over-reliance on markets. Markets do one thing and one thing well, serve individual self-interest. They cannot serve public interests except when the public interests align with individual self-interest. To a market, an incentive is an incentive, questions about how humane they are are questions that cannot be answered by a market.
To a market, your labor is a good that you sell, and the market, being human interest, has as much interest in getting your offered labor for as cheaply as you're willing to offer it as you are interested in getting all the things you want for as cheaply as possible. This is all supposed to work, and by that I mean it requires the whole country to participate in the creation of a grand fiction. Religious society declined in the 70s and with it went the American predilection for grand fiction. Now we're left with the ugly truth behind the fiction and we don't even have comforting lies to sell to the underclass anymore.
I don't know what the way out for us is, but I do know how some European countries found a way through it. There's the Nordic model. A ton of wealth was generated through resource extraction and is now held at the state level, creating the same effect that university endowments do for their ecosystem. This does not typically happen with resource extraction economies, particularly large ones, look to Russia for where that goes wrong. The Nords got lucky due to a shared culture and very few external geopolitical threats.
We could discuss France and Germany, but this is getting long so I have to cut it short. Europe in general can leverage shared culture that goes back thousands of years, while the US built its in all of some 300 years, counting from around when the settlements first started taking off. This makes a lot of things much much easier, as culture is generally how humans solve coordination problems.
In many ways we're more of an empire than a nation-state. Multi-ethnic empires have to be governed according to different principles than nation-states. "American" as an ethnic identity still needs to gel. The Internet is bringing about a "universal culture" that might get us further to an answer but in the meantime Americans are having to re-learn how to be charitable.
I get the desire for living wages. I really do. But they're expecting the market to solve the problem for us. That fiction is deader than Jimmy Hoffa. America has spoken, and we do not want anything getting in the way of the almighty market. So it's humans that must solve the humanity problem that inhuman markets cause. Charity for your fellow man, expect more tipping culture and more browbeating to donate. Sorry.
People do these jobs because there's a market for the items in question, and because they're poor. Taking away a deposit (which helps lubricate the return process of useful materials and gives people a reason to value them) for your conscience sake will not make the poverty go away.
Clearly people do throw away cans and bottles when it's not convenient, and these people who clearly don't have better opportunities in front of them, get some minimal (though unfortunate) employment which they choose to do.
Go work to eliminate poverty. Not the outward indicators of it.
Eliminate that and people would probably switch to something more unsavory and harmful to society.
Consider this coverage of rats from the same source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/nyregion/rat-infestation-...
Or this lovely article by the Brooklyn borough president which opens with a story of a rat gnawing on an infant's face, in the slums of Brownsville. The child then grew up with a scar on his lip. (There's probably another policy failure there, too, with regards to public housing, as NYCHA is not good about extermination.) https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-our-war-on-rats-...
Homeless people (a prime bottle-collecting group) are if anything more vulnerable to rats, as they are likely to be sleeping where they are exposed to said rats.
And New York trash policy in much of Manhattan is your building leaves your trash (recyclables and otherwise) out on the sidewalk for pickup, where it is rodent-bait. This needs to change.
Last I looked nearly half the apartments were in one of those three categories. Rent is fucked because supply is fucked because we fucked it with various programs.
At minimum enforce the short term rental ban.
"Episode 925: A Mob Boss, A Garbage Boat and Why We Recycle : Planet Money : NPR"
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...
However, I have some questions for the NY Times:
1. What does the fact that there are people paying $13,000/month rent have anything to do with the people collecting cans?
2. They're stealing from the City, as you point out. Why isn't this wrong?
3. How much tax-free money are they earning? Combined with the benefits they're receiving from Federal Government, City, and State with this untaxed revenue stream, what's their income? How much would a person who pays taxes have to earn to net the same amount?
And their income tax theft isn't legal or decriminalized.
I wonder if HN really thinks journalism should have the writing of an API documentation.
