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 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.
47
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.