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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

>why would anyone "donate" these is a different matter

This is a very big question though. WTF are people thinking? There's a difference between no longer wearing something because it no longer fits but is otherwise in good condition to not being used because it's completely ruined. What mental block exists in the original owner from just throwing away the ruined items vs just holding onto them to donate so someone else can throw it away? Do they actually feel like some good is coming from donating worthless items? I honestly just do understand this.

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To add to what others have said, I think that a lot of people have this idea that "trash = bad" so deeply internalized that they're heavily biased toward only putting things in the bin when there can be no doubt whatsoever that it is garbage.

You also see this when people put greasy paper take-out food containers in the recycling. No, it's not recyclable, and worse, it might further contaminate other things and render them non-recyclable as well. But, when I ask houseguests not to put them in our recycle bin, they seem to be honestly startled by the request. Oftentimes they assume it's because I'm a lax recycler and would rather throw things away than sully my pristine recycle bin with uneaten curry.

Yep, I asked people to do the same recently at a party. They were entirely shocked. It's like realizing that your disposable cutlery and plates are actually waste and seeing it going into the actual trash makes them realize how wasteful it is. Recycle (or charity giving of clothes) is such a "guilt free" behaviour, feeling like you do something good for no efforts, so I'm not surprised people would do it even when it makes no sense.

Depressingly that was the point of recycling in the US

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Penn & Teller said it in 2004: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/

> You also see this when people put greasy paper take-out food containers in the recycling. No, it's not recyclable, and worse, it might further contaminate other things and render them non-recyclable as well. But, when I ask houseguests not to put them in our recycle bin, they seem to be honestly startled by the request. Oftentimes they assume it's because I'm a lax recycler and would rather throw things away than sully my pristine recycle bin with uneaten curry.

It happens here because recycling volume is unlimited, while regular trash has a fairly low limit.

However.

You do not have to sort the recycling. They do not reject it for being entirely take-out containers. And it's collected in open-top containers that result in a mass littering event every time trash day happens to be windy.

I suspect they're just picking out the metal and putting everything else in the landfill, anyway.

Plastic recycling is a sham.

We were paying China to take it, and they were putting it in a landfill (probably). China won't take our trash, I mean recycling anymore, so now we're putting it in landfills.

General rule of thumb is if you can get money for scrapping it, it's recyclable (aluminum, glass, steel, etc).

Companies use plastic because it's cheap and the government won't regulate it. I remember when sodas used to come in bottles, and food came in wax paper wrapping, and it tasted better.

From an npr article posted by someone else:

>Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Glass is mostly "recycled" by crushing, mostly to reduce the hazard of broken glass littering the street. In many states, buying a drink in a glass container carries a nominal extra fee to cover the "recycling." No one actually wants to buy your used glass containers for their own sake.

In the UK 70% of a typical green glass wine bottle will be recycled material and the limiting factor is the availability of the recycled material, the manufacturers would use more if they could get it, since it saves energy to do so.

And we generally don't offer deposits. When we did, the bottles were actually re-used directly.

When recycled, it is crushed, that creates something called "cullet" which can be used in the glassmaking process and is easier to transport. But I don't see the link to keeping broken glass of the street, that should be possible without crushing or recycling.

As recently as the early 90s there were still grocery stores that'd take back glass soda bottles to refill them, but the only places I know that still do anything like that are some fancy dairies (via the grocery stores that distribute their product).

Yeah, and I remember beer in iron cans... and that's about as relevant to the majority of consumers.

Sure, it's just that not that long ago, it was economically feasible, so it's not like it's some kind of unattainable fantasy. A couple laws, and a 5-10% hike on the costs of drinks distributed in bottles (thanks to the added costs of handling & recycling glass), and we'd be back there. It's something we definitely could do.

But yes, right now the main glass recycler in our area just crushes everything up and turns it into fiber glass. Only an irrelevantly-small fraction of bottles are re-used. I expect we'll switch to some kind of plant-based plastics before we bring back glass recycling for drink containers, though I wouldn't wholly rule out the possibility of a shift back to glass.

Cheaper is often because something was easier to make. Less materials and less energy.

