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Comment by mtanski | Hacker News Reader

I made the mistake of reading the comments on this NYT article. The thread is filled with people who are against recycling at collections points.

This has been one of my pet peeves for a while now. We should be figuring out how stop delegating to end users and figure out the recycling of most things at the aggregation point. It's a huge economic cost to have 9 million people do it vs. centralize it. Not to mention there's a lot of communities in NYC that do a poor job at recycling.

For now I'm going to keep separating my recyclables till they solve it, but doesn't stop be from being angry at the government for punting to me because it's easy. On top of that you self righteous folks who don't want to make it more efficient because they feel good when they sort it themselves.

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I work in the industry (my family runs a collection operation and I focus my effort on software for waste haulers) and I’ve seen huge variance throughout the country in how this is handled. As mentioned earlier, some locations operate a dirty MRF (everything is mixed and the recyclables are sorted out) to centralize the process but the issue you run into is how low quality the majority of the materials are once they are separated. Waste generators in this “system” aren’t consciously putting effort into the way recyclable material is handled so you end up of with a high percentage of residual (not recyclable) that gets landfilled.

Here in CA, South Tahoe Refuse (STR) uses a modified process that I think solves a lot of that problem. They give their customers durable semi-transparent blue bags to fill with recyclable materials. This is somewhat ceremonial but does certainly aid in the sorting efficiency. The waste generator then places those bags in with the regular garbage and one truck collects it all. At the STR operated MRF, they mechanically separate the blue bags and break them open. The resulting recycling is then hand sorted. From what I’ve seen at their MRF, the diverted material is of much higher quality than materials I’ve seen at “regular” dirty MRFs.

I’d personally love to see waste collection return to single container/vehicle or some less impactful method. The current regulations in CA essentially require most locations to run 3 vehicles that collect from 3 different containers at each residence/business since you have to hit a certain level of diversion (keeping materials out of the landfill) that is hard to attain at a dirty MRF. Add to that the CA health code requirements for weekly collection and you can’t just “alternate” collection. The additional fuel consumption, road wear, and other resource demands that result from this multiplication of equipment & travel would be super interesting to research and document. Figuring out a good solution that would allow you to centralize sorting and hit high diversion percentages would result in less pollution/resource demands and potentially lower rates for the waste generators.

Also, now everyone else is experiencing my inverse experience to every “garbage collection” article on HN. I’d love to see more innovation, thought, and exploration around the problem of physically collecting garbage and I love when it’s discussed here on HN.

The South Tahoe method looks like a nice compromise between doing everything at the depot, on the one hand, and asking individuals to do everything, on the other. End users shouldn't be burdened with the (increasingly impossible) task of deciding whether a container is made of PS, LDPE, or whatever. All they need to know is that if something is "plasticky", it goes in the blue bag.

Money can also act as a nice incentive for people to pay attention. Here in Korea, regular garbage needs to be put in special bags that cost a fixed amount per volume. (Garbage collection services are subsidized with revenue from these bags.) So you can save a decent amount of money by putting bulky plastic bottles and empty cans in the recycle bin instead. This system also encourages people to compost as much as they can.

Is the food waste collected separately? Locally we alternate landfill and mixed recycling, but we don't have the high temperature of CA so I guess that helps as well as the food waste (or at least a decent proportion of it) getting collected weekly as a separate stream. Maybe the health code just needs updated?

(Relatedly, garbage trucks, like busses, are ideal targets for hybrid-electric drivetrains due to high gas usage, heavy weight, low speed start-stop journeys, and being driven where pollution (including noise) are issues)

They do seasonal yard waste collection separately from the primary waste stream. When I last visited they only did a small amount of food waste collection since their new processing plant (digester) hasn't been built. Food waste adds in health and odor concerns so they need to build the digester before really expanding that program.

Throughout CA and across the US it is very common to offer a separate service for solid waste and organic waste. Certain areas/haulers have been collecting and processing food waste for decades, but the vast majority aren't yet.

I completely agree about the need to update the health code to allow for more efficient resource management. A minor change could dramatically impact the annual resource consumption of the hauling industry.

Also, YES!! hybrid garbage trucks are certainly on the horizon and will have massive positive impact. Waste Management (wm.com) was working on them at one point around 10 years ago. Now there are several companies working on them.

