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Comment by gvr | Hacker News Reader

My dad's condo [edit: condo complex] in Sweden has 10+ different trash cans. You divide your trash into individuals cans for batteries, bulbs, cardboard, paper, compostables, and so forth.

I don't know but I assume that part of the reason that Swedes are able to deal effectively with the trash is that they sort it properly at the source, so that they more easily can process it.

When I read stuff like this it honestly makes me homesick. I've lived half my life on the left side of the political spectrum (Sweden/France) and the other half on the right side here in the US. I love it in SF, but this supposedly "progressive" city has - especially considering how many smart people that live here - an appallingly poor understanding of how to architect a civilized society.

There is no reason this city shouldn't be clean, essentially free of homeless (and sometimes insane) people, have great public roads, excellent public transportation, low crime, worry about more interesting things than what size diamond ring Kanye bought for his lady, and so forth.

There is a good data driven TED talk on how points like the above correlate with wealth and equality: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html

View on HN

It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person. It is more efficient to sort it at the garbage transfer station the way Canadians do. Most places have 3 cans. General, glass/plastic/cardboard, and biodegradable.

Also, SF is considered "progressive" for many of its completely unsustainable policies, like housing controls, which ultimately lead to further economic inefficiency. A truly progressive society is more like Toronto where the poor can generally get help, but we don't mind putting up condos or new office space.

Also the Swedes do some things that are much more right wing than America, like Free Schools (essentially private schools operating with a government payment, similar to the coupon model). It isn't a left-right difference. Furthermore, Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade.

Also you can't really compare it anyway. There is a far higher amount of cultural homogeneity in Sweden than the US, even in the white portion of the US, and the average IQ is 3 or 4 points higher.

As for homelessness, you are living in SF. This is what you get. The US has a much higher veteran rate than Sweden which highly correlates to homelessness (usually due to PTSD and associated drug abuse) and the capital of homelessness in North America is SF.

> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person.

I think he means that there are 10 cans for the entire condo complex.

Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going.

Consider the opposite extreme, having a single bin that absolutely everything goes in. It would be easy to just completely forget about whatever it is you're throwing away and never think about what ultimate fate each piece is destined for.

It would sure keep it in the forefront of my mind, but not in the way I think you'd like! More: "How can I get rid of the politicians who force me into this menial waste of time?"

I will happily pay in taxes whatever the added processing costs are for allowing me to continue to use Cambridge's terrific "single stream" system, which allows for an astonishing range of waste in a single bin. It doesn't cover the hazardous stuff like batteries and CFLs, but you can make that easier, too, without requiring individuals to maintain bins for 5 different varieties of plastic.

In which case you charge for rubbish collection on a combination of weight/volume and make it a premium for unsorted refuse. That gives people a choice. Pay the premium if they want someone else to do it, or take extra care themselves and save a bit of money.

I think in Paris (?) they have some underground storage for recycling on street corners. Someone was telling me about that when I was there.

In New Zealand (and some other places), garbage is put out in plastic bags - only official bags are picked up - and you pay per bag used.

Incentives to minimise hard-to-recycle waste could be a good thing.

Does requiring people to sort their trash actually work? What sort of feedback and enforcement is in place?

Where I live in California, we are given a large recyclables bin and a small trash bin, with the option to pay more for a larger trash bin. This sounds like an incentive to recycle, but it's a perverse one. If I were to just put all my trash in the recycle bin, there would be no consequences at all for me, because the recyclables truck just dumps it all into a big communal heap, with no possibility to trace it back to me. Is this cardboard too wet to recycle? Who knows? In it goes!

"Does requiring people to sort their trash actually work? What sort of feedback and enforcement is in place?"

No it doesn't. I live in so-called 'progressive' Holland where separate waste collection has been done for years. It's not efficient now any more (in 2013 we have better waste separation methods as was had in the 1990's) but people have become conditioned to 'separating waste = green' that it's hard to reverse now. Plus, the whole infrastructure exists now anyway, so the switching costs would take another decade to make back - an investment for which there is simply no room in these times.

That sounds like it is working, but you don't like it.