That's certainly the case on a one plastic bottle to one glass bottle ratio, but I wonder just how energy efficient is making that bottle over the glass one? Twice? Ten times? A hundred? Then how many times will a glass bottle get reused on average? What sort of resources are used in the process of bringing them back and cleaning them?

This might be my bias as an Australian, tons of space but already having our natural wonder smashed by climate change, but I'm very uninterested in 'pro environment' moves that results in trading higher emissions for less land fill.

Although potentially an argument could be made that because ocean waste is less contained and more harmful than landfill, a 5-10% hike on plastic bottle drinks in low water polluting countries and using it to subsidise glass bottle drinks in high water polluting countries would be worthwhile.

Its a popular misconception that recycling and climate change are in opposition. Landfills are the biggest producers of greenhouse gasses after electricity generation, transport and agriculture.

The reduced carbon impact is one of the reasons to recycle, but your not the first person on HN that I've seen claim exactly the opposite.

(Of note, burning the trash and using the energy produced is also better for climate change than landfill).

Is it the plastic in landfills causing the greenhouse gases?

Probably mostly rotting food and other organic matter, maybe some fridges and other chemicals. But once you start recycling one thing, it makes it easier to recycle others as they share infrastructure.

But recycling plastic specifically uses less energy which in turn saves carbon.

Even burning the plastic as fuel is regularly cited by life cycle analyses as less carbon intensive than landfilling it and creating totally new plastic to replace it.

I'd expect there are lots of factors with glass. Making a new plastic bottle every time might be cheaper on a resource-use than making a glass bottle and washing it for re-use (which uses energy, and water) some average number of times before it gets broken (5? 20? 50? No clue). But it might not.

However, other factors include: labor; transportation & waste costs (glass is heavier and breaks easier); and labor-geographic efficiency enabled by lower transport costs—for example, you might choose fewer bottling plants farther apart for cost efficiency, so you can reduce overhead and concentrate your labor costs in cheap locations, rather than every town having a small bottling plant, or stores having fill-n-cap stations directly in them, or whatever.

[EDIT] that is, with lower transportation costs of plastic you might be able to concentrate production in places with cheaper labor.

Another challenge with bringing back reusable glass bottles is that that approach belonged to an era with more local brands and a smaller variety of products. There were a few brands of soft drink that were all being mixed and bottled at local distributors, and cities had their own breweries that mostly only distributed locally.

Now that we have enough different brands of soda and beer to cover three sides of a convenience store, all made and packaged at one location and then shipped across the continent, I don't know that glass can be considered a less wasteful option. It's not just about the actual piece of packaging, it's also about how much diesel fuel is being burned in shipping such heavy packaging over long distances.

Glass return schemes basically require standardized bottles. That's how it works in part in Germany: there's a small number of standard shapes of beer bottles, breweries get their share of bottles from return locations around them where possible. It breaks down with more and more breweries using custom bottles, which do need to be sorted out and returned separately, over large distances.

Reusable glass bottles also mean that you either bring the exact bottle to the exact retailer to get refilled with the exact product, or brands lose the ability to use the container for advertising and brand identity.

Even the frou-frou dairies that let you bring in their reusable bottles only want you to bring back their reusable bottles with their stenciled logos on them.

In the UK there is (still, in some places) milk delivery to the doorstep in 1 pint bottles. These are all a standard size, and they're all branded by the dairy. But interestingly the dairies are perfectly happy to use another company's bottles if they end up with them - branding be damned.

When I lived in a place with only one delivering dairy, this was quite rare. In Liverpool, I'd say that 10% of the bottles I get are 'foreign'.

In the US, I quickly accumulate 3-4 Stanpac glass bottles that are almost entirely identical, except for the indelible sintered labeling, and then I get behind on taking the right one to the right store and throw them out.

Which is something that could be solved by regulation mandating standard bottle shapes. Environment is more important than "brand identity".

In many countries still do this, especially with things like milk and beer bottles.

If they are, then that's still better than the alternative.

Some nations just burn their trash, with energy recovery, and then extract any metals from the ashes. Again still notably better than landfilling in a modern, well designed landfill, which in turn is better than unregulated landfills which are better than open burning.

The media seem to love "shocking" people with stories about how recycling might not be 100% perfect. Is it still a useful thing that all sensibly run countries do a continually increasing amount of. Yes, even the US where it continues to be a weirdly political topic along with climate change and evolution for no obvious reason and so there's no real federal support for it.

