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Comment by _carbyau_ | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I am so frustrated with the approach of "lets take a population of millions of people and ask them all to sort perfectly". 'Tis a silly thing. Some people won't care, some people will care but mistakes will happen, some people will care about money more and so will deliberately dump things in the wrong bucket.

Get everyone to dump their crap into one pile and actually invest in industrial processes to sort the crap out.

Huge con: this is a complex problem with possibly poisonous/explosive ramifications if it goes wrong.

Huge Pro: If we can solve this issue, that is a society changing capability, forevermore.

Or until armageddon/robot overlords/singularity/zombie plague at least.

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Picking up after your dog. Putting the grocery cart away after unloading. Shoveling the sidewalk in front of your house. Waiting to the side of the subway doors. Not talking during movies.

We are asked to do hundreds of little things that mildly inconvenience us in order to maintain some social contract. Sure they could be made easier/nonexistent with better technology, but I:

1) don't see why asking people to do their part is silly

2) don't see why this particular problem would be more frustrating than e.g. the others I've mentioned. I feel like they are all similar on the "effort" scale.

Although I guess I'd admit that asking people to sort recycling properly is very different than relying on them to.

I have no issue with the simple niceties of life. It's nice to do the nice things for those around and helps create a high trust society.

But I don't think this is a good system of caring for our environment. If we cared properly, rather than half-arsing it we'd have a proper industrial system with known outputs that we could improve upon. Instead we seem to have a "feel good you did your part, now forget about it" process. I guess it is shambling it's way to something more but it doesn't seem like it's in a rush - kinda the same way the world agrees on acting on climate change but no one is in a rush.

> Picking up after your dog. Putting the grocery cart away after unloading. Shoveling the sidewalk in front of your house. Waiting to the side of the subway doors. Not talking during movies.

If 10% of people don't put their cart away, then 90% of carts still get put away. If 10% put things into the recycling bin that shouldn't go there, then 100% of that batch of material becomes unsuitable for recycling process unless expensive remediation is done first.

If those things can be automated, we should not waste time doing them. It’s not like they are enjoyable anyway. Count the time wasted sorting stuff and multiply for millions and millions of households

Japanese sort really well. Most European countries too

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