Oh sorry I was making another point than what was being asked. Yes it works, but what I am arguing is that it isn't the most efficient way. I do like it in the sense that it was the only thing we had for the last 20 years, and I obviously support separating waste (be it at the consumer level or centralized) for environmental purposes, but it's hard to tell what (in hindsight) was best: that we had separation at consumer for the last 20 years, but that we will have to live with a more inefficient system for the next decade(s); or that we would have postponed separate collection 20 years ago until let's say 10 or 5 years ago, and started with the more efficient (centralized) separation system.

It's an interesting question, and very difficult to answer. Like climate studies, you'd need to calculate so many side effects, that your answer might be different depending on the context you take into account. I've discussed this topic quite extensively with colleagues in urban planning and environmental sciences in countries across the world, but nobody knows (obviously) and people's preferences tend to align with what they have or have worked on. Personally I tend towards the automated / technology solutions (i.e., centralized), but I can't tell if that's because of a cognitive bias or from an increased ability in estimating these sort of things from experience, so that basically nullifies my opinion, too.

It's water under the bridge anyway.

Yes, to the point that people take pride in it. Colleagues suffer minor, humorous ridicule for putting something in the wrong bin and there are conversations about plastic type 5 vs plastic type 2. One guy is designated "Recycle Man" for leading office efforts. Under most desks in the office are two bins, one for cardboard/paper/etc. I don't know anyone who even thinks about it as a chore now.

It's counterintuive to me that forcing people to sort their trash will lead to a fondness for recycling. Did the draft engender a fondness for the Vietnam war?

A different approach would be to charge people for trash pickup. If the cost for sorted trash removal is enough of a savings, then people will do it.

(Living in Sweden)

Actually, the Swedes really do believe in this. Everyone I know conscientiously sorts their trash.

A Swede will happy carry their own bags up to their rooms in hotels, too. Most hotels don't have porters. They don't have the whole tipping thing either generally. You go through life doing things for yourself, not paying others to do things for you.

Maybe its the US psyche and is some kind of superiority complex? I'm half-serious; why do people on your side of the pond think its a hassle to sort their trash?

I think you're dead on with the "boo-hoo god forbid I'd have to sort my trash, raise my own kid, pack my grocery bag, carry my luggage mentality."

Whenever I'm offered these services I feel annoyed - what do I look like, a giant baby? I can carry my own bag.

The larger the wealth gap is in society, the more people become obsessed with comparing themselves to others and the more patterns we see designed to enable them to feel they come out on top in this comparison.

I've never understood porters in hotels. You've just transported your bags for possibly thousands of miles and many hours but they are going to take them the last few meters to your room by elevator on a cart and then they expect a tip for it.

In the civilised days when they began, I assume you had just been chauffeured to the hotel and the chauffeur has handed your bags off to the porter.

Maybe you'd still be wheezing from all of the road dust you'd been inhaling in the carriage the entire ride.

Only the more expensive hotels in the United States have porters. The Courtyard Marriott in Gettysburg, PA doesn't send a uniformed porter to get your bags. As far as porters in hotels in Sweden, most of the luxury hotels do (at least in Stockholm.) Trying to turn this into an "American superiority complex" thing is completely silly. Visit any major city in the world and nearly any full-service hotel in the world and there will be porters -- and it isn't just for the American tourists. I happen to like the Swedes and Sweden, however I hardly consider their culture any more superior than any other. All cultures have value and generalizations of any culture are pretty ridiculous.

man you just love yourself some tangents dont you?

According to what I read about our history, the US tried to get rid of tipping early on, in an effort to have a more egalitarian society, but people couldn't stand the idea.

As far as I have ever seen, most people don't mind sorting the trash, the different bins just aren't there.

In places where there is a single recycling can, I can't remember anyone throwing recycling into the trash can, with righteous indignation, muttering about the extra cost to their personal time.

"Actually, the Swedes really do believe in this. Everyone I know conscientiously sorts their trash."

Too bad they're wrong though. Talk about 'Stockholm syndrome' (get it? I'm so funny)

Are you really under the impression that there are people out there who believe recycling is immoral and will lead to countless deaths?

Sorting your garbage rarely leads to a sucking chest wound.

It's worked in Australia IMO. Everyone takes recycling a lot more seriously than 10+ years ago when it was first on the radar. It's natural now and is done without thinking.

