Should you still separate recyclables if your town was just landfilling all garbage together, recyclables and non-recyclables?

Our "dump" on Cape Cod is now the "transfer station".

People wash and sort their recyclables into the appropriate containers and there is a monitor there to make sure everybody does so.

At the end of the day, when the t.s. closes, all the sorted trash is dumped into a single container and hauled up to Rochester, MA and burned. Nothing is recycled.

In Boston, my neighbors sort all their trash and put them out back in the alley for pick up.

The trash truck comes and dumps all the sorted containers into the back of a truck. Nothing is recycled.

People are dumb.

Now that China isn't buying are recycled trash this is happening a lot more. I have been composting and the only place I can drop off is at certain farmer's markets. Which is such bullshit. Why make it so difficult to be a good steward of the environment.

That in 90% of towns, OP. Recycling is a sham just for people to feel good about themselves.

In many places, recycling is falling apart and mostly because it's too expensive. Also people are FUCKING LAZY IDIOTS:. Example - there are local ordinances in my city - there are categories of recycling that must be offered. It got to where the city is required to have bins at big building and also local recycling corners. But, lazy fucking idiotic citizens chuck ANYTHING into the compost bin, ANYTHING into the paper and cardboard bin. Etc. Apparently the sanitation department is obliged to burn it all because it cannot be resorted, but they cannot remove the bins because the city mandates this. Whatever one shows in the bins is free! Otherwise, all one's trash must go into expensive bags - about a buck a bag. This is partly why fucking dump twats chuck whatever they want into the recycle bins.

China, China just stopped taking our recyclables.

The phrase is “reuse, reduce, recycle “ on purpose. Recycling a lot of stuff is expensive or not worth it

Our local recycling company hauls glass and stuff that's not clean/dry to the dump. So, if you don't rinse out every last bit of mustard or soap, they haul the plastic container to the dump. How many people actually make the effort? So, we get billed for our garbage, and then the recycler bills the city for what it has to haul to the dump. And who does the city pass that cost along to? Recycling like this is a racket. Not to mention what it costs me to clean everything to their specification.

Glass pop bottles with deposits of a dollar a bottle should be a thing again.

they are in some states

The triggered are triggered again.

I live in an apartment building and it drives me crazy. I spend ages sorting out and cleaning my recycling - then head down to put it in the bins only to see that other people are throwing in everything at random. We have specific bins for food waste, which is a great idea. But people toss in their food scraps in plastic bags, which means the entire lot will go to landfill. Everybody complains about global warming and microplastics, but if they can't even do their fucking recycling properly, what hope do we have?

I just don’t understand how recycling doesn’t pay for itself, let alone make money? How is this?

Because it's cheaper to make new plastic than recycle old, Blanche.

r!0, that stuff isn't being recycled. It's being hauled off to a landfill or an incinerator.

Recycling is a myth. There's no money in it. Even China won't take it anymore.

If only it were just food scraps in plastic. They toss entire take out meals into the compost. How about florist bouquets including styrofoam, wire, plastic tray, sparkly spirals. Giant turkey carcass. pills. MEDICINE PILLS. People do this on purpose. Many many people have a low current of anti-social behaviour and they need to do shit like this.

The problem is not recycling but in how we package everyday purchases. Is it really necessary to put 6 muffins in a plastic sarcophagus?

Recycling has become a failed endeavor. At least 50% of what you send to be recycled just gets thrown away.

China and other countries aren't buying our waste any more. You can;t even pay people to take it.

When I was a kid, we still had milk in gallons-sized glass jars delivered from a farm to our house.

Mama would skim the cream off the top and set it aside for baking and other uses.

And we would drink the rest of the milk from the glass jar.

Empty jars would be left outside for the farmer to pick up and replace.

The milk was not pasteurized. But we did not use any plastic to keep the milk from spoiling.

All we do right now is put lipstick on a pig, because barely any country is able to properly recycle all of their citizens' trash so no new trash is added to the world's overall pollution.

In a couple of years it might be even too late for building one-way trash rockets that are being shot into the sun to make the trash go away.

How do you find out what your city is doing with the recyclables?

Ask the "garbage men". They know.

Maybe I'm crazy but there seems to be one way only to fix this problem - governments must demand that all manufacturers stop using plastic that isn't biodegradable - and go back to aluminum, metal, glass, cloth, netting, etc., like they did before plastics.

I quit recycling containers that need much cleaning. A quick rinse is ok but I'm not cleaning out mustard and mayo containers. I read somewhere they really are only looking for metals (aluminum cans mostly), and most of what's left gets chucked into the landfill.

I find it weird about the "China won't take are recyclables anymore" argument. The problem was we should never have been shipping it there in the first place, which just adds to the carbon footprint and cost. We should have and need to create those processing plants here and make them profitable or at least sustainable in the first place.

Our landfills are maxing out and so barges of trash are shipped 6000 miles to China and dumped in their landfills. So very green of us.

We should send all of our trash out into space.

when a new item is invented it shouldn't be able to be put on the market until there is a proper way of disposing it.

R21 all that will go into the landfill, anyway.

The solution include reusable containers with deposits. Wrapping that can be ecologically burned. Biodegradable wrap. What ever happened to wax cardboard? I bet that wasn't an ecological disaster. What about wax paper in general. Lots of food used to come wrapped in papers of different sorts.

At some point in the future, there will be automated separating by robotics and landfills will be mined so all is not lost.

r11

Because it costs more to recycle than to create the product new.

^Now. It might not in the future.

OP = Rosemary Ackerman

You should be storing your recycling for the day your town repents.

[quote]The problem was we should never have been shipping it there in the first place, which just adds to the carbon footprint and cost

The shopping containers have to go back to China empty or not. Lord knows we don’t make anything to send there.

A commenter on NPR says it's better to bury plastic than to ship it to China for recycling. China dumps much of its unrecyclable plastics into the oceans.

In the UK in some areas we have 6 bins per house, they aren't all emptied every week and the bin for non recycled was is only emptied every 3 weeks.

90% of it goes to landfill or is burned.

So it's really not a bad thing that China's saying no to taking more recyclables, R35, if they were dumping the unwanted ones in the sea.

Why don't they use those pollution-free incinerators? Yeah, I know... money. Well, what good will all the saved money be when the ocean - and then the planet dies?

I can't believe how short-sighted most of the world is. It's tragic.

* When I said why don't "they" use incinerators - I didn't mean the Chinese - I meant why doesn't every country that can afford it do that?

Recycling does nothing to help the environment. Big industry and especially big AG is the biggest emitter of carbon. We also need to stop using plastic altogether since so much of it ends up in the ocean and in the stomachs of fish and birds.

Filters exist for incinerators and even coal plants.

The coal stack filters are expensive and kill the whole point of coal. It's cheap. The motivation for saving the out of date and ultimately doomed coal industry. is its' cheapness. Obviously Trump and his goons don't give a shit about the enviroment.

Burning trash pollution can be greatly reduced but again it's a money issue.

I do my little best but its disheartening when every supermarket seems to be getting worse about the packaging, in France and Switzerland. Its particularly galling when expensive organic (*bio*) humane foods are packaged up with plastic AND cardboard. Also now that I am single and work too much, I buy too many prepared foods and it all comes with way too much packaging but I don't have it in me to prepare a variety of meals, for 1, day after day after day. I wish I lived in a city with lots of hippies and there were some commune type eateries where they make the real old fashioned effort to be truly ecological.

Any takeout, even fast food, leaves the kitchen trash full. Hopefully all 7 billion of us aren't getting take out all the time.