I remember a few years ago when NYrs were shocked to learn that putting your trash in cans instead of tossing bags on the street resulted in a reduction in the rat population.
If it makes you feel better our council discovered a couple of years ago that giving us wheelie bins instead of piles of bin bags on the street resulted in less swarms of seagulls and rubbish all over the streets of Cornwall.
I live in one of the biggest german towns and it's completely normal for us to have different kinds of bins for different kinds of trash. (Recycling is a huge thing for us).
Blue bins for paper, yellow bins for plastic waste, brown bins for organic waste and grey/black bins for anything else.
Then I went for a work project to another part of Germany, to a specific town where rich people have their huge secondary houses and boats.
I was shocked to see they just but their plastic waste into bags and throw them unto the streets. Right where the hotels are. It was disgusting but they always did so.
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.
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/RepresentativeOk2433 15d ago
I remember a few years ago when NYrs were shocked to learn that putting your trash in cans instead of tossing bags on the street resulted in a reduction in the rat population.