Change leads to awareness. Whether this awareness leads to fondness depends on the context. In the case of the environment, this seems to sometimes be the case. I think young Swedish people have a much greater appreciation of and respect for the environment than our parents.

In the case of the Vietnam war, the awareness clearly lead to - how should I put it - an extreme absence of fondness, as it should have.

its counterintuitive to me that you think something intelligent and good for society like sorting the trash that you generate is even remotely comparable to fighting a war that shouldn't have happened to start with - and spraying agent orange at a bunch of innocents.

I won't defend the Vietnam War, however generalizing the bunch innocents is a bit daft. The US gets criticized for torture yet the US version of torture compared in no way to the torture perpetuated by that 'bunch of innocents.' Let's not even get into that 'peaceful' Communist group just across te border known as the Khmer Rouge. It's stylish to be a Che Guevara-shirt wearing anti-American granola eating hippy, yet Che, the North Vietnamese, the Soviets and every other group idolized by armchair academics were far more brutal than anything ever done by the United States. Yes there were innocent victims, but it takes two sides to make a war. And given the state of Vietnam today (compared to, for example, South Korea) the war seems like it was justified in intent despite the deficiencies of its execution. Bloggers have been sent to prison in Vietnam for simply critising the government. As 'bad' as the US might be, at least we don't send people for prison for speaking their mind. You can still burn te flag if you want, that's your right. The fact that you can't do that in Vietnam kind of proves my point.

Go blame Ho Chi Minh as well for the war that shouldn't have happened. Of course by doing that, you'll likely be kicked out of the organic food co-op.

I prefer that we kept all politics off Hacker News. Nobody cares about my (or your) political views unless they pertain to something extremely relevant to the tech and startup communities.

Your post could've done without the first paragraph - the "I prefer that we kept all politics off Hacker News" was sufficient without the over-the-top generalisations like "anti-American granola eating hippy".

Also the conviction of the North Vietnamese and Che Guevara of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.

if im an anti-american granola eating hippy (yum granola!) - then you´re nothing more than a stars and stripes boxers wearing nut - who´s gone off on a tangent about politics - the idea was just to point out that theres a very big difference between something thats generally a positive thing - and something that obviously was in a very gray zone. Don´t get your panties up in a bunch and get all ad hominem - the point wasn´t to bash the US - the point was that the poster before me seemed to make a very skewed comparison that just didnt make sense.

also for wanting to keep politics off HN - you failed pretty badly at that mate!

Equating these uses of "force" is an almost troll-like stretch.

It's a standard libertarian scowl of disapproval.

Instead of charging, they simply just leave the trash on the curb if they notice it has too much of the wrong type of garbage in it. Its a little annoying having so many different days when trash needs to be taken out, but sorting it isn't that annoying once you start doing it for a month or so.

> Also, forcing individual _taxpayers_ to sort trash really keeps environmentalism in the forefront of voters' minds, which I imagine makes it much easier to keep environment-friendly legislation and public works projects going.

Indeed. I always get a bit surprised when I see visiting people throwing cans out of the car window, or a plastic wrapper while walking down the street. I guess its a wonder that they only regard the street as a garbage can and not as a toilet.

Cultural norms...

When I was in certain large, developed cities in China (nearly 15 years ago now) most of the toddlers I saw in public had "open bottom" outfits on; they literally used the street as a toilet. Some parents would hold them over the bin when they needed to go. Many wouldn't.

They still do that, even in the nicest neighborhoods in Shanghai. I lived there a little over a year ago and it was poop central for the little ones on the street. Allegedly it results in faster potty training and one could argue that it cuts down on diaper waste.. so it could be called environmental, despite the horror is causes for the foreigners who witness it. Some parents did have more talent than others at aiming their child appropriately.

I was in a train going North-East from Beijing (can't remember where we were going, or more to the point, whether it was a 'rural' train or not) as little as 5 years ago, and the grandmother in the section opposite the corridor from us made here grandson go nr 2 right there in the middle of the train. Every time the train would swerve, the turds would roll from left to right and back :O| Cultural differences be damned, who in their right mind would accept this as a common practice...