Recycling education is awful in America. I made it about 33 years without hearing that take out containers, etc. can’t be recycled.

It also recently came out that much of the recyclable recycling was and/or is not being recycled anyway, so I doubt any education would have made a difference. I assume all the recycling efforts are simply for political purposes at this point.

It recently got coverage in popular media -- but those familiar with sanitation operations and secondhand materials markets know that recycling has been subject to market demands for those materials for its entire existence. Recycling has never operated outside of the realm of economics.

The reasons changes to recycling programs are slow are:

1. People don't pay attention anyway

2. If the price of plastics go way up 5 years from now, you'll never retrain people to recycle again

3. Recycled metals are still valuable

the problem is the recycling triangle that's imprinted on the containers, the one's showing the material code on it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_codes. Somewhere along the line the recycle triangle had become synonymous with recyclable, but what didn't get communicated is that only certain codes paired with that triangle are actually recyclable.

So they use the recycling logo to indicate the material, NOT that it's recyclable. I wonder which genius came up with this idea...

I think that's a doomed plan. It varies from city to city, and even over time based on what they can contract to unload.

They try to relay changes, but the messaging is incredibly spotty. At one point they were saying "plastic containers where the mouth is wider than the base" or something like that, rather than even trying to use the plastic codes.

Some can, if you wash them. Puts a damper in the easy disposal that folks are accustomed to, though.

Plainly dirty, obviously goes in the trash.

But where then is the line for what's otherwise clearly marked with the recycling symbol? ...especially when there's lingering suspicion the recycling bin contents are ultimately ending up in the landfill with the rest of it all?

If something ever seems like a popular but illogical set of actions by people, the best way to understand it is to look at the incentives that drive it (thanks Freakonomics).

In this case I'd wager two things. As a kid I had family who worked a receiving center for Goodwill. Fairly affluent part of our town near the beach. I remember two distinct things being odd to me then. The items people would bring would sometimes be questionable as to how they'd be useful to the needy, either from wear or function. The other part was most people wanted and received a receipt for their donation. Cue Mitch Hedburg receipt for a donut routine. I was told then when I asked this was an approximate value of their donation and it was used for tax purposes. So one is probably tax write offs.

Throwing things away costs money. When my wife and I moved recently we cleaned house. A second trash can was around 150 a year with limited volume. Trips to the landfill are charged by weight differential. Charity donation is free with the added bonus of someone coming to pick it up if the donation is big enough. We both commented at the time that if we were a little less moral we could easily pack the rubbish in with the donations and save a ton of money. So second is probably convenience with some working the system added in.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's something there, but I do have a hard time lining those theories up with my past interactions around the subject.

For example, a long time ago a roommate of mine wanted to get rid of some furniture, so he had a thrift store send a van to pick it up. It had all been pretty severely damaged by his dog. Having previously worked at a thrift store, I was pretty confident that they wouldn't want any of it, and mentioned as much to him, but he was sure they would be able to find a use for it, and so we schlepped it out to the curb.

After the van had left without taking much of any of it, and we were carrying it all around to the alley for the garbage trucks to pick up (which is free in our city, even for furniture), the thing he expressed remorse about wasn't the donation receipt. It was that he thought it was wasteful to throw all this furniture in the trash just because his dog had been chewing on it.

I still have similar conversations with my partner about this. Her bias is, she wants to hold on to even the slightest glimmer of hope that someone might find a use for an item. I lean toward not wanting to make the staff of the thrift store throw out my trash for me. I think it might just be hard to see if that way if you haven't been there. Neither of us cares about donation receipts, which we don't bother to collect, and still live in the same city that will take anything that will physically fit inside a garbage truck for no extra charge.

Tangentially, if you haven't seen one swallow a full-size sofa, put it on your bucket list. It's a fascinating spectacle.

> Her bias is, she wants to hold on to even the slightest glimmer of hope that someone might find a use for an item.

I have this same problem. It's actually taken me a lot of effort over the years to get away from this mindset. Not that I try to be wasteful, it's more of just forcing myself to be realistic about the likelihood of me being able to repurpose a thing. Sure a thing might be useful to someone but unless I'm really interested in the effort required to find them and facilitate the transaction, that thing is just going to sit around. I have finite space available so unless I really want something or really want to make a donation happen it's going in the trash.

