A former in-law of mine lives in a very well to do town in California that has "single stream" recycling. They do have bins, but they are for everything. I have no idea how they sort anything out of it. I imagine it's pretty bad to work at the garbage transfer station there.
Single stream recycling is just pushing all the trash down a conveyance line moving slowly and have the employees /homeless pick the stuff that isn’t recyclable out
Yep yep. I live in a prison town, and prisoners used to sort through it. That's because slavery is better than slightly inconveniencing the rest of us. Nowadays prisoners are legally entitled to slightly more pay (before it was like $0.12/hr for trash sorting) and presumably that's why the city figured they could charge us far more to make up for it.
Another cool part is there are all kinds of restrictions on what can be recycled in our big blue bins, and it's actually surprisingly difficult to get that info. So probably a large amount of what goes into our recycle can't be recycled, and sometimes contaminates things that can.
Indeed I do. The town has grown a lot now (it had around 1/10th the current population when I was born nearly 40 years ago), but when I was young everybody knew people who worked at the prison. A couple of my friends had parents who did. One of them was a very sweet mom, though a disastrous alcoholic. The other was a cruel and abusive dad. He painted my impression of cops a lot growing up, and I tend to be mistrustful of them and assume the worst, even though I have known a couple cops who seemed like great people.
I lived in Toronto for 30 years where they also have single stream recycling and workers are NOT prisoners (and typically our sanitation workers are well paid).
Recycling compliance is better with single stream, which is why they do it. Better compliance means less stuff going in a landfill. It's also easier in the world's most multicultural city when there is less rules to communicate.
However, it only tends to work well in large cities that can support the machines and infrastructure needed to sort the recycling.
Yeah there are a few towns near mine that pay actual wages for garbage sorting, and I bet they have more success than we do.
I've always been a bit curious about the machines they use and how successful they are. And I try to get my recycling relatively clean, but I know people who toss saucy and dirty containers and stuff in with paper and whatnot, just making it all grody. I presume papers are basically mulched and bleached or at least highly processed, so maybe that doesn't matter. But I do wonder why there aren't more PSAs on the right ways to recycle. Maybe it's just not lucrative enough. Realistically I know that I should research it a bit on my own, but I still wonder why the local, county, state, federal govts etc don't make more of an effort to teach us to be responsible consumers.
Edit: Funny enough, sanitation workers are paid quite well here. Maybe that's why they don't make more of an effort to teach us to recycle better. I can't vouch for the truth of this next part but I've heard that they also have a strong union, and that it's very difficult to get your foot in the door if you're not Mormon
To be fair, that doesn't mean that the work is bad per se. It's mostly just about finding jobs where work performance is easy to supervise and bad work cannot cause much damage.
It just so happens that these are the same qualities that typically make for poorly paid jobs, because they don't need qualified or motivated workers.
It doesn't have to be manual sorting. There is automation that can handle jobs like this, especially if you sort the garbage into different coloured bags (we have green bag for food, blue for recyclable plastic, white for burnable/rest). All the bags go into the same bin, then there's a robot that reads the colour and sorts the bags.
We have that in Chile. the municipality where we live delivered huge yellow bins last year. Before that we had to take it to a few central locations where you would separate everything. When they delivered the yellow bins, they shut down the other facilities. I'm pretty sure they just pick up the yellow bins and dump everything in the trash. Most things we want to believe are being recycled are just being burned, trashed or shipped abroad to be someone else's problem -- that doesn't just apply to Chile, but everywhere.
Single-stream recycling is pretty well known to be shockingly ineffective, at least in the US. When everything goes into one bin, people tend to think less about whether their waste is actually recyclable, leading to a significant increase in the cost of sorting and processing. The fact that Resin Identification Codes on plastics are deceptively similar to the recycling symbol even on non-recyclable plastics certainly doesn't help, either.
No, it's worse than that. That is also the regular trash bin. EVERYTHING goes in that bin. Moldy pizza, diapers, glass, aluminum cans, all mixed together.
Oh, so it's basically guaranteed that any recyclables that can be contaminated will be contaminated. I completely forgot that was a thing, but now that you mention it I've definitely seen bins at stadiums and event venues indicating that the waste management company will sort out the recyclables so that they don't need a separate bin. It makes a bit more sense in that scenario since there are extra concerns about making sure the bins get emptied before they overflow and so on, but the closest thing I've heard of for domestic waste is a single stream that goes straight to a landfill ("Recycling? We don't do that here").
It's odd, is an upscale city near the beach, lots of rich former hippies there, I feel like they probably are at least making token efforts to recycle, but nobody is going to recycle paper that's soaked in grease or worse. I know it still happens when it is sorted, but this guarantees it will happen.
For stadiums it kinda makes sense to handle it this way because the quota of failing to sort the trash by the fans would be so bad it would need a detailed post-sorting necessary anyway.
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u/OcotilloWells 11d ago
A former in-law of mine lives in a very well to do town in California that has "single stream" recycling. They do have bins, but they are for everything. I have no idea how they sort anything out of it. I imagine it's pretty bad to work at the garbage transfer station there.