I live across the street from a small park. It's sad how much garbage is in my yard after the Saturday tee-ball games. I just wonder how these same people would feel if I came to their neighborhood and just dumped my trash in their yards.

Wait, you're saying I left India for this!

Yes 10 cans for the complex, which consists of ballpark 50 units. Awareness is definitely a huge part of it - a lot of once "progressive" ideas like recycling and sexual equality was taught to us as kids, and the kids ended up educating the parents.

Your point is valid; when you "abstract" away recycling to a centralized plant, the individual most likely won't consider the environmental impact of his purchasing decisions and habits nearly as much.

How does 10+ cans for a condo complex work? 10+ different chutes? Do you have to walk your trash down to the trashcans yourself?

Yeah, that's the way it's usually done (that you walk your trash down to a common room where the cans are, that is). All garbage chutes I've seen in the last few years have been bolted shut.

Regarding schools: the "Free Schools" are quite unusual, almost all universities and certainly the top ones are run by the state and free, and people are accepted based on academic merit. I went to arguably the best engineering physics program in Sweden; it was free, and they paid me a $250 stipend per month, the rest of money needed to live was borrowed at a low rate.

It is true that Sweden has cut services a lot in the last few years and the "right wing" coalition had unprecedented voter support in the last election. There's a massive backlash against them, and I'll be shocked if the ruling coalition or party doesn't swing massively left next year - as will most Swedes.

Regarding vets: yes I'm sure that if you send somebody to the hell that is war, and doesn't take care of him when he comes back, that this will increase his chances of ending up in the streets vs the average civilian. I'm not sure what your point is. Maybe we should reallocate some of the wealth to taking better care of these people, and enter into fewer wars?

"Regarding schools: the "Free Schools" are quite unusual..."

In the UK, the right-wing Education Minister, Michael Gove, is a particularly enthusiastic proponent of "free schoools" and has been strongly influenced by the Swedish free school model. In fact, the 2010 Conservative election manifesto even included a page praising the Swedish free school policy.

1) Nothing is free. We pay the most taxes in the world. 2) We don't accept based on academic merit. We accept based on government unemployment programs.

Edit: Spello

> We don't accept based on academic merit. We accept based on government unemployment programs

That's overly pessimistic.

Compared to most of the world, the fact that the size of your wallet doesn't directly determine which schools we can go to is remarkable.

But now you are saying that has do with the size of your wallet (or rather lack of), which is true, but that does not mean we are basing it on academic merit. That is jumping to conclusions and assumptions.

What is the academic merits to become a teacher today? Zero?

Edit: Added extra paragraph.

> That is jumping to conclusions and assumptions.

Sure. I didn't arrive at this through reasoning, it's a contingency. I hope I didn't leave anything non-obvious out:

* In most places, you have to afford the school and you need the grades/SAT scores (academic merit).

* In Sweden, you don't need to afford the school: you only need the grades/SAT scores (academic merit).

But I'm saying that is not based on academic merit when anyone can attend.

Not anyone can - only those who can get the grades. And while grades are an imperfect measure of academic merit they're the best one we have.

For a long time we have had a public policy that anyone can go to higher education if they want to and in combination with different labor programs that pushes unemployed and under skilled to universities, that leads to undermining academic merits to a point where its not left.

And that we granted every small education institution with the status of university.

So to sum up: the goal of "free" education is to make higher education available for more people. This will lead to lowering of standards of already existing programs because more will attend (normal distribution of skill) and in the universities self interest a majority will pass because universities is paid per graduated student.

And with a gradual lowering of standards this opens up for unqualified students to attend, especially in combination with government programs.

Ergo academic merits does not matter.

In Swedish Almost anyone can be a teacher http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/nastan-vem-som-helst-kan-bl...

This is now norm on many programs at the Swedish universities.

I gather you're unhappy about the falling demand for a degree in teaching, but the whole argument you're describing is politicised and unsupported. The article suggests there's low demand for a degree in teaching; extending that to "academic merits does not matter" is a crazy stretch.

This link shows statistics for people accepted into higher education for this fall semester: http://statistik.vhs.se

Both in the design of the system and in its actual results, it's clear that academic merit matters more than any other factor.

That link just shows academic merits relative to other students, not absolute academic merits.