I'm finding that I get a lot more utility out of framing it thus: the trash isn't created when I put it in the bin, the trash is created when I buy it in the first place. Once that happens, it's going to get pitched. Could be today, could be in 30 years, but someday it will happen.

Where that pays extra dividends is in limiting the accumulation of clutter. I used to buy electronic gizmos I didn't, strictly speaking, need, at a fairly regular pace. But I was storing up a bunch of crap I'd eventually have to throw away the next time I declutter. And I had a lot of clutter. Reminding myself that every consumer product is future trash helps limit the accumulation of clutter, which, in turn, limits how often I have to feel bad about throwing it away.

That's a good way to frame things which is something I now do a better job with. My clutter problems were/are mostly from old me not thinking in that way.

The big question here is how to minimize transaction costs.

You often have an item which in good condition would be worth e.g. $55, but it's damaged. If you ask someone how much they need to repair it, they say $50. So in a frictionless plane you would make $5.

But in order to pay them, you would have to fill out tax paperwork, and they would have to fill out tax paperwork, and you would have to pay payroll tax, and they would have to pay income tax, and in the end you would pay $60 and they would receive $30. So instead you throw the item away.

Whereas what you should do instead is to just give it to them. They were willing to fix the item for what in practice was $30. If you gave it to them, they would do the labor they valued at $30, or at $25 because they can omit the labor of doing the tax paperwork, and then they have a $55 item instead of the item going into a landfill.

There are also people who might be willing to use the item as-is without repairing it, if it was free.

So the real problem here is that these organizations aren't allowing people to pick through what they're throwing out. Which wouldn't make them any money, but it would be better for the world.

I can get on board with this, too. Hoarders are kind of the far end of that spectrum and I can see the same closer to home tendencies in my partner as well. She struggles to dispose of clearly broken beyond repair or reuse items.

Difference in perspective down to cultural bias. Living too long in rural southern US has jaded me into looking for selfish intent behind any altruistic curtains.

>I was told then when I asked this was an approximate value of their donation and it was used for tax purposes. So one is probably tax write offs.

Anything preventing them from just making up that figure?

Hilariously there is a motivation to provide low value receipts for estate executors.

"That old bookcase? It was only worth a dollar so I sent it to Goodwill after his death, it wasn't in the will and nobody wanted it".

Now maybe an antique dealer could sell it for $400, meaning maybe the seller might have gotten $100, and now the estate executor is in trouble. But he died and there's three days to get all the stuff out of the apartment and nobody has set up an estate-paid-for storage unit (how long can you afford to store something only worth $100 anyway? If estate/probate process takes a year...) or prepared a deal with an antique dealer to immediately accept (and who's going to drive it over there, I don't have time?) and if its not disposed of in three days the building mgr will hire a very expensive per hour cleaning crew to toss it in the trash (at some expense) and deliver a hefty bill to the estate. And Goodwill gave him a receipt for a dollar so its documented at least. The Goodwill receipt at least proves the executor didn't steal from the estate by hiding the bookcase in her basement and selling it later on ebay for $400. As if she's young enough to know what ebay is.

An eventual audit that if they hit the anti lottery could cost them more than they could possibly save. Remember that you don't get to just deduct a donation from your taxes you deduct it from your income which lowers your taxes. For example if you ultimately pay about 30% of your income in federal taxes and you lower your income by 1000 you ultimately have reduced your taxes by $300.

Donations 5000 and up require the person you donated to to fill out a tax form for that donation so making up the numbers would require a confederate in the donating org to be willing to risk prison to enrich you.

https://www.amazinggoodwill.com/donating/IRS-guidelines

Also remember that the bottom half of the country pays little federal income tax (because they don't make much of the income in America) and the top 10-20% has MUCH better legal tax avoidance strategies.

It's likely that some portion of middle income individuals could avoid a small dollar figure in taxes by inflating or even fabricating a string of small donations and presumably out of hundreds of millions of people a few do but you would have to make up a LOT of bullshit donations to make much of a difference but before you could actually save much money you would end up sticking out like a sore thumb. Yes Mr IRS auditor I totally donated over 1000 in goods to goodwill on 10 separate occasions over 2021 and I totally deserve the corresponding $3000 deduction!