Related to this, I'm working on software that increases the efficiency/density of collection routes as customers subscribe. I feel that the vast majority of waste haulers have allowed their routes to become inefficient and through applying a layer of software/logic at the subscription point we can help them be more profitable and more efficient.

Personally, I believe the opposite. I think we should do more recycling separation in the home. Centralization makes sense when there is an economy of scale, or, more precisely, when the economy of scale outweighs the costs of homogenization. With recycling, I'm not convinced this is the case.

Ultimately, the stuff being recycled does have to be separated in order to be made useful again. Doing this centrally lets you automate some of that, but you'd be surprised/depressed at how much of the separating is done by hand. There's no magic separator robot at the end of the line.

Also, the quality of the result goes down. Bits of broken glass get mixed into the paper. This makes the end product less valuable, which sucks money out of the entire pipeline. If it's cheaper to single-stream recycle, but the recycled product gets sold for half the price, you haven't really gained anything.

Some more details: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/single...

In constrast, it takes a lot less effort to separate the bottles from the paper on my kitchen counter where they are already sitting there clean and separated. Single-stream recycling to me seems like letting users add a ton of entropy to the system which then has to be laboriously removed later on. Why not just leave the chaos out to begin with?

What I do think is a real problem with decentralizing and letting everyone participate a bit in the recycling process is that there's no feedback loop. I spend an embarrassing amount of mental anguish on trying to decide if some piece of paper can be recycled or composted. I don't know if I'm doing it right, or how I'm doing compared to my neighbors.

I understand the information tracking would be insanely complex, but I would love some kind of feedback loop so I could do things better. Even if it was aggregated among my whole neighborhood, maybe a little friendly competition between other parts of town to get the best recycling score would help get people to participate.

I'm gonna keep this example in mind next time I end up in a subthread about how centralization sucks and distribution is so awesome and unicorns.

I of course agree with your sentiment here. It scares me how general population has everything exactly backwards when it comes to aggregate effects. Fighting centralized sorting is one example. Fretting over unplugged chargers is another (savings here are minuscule; most people would save orders of magnitude more of energy if they stopped driving their cars so much and used public transport every now and then). It's as if people cared only about gestures and feeling good about themselves, and not about actual effects.

From what I've observed, distribution makes sense if your nodes are homogeneous. Centralization makes sense if your nodes are heterogeneous.

People are typically heterogeneous (various levels of training, apathy, emotions, stress) and getting them to recycle properly is impossible. If everyone were a robot with the exact same version of the exact same recycling firmware with no known bugs, distributed recycling would make absolute sense.

I'm gonna keep this example in mind next time I end up in a subthread about how centralization sucks and distribution is so awesome and unicorns.

It's not really a good example - the system is centralized either way, moving the separation task to one side or the other doesn't really change that.

That's because decentralizing this system would make it crazy inefficient, which is why I think it's a good example - the benefits of centralization are somewhat obvious here.

Further, I think most recycling is not correctly sorted. There are many people that really don't care but go through the motions, and many others that care too much and put inappropriate materials in the recycling. Getting everyone to sort the same way is really not possible.

(I've had a previous landlord that was very into recycling and he would remind us to take the caps off of bottles before putting bottles in recycling. Either he was wrong, or most people I see recycle bottles wrong. I also went to a very liberal high school that was super into recycling, and had large central sorting bins, but half the large recycling pickups were rejected for being too impure.)

I remember moving to a new office building in a new city a few years ago and puzzling where to find the recycle bins for the complex. I started asking around and I think I ended up calling the city and discovering that the city murfed[0] all its collected trash.

Ever since then I assumed all recycle bins were just a courtesy interface like the close door button on an elevator and that because everyone does such a crappy job sorting their own trash (I know I do), it all went into the same truck and ended up at a MRF.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_recovery_facility

Tangent, but in Japan the close door button actually works; some elevators will even just sit there and wait until that button is pressed.

They are occasionally functional in the US too. Always worth a check if no one else is approaching the elevator.

There are non-functional "close" buttons? I assumed your GP was saying that the buttons do work, just that they don't need to be used because the door will close anyway. At least that's the case in any building I've been in.

Most(almost all) Elevators in the US have to comply with the ADA codes. One of those is that the doors have to be open for a certain amount of time, period. During this time, the "close" button is required to have no effect. After that time, the "close" button can close the doors, but this is usually about the time the doors would start closing anyways. In essence, the "close" button does nothing most of the time you are hitting it.