Politicized is the one that accepts the reality of politics, I don't because I look at result not intent.

The suggestion that Sweden is homogeneous is too common and simply false. I've lived in Stockholm for 6 months and it's a very diverse city. Far more cultural and economic diversity than, say, many Midwestern cities of comparable size. In fact, wikipedia can point you to the facts "As of 2011, Statistics Sweden reported that around 19.6% or 1.858.000 inhabitants of Sweden had foreign background, defined as born abroad or born in Sweden by two parents born abroad." (from "Demographics of Sweden")

What is more, the notion that homogeneity and IQ have anything to do with the capacity of a nation to recycle is both offensive and absurd.

It's the standard racial theory of Scandinavian social order aka 'We would be like them, except better, if it weren't for those stupid, violent, harmony-disrupting minorities.'

It's definitely not homogenous. It's getting "culturally enriched" by Somali Muslim "refugees" over time. The enrichment includes street harassment of Swedish women, no-go enclaves of illegal immigrants, increased rape rates, female genital mutilation, and other nice things.

If you get an ethnic Swede drunk and ask him about third world immigration and its effect on his nation, be prepared for an eye opener!

Oh, and there's lots of racism too, as represented here. We even have a party in the parliament that represents opinions like that.

Yeah, nationalist / nativist parties seem to be part and parcel of the European nations - e.g. Front National in France, PVV in Netherlands.

I'm an ethnic Swede and I hope Internet anonymity is a sufficient substitute for being drunk. I don't mind the immigrants. I think the overall effect on the nation is positive.

And I'm fed up with stupid racists that think that they just say what everyone really thinks. You don't represent us. We think you are stupid and ignorant.

Definitely agree about the racists.

Much like the internet at large is getting culturally enriched by trolls from flashback. Is it really necessary to bring a conversation about recycling down to this level?

A big factor in homelessness is also just weather. You get far more homeless people in a location with year-long homogeneously nice weather like SF, because you actually won't die being homeless. Swedish winters are harsh, and the country's not so big that these people can just go somewhere nicer for the winter. I don't have any stats (does anyone?), but I'm certain a good proportion of the homeless in SF arrived from further away.

I do think the northern European schooling/education model makes a lot more sense, and could be a solution for a lot of the societal problems at the root. However, the cultural diversity of SF makes that a much more complex problem than it is in Sweden/Finland. And so we come full circle, this stuff is just not that easy as "look it works over there, we should do it too"

A couple of counterexamples. Moscow used to have plenty of homeless people (not sure how it is these days) despite harsh winters. New Zealand has very few, despite similar weather conditions to SF.

While it's probably true that SF has more homeless due to migration, I don't think it's the root cause. You really have to look at the societal structure, government support and so on for the causes.

New Zealand doesn't have anywhere that poor people can immigrate from. But you can take a bus or two to California.

I still don't like the regimented age-based education heirarchy, which Europe still subscribes to. Beyond basic skills for human interaction (an understanding of the dominant language, basic arithmetic, necessary social skills like knowing traffic signs, what emergency lights mean what, how to calculate taxes, how interest rates work, and some basic history of the world and the local country) the most important thing is getting them interested in learning more, but it has to be by their own will, or else they won't absorb the information you try to force down their throats. The best way to do that is through exposure - I can easily see children aged 6 - 12 going through a school system where half their day is learning basic requirements to function in society (and none of the really unnecessary things for basic interaction like 18th century literature, ancient civilizations, trigonometry, and the number of electron orbitals on Iron) and the other half is exposure to professions, concepts, and ideas (go to a museum, go to a baseball game, go watch the local smelters forge aluminum, observe a busy intersection and discuss traffic patterns). In other words, to expose them to and enable them to explore a broader spectrum of the world than sitting behind decks looking at a chalkboard reading from a book and writing down notes to repeat on a test and forget the next day.

Theory of education systems is really complicated, and something I tried to read a lot about, and hypothesize about. I used to think along your exact lines as well. However, this is a very instrumentalist [1] approach to education.