On net its probably a small issue. At this point we have people making 6 figures + who just don't file tax returns and haven't been addressed.

Bill Clinton famously donated used underwear, tax write-off claim of $2-6 each.

> This is a very big question though. WTF are people thinking?

From what I've seen, there's a segment of people who feel the urge to donate, but have this elitist attitude towards less fortunate people who need assistance that can be summed up as, "they should take what they are given with a smile." Like, they have this notion that accepting any charity should involve some degree of humiliation. Almost like they feel like a person must not really be in need if they aren't willing to, for example, accept expired food.

It's a really fucking toxic attitude and I suspect being on the receiving end of such behavior can be a cause for a lot of people who need assistance to not seek it out.

My mother works at a women's shelter and this comes up when it comes to donations around Christmas time. People claim they want to donate, but when it comes to donating things women actually need, they will sometimes get all huffy. The women who come to the shelter came there with basically nothing and potential donators sometimes raise a stink about giving women nice toiletry baskets, as though they are entitled to no "luxuries" by virtue of being poor, homeless, and without a support system.

>>Do they actually feel like some good is coming from donating worthless items?

Unfortunately, I believe people are encouraged to donate everything no matter the state, because importers like us pay per kg, so a charity that we buy from will get money for those dirty destroyed shoes, even though they do actually go to landfill on the other end. In a way charities don't really care what's in the bags, the heavier the better. That's why recently it's actually a bit more popular to import from Cash4Clothes charities, as they at the very least have a cursory glance through the goods, so you rarely get actual pure rubbish in there. It has other downsides though.

> This is a very big question though. WTF are people thinking? There's a difference between no longer wearing something because it no longer fits but is otherwise in good condition to not being used because it's completely ruined. What mental block exists in the original owner from just throwing away the ruined items vs just holding onto them to donate so someone else can throw it away? Do they actually feel like some good is coming from donating worthless items? I honestly just do understand this.

It's still "good," just not good enough for them, and they don't want the item "to go to waste." Basically, they can imagine someone using it, but it's an unrealistic fantasy.

I think that also applies to freebie crap no one wants.

For myself, I tend to be in the "let the professionals decide what to scrap" camp.

If the alternative is that I throw it in the garbage, what is the net loss by letting the workers who do this all day long decide what should be thrown in the garbage? As the OP says, they have various uses for items, so it makes sense to let them handle the sorting through of junk to decide what is ultimately landfill material. Sure, I could educate myself better about the details on what happens once I hand it over, so that time isn't being wasted, but I am, of course, lazy.

> If the alternative is that I throw it in the garbage, what is the net loss by letting the workers who do this all day long decide what should be thrown in the garbage?

Because a lot of the organizations that take donated items are charities, and disposing of your garbage costs them money that they then cannot use to do good.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/993821945/goodwill-doesnt-wan...

It's the same thing with recycling. If you "hopefully" put unrecyclable stuff in with it, all you're doing is making recycling less economically viable and increasing the chance that the batch is ruined. The sorters only have the capacity to imperfectly remove the most obviously unrecyclable trash (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83sYHe3jdGA), not to ponder if your yogurt container is made of the right kind of plastic or determining if every wrapper is food-stained or not. The contents of your entire recycling bin flies past their eyes in a literal second or two.

The increased cost aspect is interesting, and is something I've recently learned about. Fortunately our local goodwill is very active in pre-screening items when you drop off so I don't feel a huge need to get into the weeds with it.

For recycling, it sounds more and more like our current systems just aren't well designed. If there is so much incidental complexity downstream that can actually ruin the recycleability of other items, we as consumers should aggressively under-recycle. But then that makes recycling that much less impactful as well. I don't know what the right answer is here other than we need to improve the sorting/processing to avoid consumers needing to understand the intricacies.

> The increased cost aspect is interesting, and is something I've recently learned about. Fortunately our local goodwill is very active in pre-screening items when you drop off so I don't feel a huge need to get into the weeds with it.

So they're paying some dude to pre-screen instead of paying a larger trash bill. It's still a cost to them. If people were a little more conscientious, those costs could be eliminated.

