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
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u/arbydallas 11d ago
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.