I don't think this is terrible, but it has costs associated with it that will become apparent further down the road -- similar to how the existing education system born from the industrial revolution's needs has proven to. The system you have suggested has a prominent lack of means to introduce people to advanced theoretical physics, economics research, astronomy, abstract mathematics, etc, you get the picture. A generation without a hint of knowledge in the non-practical fields will function fine in the short-term, but it will lead to a stagnation of advancement until an external trigger brings it back about.

Essentially, as I'm guessing you're a hacker-hustler-type, you see the primary course of education to promote passion in "doing," and that's my first instinctual priority for education as well. But classically, education has had a role to do much more than just that (albeit extremely inefficiently) for many generations, and it could be detrimental to focus on only one educational priority of "learn to do things well", with a potential to lose being able to gain exposure to other kinds of intellectual commitments. Maybe it won't happen, but it's a real risk. Who knows what we may have lost already from generations past?

Of course, everyone in the world agrees that the "sitting behind desks competing on test scores forgetting all the knowledge and then stumbling through relearning the real world from scratch" model of today's education is broken and pretty stupid, but it's not that straightforward to fix, unfortunately. Your suggestion is definitely something a single school could adopt (and broad institutionalized educational requirements should be abolished), and I would love to send my future kids there over anything that exists today.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

Sweden has cut services and taxes more than any other western country in the past decade.

They still have some of the highest taxes in the world and an extensive welfare state.

Though statistically you are correct, I'd like to see a comparison of not only current tax rates, but tax rates compared to debt/deficits.

The US may be collecting less taxes, but if they're just putting the remainder on credit, then they aren't really any further ahead (and possibly behind).

I did a quick search, but didn't come up with anything.

Any such comparison is tricky. Swedish taxes also pay for child care, medical care, elderly care, and even burial, which are seen more as a purely personal/employer cost in the US.

Sweden collects high taxes even compared to other nations. When it comes to debt, the US is the outlier.

Actually the US debt-to-GDP ration isn't all that bad, and its deterioration (or increase, depending on interpretation...) of the last decade is largely due to spending on war, not due to fiscal or socio-economic factors (that is to say, this is spending that can 'easily' be cut). Whereas the other countries with ratios similar to that of the US have historically not had much better figures, and their deficits are due to enshrined socio-economic structures.

Considering that the average trash stays for at least 10-12 hours inside the house/apartment, it's inefficient to segregate once the waste is in this mixed state for that duration. At least the organic/inorganic waste has to be segregated at source.

My city (Oslo) has reduced some of the cans by having an optical sorting robot at the garbage processing facility. You can use one can for general, biodegradable and plastic by using different colored bags.

My city (Trollhättan, Sweden) had that policy until a few months ago. But earlier this year we got a notice saying that the city's per capita waste bills were some of the highest in Sweden, so they were switching to a bin-based separation system instead.

So on the IQ thing, is that because they properly care for the physical and mental well-being of their children, expectant mothers and parents? Or is it because they are some kind of Aryan super-race?

It's politically very hard to study the first hypothesis scientifically, and practically impossible for the second. So we don't know, and won't until society has matured to the point we can face these questions.

(I understand what little evidence we have points to maternal health/diet/wellbeing as the single biggest causal factor. Handouts of food - or simply money - to mothers in the latter part of pregnancy are the most effective intervention we know. But again, we know very little and it's very difficult to find anyone who can study these effects from a position of neutrality)

Probably not.

> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person.

I don't understand how you can make this claim when it has so obviously worked to great success for Sweden. The evidence shows that they are the best at managing their trash; why shouldn't we learn from them?

> It's inefficient to do 10+ cans per person

It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial.

I would love to have 10 cans and help the environment. Something like this:

Glass, plastic, paper, metal, bio/food, electronics, rubber, textiles, everything else.

Right now most of that stuff gets mixed and gets piled up polluting ground water.

> Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial.

Collecting 10 cans is not really trivial. And even with 10 different cans, the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone). Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors. Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities.

Industrial waste sorting certainly is expensive -- due to capital expenditure, not ongoing costs -- but it's needed in every recycling solution. The problem with expecting the public to sort, is that humans are less good at sorting than (well-designed) machines and relying on humans sorting reducing the percentage of recyclable material that is actually recycled.

There are serious arguments that all general waste should be machine sorted since it's the only way to maintain maximum levels of recycling.