> But then that makes recycling that much less impactful as well. I don't know what the right answer is here other than we need to improve the sorting/processing to avoid consumers needing to understand the intricacies.

Those intricacies are not hard to learn, and the improvements you seek are probably a lot harder than you or I realize.

If people were (universally) a little more conscientious a lot of costs could be eliminated...

Personally, I would happily pay more for someone to come and take away my maybe-garbage and maybe-recycling, and sort through it. If the issue is purely economic - that there's a very real cost that's not accounted for - let's just make it explicit.

FWIW I think the reason why it's not that way already for recycling is to encourage people to recycle when they can. But it's clear that, at this point, the processing issue is more important than that. Then those who recycle because they want to feel good about it, can pay for the privilege. And same for donations.

You are making it harder for recycling to be profitable/worthwhile. Sorting the material and disposing the trash is one of the biggest costs associated with recycling. If the inputs to the processes get too saturated with waste, the recycling process stops being a net positive to society. As an example posted elsewhere in this thread, a soiled food container is not only non-recyclable, it will contaminate the other material next to it also making those materials non-recyclable.

Basically, if you think you are being a good steward of the earth by throwing your trash into the recycling bin, you are wrong, you are making the problem worse.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environm...

I should note that I'm only addressing donating items to e.g. Goodwill.

I am more careful with recycling, but only because I have slightly more knowledge about what to recycle since there is a somewhat helpful graphic on our city's recycling bin.

> WTF are people thinking?

I can understand people just dumping everything in the bin because sorting it properly is an overwhelming task.

I recently signed up for Ridwell [1] and pay them to properly dispose of (sort and redistribute) all kinds of waste I could get rid of for “free”. The problem is figuring out where to take everything and then actually getting there in my car. As far as I can tell there isn’t one single drop off point in my area for plastic film, food containers, clothing, electronics, and styrofoam. At some point just putting everything in a bin for $10.00/mo makes a lot more sense.

Muddy boots are an extreme but I have things like ripped shirts that might be repairable or useful as rags or some thing I just can’t think of.

[1]: https://www.ridwell.com/

I've seen videos about recycling where they call it "wishcycling" and point to things like lamps and umbrellas tossed in their city's curbside recycling bin. I think the wish is that someone will find a use for it and it will avoid a landfill. In actuality, it can be a waste of someone else's time and money.

I suspect on a large scale over time, post death donations exceed annual donations by quite a bit.

So, old uncle X dies, state fund stops paying his nursing home room in 3 days, after everything of value or mentioned in the will is picked over or set aside, its all gotta go somewhere and somewhere is three relatives with trailers driving to goodwill.

There's simply not the time to determine his 1970s suit is currently resellable as retro kool, his 1970s neckties are 50:50 resellable, and his 1970s fancy dress shoes are simply trash. You've got less than two seconds per item, times up, now help load up the bookcase its all gotta go and the sooner we're done the quicker this depressing job is over. Toward the end, people are like "box of old plates? I don't have time for this toss it on the Goodwill trailer".

Think of his neckties from the 70s, someone doing a 70s school play or costume party or maybe some kind of art exhibit might pay good money for perfect condition, and badly stained goes in the trash, now what about the one in between that's not perfect but better than most people's daily wear? People LARP on the internet about being experts on everything especially apparently clothing resales but we're kinda in a hurry here and my MiL is not an expert on that topic so she's seemingly randomly tossing stuff on piles for trash or recycle or goodwill, I mean she's trying but we as a culture do not license "cleaning up the estate of deceased relatives" so she's just gonna toss stuff semi-randomly.

WRT to hoarding, consider that red necktie thats a little worn and has a tiny stain on it. He wouldn't throw that tie out, because he was married to my long deceased aunt while wearing it 60 years ago, it meant a lot to him ... but not to anyone else and now he's gone. Or that hideous endtable, I mean, sure a 1960s collector might want it if its in perfect condition, but he never threw it out because it worked perfectly well even if nobody post 1980 would consider buying such a thing.

Oddly enough things are simpler with terminal patients. He handed his bible to his sister when he said goodbye so when its time for estate cleanup nobody has to wonder where the family bible is, its been at his sisters house a month ago. I suppose a surprise death might be more work. But, the cancer finally got him so just ship everything in the room that isn't food, to goodwill.