Interesting, thanks for the insight.

For anyone else reading this, here's a decent summary of the ADA requirements: http://sterlingelevatorcons.com/white-papers/elevators-and-t...

In Portland, OR the recycling pamphlet provided by the city specifically requests that caps be removed from plastic and glass bottles before recycling.

I still see plenty of caps on plastic bottles in the bins, so at least here it's a case of "doing it wrong".

I live in Portland where curbside recycling is a long-established tradition. A number of years ago the rules changed, instead of the homeowner separating plastic, glass, paper, etc., all of these are put into the same bin. Separating the components became the hauler's responsibility, definitely a more centralized method of handling the task.

Yes, bottle caps are supposed to be removed, but if not probably won't be a major calamity. Anyway, some plastic/bottles have aluminum caps, and those I might leave on vs. tossing in the bin detached. I figure it wouldn't matter, aluminum is recyclable too.

Glass is still a separate (yellow) bin, in Portland, at least in Overlook...

> Anyway, some plastic/bottles have aluminum caps, and those I might leave on vs. tossing in the bin detached. I figure it wouldn't matter, aluminum is recyclable too.

Yes, aluminum is recyclable, but not when attached to a plastic bottle.

How do you expect that your 'attached' cap is going to become detached from the bottle so it can be recycled with the rest of the aluminum, and the plastic bottle recycled with the rest of the plastics?

For plants that use separator machinery, the machines can't unscrew caps from bottles. For plants that use humans, it means the human has to unscrew the cap before it is separated.

That's why the pamphlets say separate the caps from the bottles. The bottle and the cap end up in two different streams, and if they are separated at the outset, it is easier to split them up into the two separate streams at the sorting plant.

We should be figuring out how stop delegating to end users

Here's a fair proposal to do the opposite: At collection points throughout a city's inner suburbs have bins equipped with cheap image sensors scan a QR code on the packaging - each code containing information to identify the type of packaging as well as provide a unique code for each item so it can't be scanned multiple times. Depending on the type of packaging, a certain lid on the bin (among several) will open so that sorting is automatic, and a refund for the packaging can be either donated to a chosen charity or aggregated until a certain dollar value is accrued from future recycling deposits and paid in bulk on the spot.

Biggest limitations: getting a country to alter its packaging requirements to include an advanced bar-code system and a schema that is internationally recognized (ISO certified). The hardware side of things would be trivial, and when concentrated in the inner city you have fewer bins capturing a greater number of people's waste.

Maybe I'm overthinking it - with machine learning the bin could determine the type of bottle/can/container, open the appropriate lid, and watch as the item is surely and safely deposited. A mid-tier smart phone could do this - use similar parts including modem to connect to a server to log a credit for the user/donate to charity. Perhaps an international packaging code schema isn't required.

And then someone prints a billion of those QR codes and drops them in bins.

(As good luck being able to distribute the means of making unique QR codes to every manufacturer under the sun without the method being leaked...)

> And then someone prints a billion of those QR codes and drops them in bins.

From my original post: [...] as well as provide a unique code for each item so it can't be scanned multiple times.

> good luck being able to distribute the means of making unique QR codes to every manufacturer under the sun without the method being leaked

A registrar could issue one-time non-linear increment codes to manufacturers in bulk lots. The main issue would be a central point of failure, but few people would benefit from a billion 5 cent refund QR codes that can only be registered via a bin using a manual process. Also, codes considered compromised can just be deregistered by the registrar.

When you say "separating my recyclables" what do you mean? What you have to do varies widely by country (and even within countries down to county levels).

I personally don't mind my local four bin system (food/garden-compost/mixed-recycling/landfill) as that seems logical to me and takes basically no thought or effort and 3 of the four bins are the same size and get picked up by the same trucks on different days so they've put some thought into the whole system efficiency.

So there's some seperation there (food versus plastic bottle) but I also get to put different types of plastic and glass bottles in the same bin.

Do you have any recommended reading on this? I know this is a problem that can be heavily mitigated by engineering...it just boggles the mind. Even when the trash is sorted at the disposal point, I've wondered how recycling plants efficiently keep bad/non-plastics out of the recycling process.

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