This Japanese Town Sorts Their Waste into These 45 Categories
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Checked - Wikipedia says: pop. 1,431.
This would never work in a big(ger) town of say 50..100k+. Never mind megacities.
Unless robots would do all the sorting & collecting for us, close to where the waste is produced, before it's all mixed up into a difficult to sort or recycle mess.
> I say if we were smart we would be sorting out trash but only to bury it to make recycling easier in the future (..)
Valid strategy. But often it's exactly the "sorting out" part that's the problem. Garbage in (everything in 1 heap, many pollutants) -> garbage out (sorted materials not clean enough to be useful for recycling).
If you sort / separate materials well enough, almost everything has some uses so there isn't much point landfilling it.
Some quotes from article:
glass and metal that are irreparably dirty, plastic and metal that has been joined and cannot be separated
That's weird... some mixed-material items are difficult to recycle, but this mix isn't among those.
In an oven, plastics & other contaminants burn off, glass & metals melt at various temperatures, and the metal mix can be creamed off or tapped from bottom of the glass bath.
Metal refiners know how to use (not necessarily separate!) such metal mixtures.
Lightbulbs of all types
Will be recycled into glassware
Maybe. But that's kind of a varied category these days! Some bulbs may not even contain any glass. But unlike incandescents, a variety of semiconductor materials, specialized plastics, etc.
Would be interesting how state-of-the-art recycling handles this category.
Of course not, but what if a facility like this was made available for the segment of the population that doesn't mind doing this. Give them a perk, like no charge trash pickup and access to the "freecycle" store. Many seniors or others with time would gladly save the monthly fee to the city for trash pickup.