At one place I worked in San Francisco we had a padlock on our trash can. It was worth the inconvenience of unlocking it and locking it back up when taking the trash out. The waste department had keys that could open it. This was in the mission.
you could pay more in taxes so that these people could have section 8 housing and food stamps so that they don't have to dig in the trash in order to survive.
edit: i see i'm getting downvoted. it boggles the mind. people are starving literally in his driveway (not in another state, not in another country, not abstractly) and he's complaining about the noise of their death rattle. like how do you square that? i'd love someone to actually respond/answer rather than downvote in indignation. are you upset at the politics of the suggestion that the solution to the problem is not getting rid of their sole means to survive but to actually help them? is it divisive because i invoked the hob goblin of hn (higher taxes)? just truly what is the appropriate response here? is it really "fuck em let die so i can sleep blissfully unaware"?
When you send your (surplus) taxes to the city or state (or feds), you don’t get to earmark it.
Also let’s say you could and this person got housed and they also decided they would not rummage thru trash. Someone else will take up the slack and rummage.
For example the city of SF spends inordinate amounts on homelessness but the problem only gets bigger.
When people talk of the military industrial complex, we know what it means. In SF there is a homelessness-industrial complex that exists for its own sake and is better off perpetuating homelessness than solving it.
Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
I don't know where you're from, but in California, we regularly vote on ballot propositions to levy taxes earmarked for specific purposes. For example, in the most recent election cycle, Proposition C was on the SF ballot, which raised $300 million in taxes to address homelessness. Due to our fondness for direct democracy, any interested citizen can write a ballot proposition for everyone else to vote on. So yes, you certainly can earmark taxes. You can push for propositions to reduce homelessness, and you can vote for them, and encourage your friends and family and coworkers to vote for them.
> For example the city of SF spends inordinate amounts on homelessness but the problem only gets bigger.
That's false. SF spends only about $3.8k/year per homeless person: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...
At any rate, even if SF were spending an inordinate amount trying to house the homeless, it would only make sense to, given how damn high the rents are.
> Don’t believe me? Propose homelessness solutions that cut out these orgs and see how well your ideas are received.
Yeah, I don't believe you, because the people who get into working with the homeless don't do it because they like money. I'm a software developer. I certainly don't do it because I need the money. It's not even sexy work, as far as non-profits go. Assuming that the same incentives that work on the military apply to do-gooders doing thankless work is just lazy.
There is also the small problem wherein if the org I volunteer with on occasion, Food not Bombs, were cut out, homeless people would literally starve. So yes, I _would_ be very opposed to that, unless the city took it upon itself to feed the homeless instead.
The biggest obstacle to solving homelessness, as with many other problems, is not the people who care about the homeless, but the people who don't: the NIMBYs. The SF NIMBYs recently put $250k and a lawsuit into the effort to defeat the Embarcadero Navigation Center, which has only 200 beds. Thankfully, it has failed, but there are only seven centers, and a homeless population of 7-8k, so it's not going to make much of a dent.
When every attempt to build a good homeless shelter meets this much opposition, it's just deeply wrongheaded, and, dare I say, callous, to blame the people helping a population who so many hate.
Yes, people are often negative towards suggestions that don't use any existing knowledge, experience or infrastructure. To jump from that to "there's a conspiracy to keep this in place!" is ludicrous.
Every time homelessness comes up on hacker news there are people who leap on posts they think don't show enough sympathy. This behavior never seems helpful.
>leap on posts they think don't show enough sympathy
i do not understand what the issue with that response is. we should shun the unempathetic.
In CA (in the Bay Area) I am charged redemption value on cans and bottles. I put them in recycling, and guess what, the same truck that picks up my garbage also picks up my recycling... it is all going in the trash.
Recycling is broken, and we need to make more changes to make it effective.
I don't doubt that recycling needs to be improved in most places, but the San Francisco Bay Area system is among the better ones.
In two counties, the same single compartment truck is picking up both cans (trash+recycling) at the same stop. No amount of sorting is going to help fix that mess.
i can't fathom being this spiteful. are you literally a cartoon super-villain? exploiting incentive? they're digging in the trash. how could you possibly begrudge them such a humble way of life?
You are interpreting the comment in the most negative way possible. The system needs to change, and we need to help these people in a different way.
https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/
put in the paragraph
"The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive."
and see what the sentiment score is
The quote is matter of fact, as far as I can read.
>expensive enough
>exploiting
the tone is clearly judgmental