> the result still needs to be further sorted (there are 20 or 30 types of recyclable plastic alone

They actually have machines for that. There's a youtube video on how they sort types of plastic.

> Glass needs to be sorted into 4-5 different colors

Sorting by color is trivial to automate.

> Paper needs to be sorted into 4-5 different qualities.

Yes. However where I live you have to separate cardboard from everything else. Most other paper gets shredded into pulp and recycled.

"It's actually much more efficient. Sorting is expensive. Collecting cans is trivial."

Nope. 10 years ago it was like that, not any more. Sorting technology has gotten much better. Here is the thing: you need to sort anyway, even if you collect waste separately, because you can't rely on everybody being 100% correct in putting stuff in the right container. So 2 decades ago when people started collecting separately, the sorting stations were partly automated and could only process relatively small amounts of 'pollution' (e.g. cans in heaps of paper), and the rest was done manually. Nowadays machines can handle much more capacity, and the overhead of collecting things separately has become higher than the costs of processing everything from a big heap of mixed materials.

In Finland, neighbouring Sweden, we also have more different containers for different trash than you'd care for. It takes time to learn all that and when you've finally sorted out all your trash properly to different bins, you sit on your balcony and look at the garbage truck reversing to the yard. The guy goes inside the garbage shed and brings out one bin of certain color, empties it in the truck, and drives away to the next address only to come back a few days later to do the same. When your mind accidentally multiplies this activity by the number of different colored bins you have there, you begin to imagine the local emissions produced by these different trucks circling around all the time, emptying one type of trash each. There are so many bins that each of them must be rather small, so the buffering capacity of the garbage sheds causes excess traffic and pollution due to regular visits by the garbage trucks. Further, some things are collected in certain recycling points, such as non-returnable glass waste like jars and olive oil bottles, which means people take them there with private cars!

For a long time we used to have general waste and compostables. That was quite understandable because you really want the compostables into a separate heap because of...well, composting and you can produce bio gas off composts if the percentage of decomposing waste is high enough. But I'm pretty sure the separation of glass, wood, papers, cardboards etc. could be done in some automated way that reaches a good enough success rate that would make it economically and ecologically viable.

It depends on the scale. In Denmark, while we can do it privately by driving to recycle stations - highly inefficient as you mention. The sorting in urban areas however, is mostly glass, paper (and the like), and general waste - it does not matter if a truck picks this up, because he would have to do so as general waste anyway, if it wasn't sorted. Many larger stores also have facilities for batteries, but I'm unsure how many uses them as most people I know toss them in with the general waste.

It has also been tried many times to separate organic matter from the rest (different colour of bags), and using automatic systems to sort it. It has been mostly dropped because it's more expensive than just burning everything unfortunately. Which brings me to the main point. We can be very efficient and recycle most of the waste, find a optimum point where we minimize the environmental footprint - it's just expensive, and the first thing to go when the city need to save money. People just don't care about future generations, or don't believe it's a problem, to accept the cost of recycling.

I live in London, and here recycling is largely driven by cost cutting: Landfills are limited, and there are severe restrictions on incinerators, so many councils use recycling as a way to drive down their costs for waste disposal.

That is political incentive though, they aren't quite as strict here. I think, no matter how we do it, it will be more expensive to recycle. That is, unless there is a political decision to tax waste burning/landfills, or resources become very scarce.

But it really is a shame, because high density areas like Copenhagen, are ideal for pushing recycling. You get quantities, and you don't have to collect over a large geographical area. So the running cost of collecting is significantly less, and you can build larger and more efficient facilities to process and recycle the waste.

essentially free of homeless

I feel it's worth mentioning that other cities and even other states have long had an unofficial policy of sending their homeless/crazy people to places like SF. This has now become the subject of lawsuits - see for example http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/12/first-lawsuit-fil...

As a fellow Euro, I agree with your overall argument, however.

> I don't know but I assume that part of the reason that Swedes are able to deal effectively with the trash is that they sort it properly at the source, so that they more easily can process it.

Nope, you can burn unsorted garbage. The reason for sorting is so you can recycle materials instead of putting it in a incinerator.

so when is sweden going to accept open immigration from all of the poorer neighbors?