I often donate my running shoes to the street.

After 700km they're no longer good for running. But they're perfectly fine for walking around and as general footwear. Better shape than a lot of what I've seen folks living in the streets wear.

Someone always takes them within 3 hours of putting them out.

> This is a very big question though. WTF are people thinking?

I obviously can't speak for elsewhere but donated goods are a tax deduction in the USA. Now, I do not donate junk but I also do 1-2 donation runs a year. The person who accepts my donations always asks, "Do you want a donation form?" without ever inspecting any of the items I am handing them for viability. Certain items are rejected because they simply cannot accept them but I have never once in my decades of donating seen someone inspect the items to ensure they are in "good" quality. I've always assumed that people are gaming their tax write-offs by donating their junk.

Clothes only get worse while being used (or cleaned). Thus, all clothes I donate are basically in a condition that I considered "fit-to-wear" just one usage ago. Is it a stretch that someone would be happy to get for free what worked for me just until now?

That being said, after reading articles like this some years ago, I started to throw everything that is actually damaged to the trash (even if it is only a small hole). Maybe I am overdoing it - but I totally understand the mindset of "worst case they will have to trash it in my place".

Those damaged clothes can be repaired, used as fabric in new clothes, cut into rags or shredded into filling. Throwing them in the trash is the most wasteful thing you can do. All the energy involved in making that fabric is lost.

I’m sure I’m guilty of doing this, but it’s mostly mental laziness. When I’m sorting stuff for donation I’m mostly thinking “keep” versus “donate.” The third category of “throw away” is there and their is a pile, but it’s not one of the two defaults, so unless I notice the article is quite bad I don’t toss it there.

This has also meant I’ve kept clothes that really should have been tossed as well…

It's also 'this is broken and should go to cloth recycling, but I do not have access to any cloth recycling facility, whereas the donation centers do'.

I assume a fair amount of donations haven't been sorted through at all by the donators. They likely just already have large bags of clothes that no one wears anymore for any given reason and don't take the time to determine what is and isn't donatable. I know that's what's been done by my family when a family member dies. There's maybe a couple separate pieces that get saved for sentimental reasons (I have my grandpa's wedding tuxedo jacket for example) but everything else pretty much gets dumped into bags and sent off.

This is highly location-dependent, but in some areas, charities will come to collect used items (say a big bag of clothes) free of charge, whereas throwing that same bag out in the trash is costly. So sneaking in a couple of shitty items basically saves money.

Trash collection is -- no pun intended -- a mess.

With all the different types of plastic and how easy it apparently is to contaminate a batch I feel like sorting has to basically be perfect at the collection facility. At that point can't we just put everything in the trash and assume it will be sorted? Expecting individuals to do this perfectly across the entire population seems like it would never work.

Separating donate from trash clearly makes sense. And maybe compost from trash? Maybe? But is there ever a "clean" batch of recycling? Does a truck ever get through a full route without running in to that one household that tossed their produce bags in the recycle or didn't completely rinse the yogurt tub? Is that tub even recyclable? Isn't recycling just the subset of trash that doesn't have to be landfilled or incinerated?

I wonder about the exact same things.

Adding to that, is a matter of cost. Lawmakers apparently place very little value on my time. Sorting trash costs time. Taking it to a recycling center costs time (and requires transportation, which I don't have). Disposing of paper/cardboard means I have to walk ~500 meters to a special rubbish bin with an opening the size of a letter box. Which means I have to spend time ripping up cardboard boxes. It's ridiculous and I feel like it's a giant waste of my time.

I can buy crap online for cheap, with free shipping, without ever leaving the house. But disposing of the packaging is a hassle. Trash collection seems stuck in the middle ages, but with more rules which seem pretty pointless.

Clean the garage. Trash bin is full. The bias toward good will or trash bin can be come compromised.

It's cognitive bias. It might be junk, but it's their junk.

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

I mean, it seems like you're directing a lot of ire at what the above commentator says is an extremely small (less than 1%) share of donated items.

Clearly having this sort of "mental block" is not an extremely common thing.

My ire was not directed at the original post at all, but towards the people that were specifically called out in that post. I took one part of that post and expanded on it. The natural progression of conversations.

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