I'll be impressed if it can keep social cohesion while allowing immigrants to make a better life for themselves. It's easy for an elite society to stay closed and elite. SF is open to some of the poorest people on earth.

Did you just call the American poor "some of the poorest people on earth?" Or were you talking about immigrants? One town in Sweden (Södertälje) has received more Iraqi refugees alone than all of the US has, the country that actually started the war. Sweden's immigrants are actually some of the poorest people on earth, mainly refugees of war and people who would be prosecuted/killed if they returned to their home country. Contrast that with the US that receives heaps of well educated people every year. Today, the ratio of foreign born people in Sweden is roughly equal to that of the US, but again, mainly refugees.

I was referring to the large amount of asian, mexican and central american people who live in SF. SF is known as an amnesty city (along with NYC, LA and Chicago).

What is the racial/ethnic diversity of Sweden? Showing stats on high immigration where the top of list is finnland, germany, denmark, etc. It's great sweden takes refugee's, but that is easy if they are a tiny fraction of the population. What percentage of the population is a different race or ethnicity? Here is san fransisco http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html

Your categories (being the US census categories) are, of course, US-centric so cannot be directly compared to other countries. That is, in the Swedish context, why should Swedes and Iraqis both be categorized as "white" while Chileans are in their own category of "Hispanic or Latino"?

For some hard numbers, "15% of the [Swedish] population was born abroad, 5% of the population was born in Sweden to two parents born abroad, and another 7% was born in Sweden to one parent born abroad. Resulting in 27% of the Swedish population being of at least partly foreign descent." (Wikipedia for Immigration_to_Sweden#Current_population_of_immigrants_and_their_descendants . That also shows the complete breakdown, with Iraq, Bosnia, former Yugoslavia, and Iran in positions #2-5, after Finland.)

Compare that to the US: "According to the Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey, the US immigrant population was 38,517,234, or 12.5 percent of the total US population." (http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=8... )

12.5% for the US is less than 15% for Sweden.

It's hard to compare the Swedish immigration numbers to the ones in the link you gave, which talks about ethnicity in San Francisco, because the Swedish government tracks nationality, not ethnicity.

It's also difficult to compare San Francisco, which has a higher than average diversity in the US, with all of Sweden. For example, in Botkyrka Municipality near Stockholm nearly half the population has at least one parent born in another country, and that rises to 65% in one of its neighborhoods; a neighborhood where 26% of the neighborhood is a foreign national.

By comparison, that number is 30% (instead of 26%) for the SF Bay Area. However, even then it's not a good comparison because I picked a single neighborhood of 82k people in Sweden, against the Bay Area, which has a population of 7.15 million. The entirety of Sweden is only 9.5 million people.

So yes, you can easily say that San Francisco is a very culturally diverse city. No one disagrees with you.

However, purplelobster's point was that Sweden currently, and over the last two decades, takes in a lot of refugees on a per-capita basis, and even more than the US does - a fact which is not in dispute.

This is something people frequently ignore, and point to the areas of the US being culturally diverse as an excuse for poor school results or high crime. This annoys me slightly as it carries an implication that there are some ethnic backgrounds which are inherently bad\stupid\poor\whatever.

My implication is different (altho I agree some people use it as a racist argument). My implication is that social cohesion policies are not easy when you have a ethically diverse population with different cultures and values. It's perfectly natural for people to form into groups and not trust 'others' (which isn't racist). This natural tendency makes it hard for social policies to be successful. When 95% of your population is white, with similar cultural values, its easy to have a policy where you spread the wealth to fellow group members you identify with. It's a lot harder to have policies when your population is split into 3 different camps.

As a EU member Sweden is open to most of our European neighbors... We also take in way more immigrants than most.

"SF is open to some of the poorest people on earth." no more so than the rest of the United States is insofar as immigration goes. I don't believe there are many (any?) people living in SF that qualify as the poorest people on earth though.

SF is an amnesty city, with a lot of immigrants from central america. Many other US cities have an active deportation policy, SF does not. SF does not push out the homeless either.

My point was if Stockholm had the same weather and immigration policies as San Fransisco, it would be facing some of the same challenges with poverty and homelessness.

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