When I was a kid, the “bottle depot” was a very motivating way to go out of one’s way to collect stray bottles.
Deposits at time of purchase have proven effective. Put a deposit on every product with recyclable material using some generic measurement (like “weight of packaging”), such that when you return it you receive a quick and approximate return (in this example, by weighing everything you recycled and just not caring too much what the breakdown was).
There are already some pretty impressive recycling robots, especially in the field of sorting out mixed recyclables (scanning the incoming stream and shooting stuff that matches certain parameters into a separate area). It's pretty cool, you should check it out. I don't know how economical they are but they still require human backup because of the sheer variety of (incorrect) crap put in recycling bins.
You need to be careful putting taxes on these things because of their regressive nature. Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans?
Also while landfills are among the ultimate NIMBY things, we're not running out of space on this earth in any real sense.
Some things are just not worth doing economically. Maybe we should go back to the old ways and have consumers sort into only a few categories that are easier to manage - e.g. "paper" and "bottles and cans", and not bother with the rest.
> Who winds up feeling the pinch when you add a $.05/can tax on soda cans? Does that person really have time to make extra trips to the supermarket to redeem a few dollars worth of cans?
Where grocery stores take back empties, one just needs to collect the empties and bring them on their next trip to the grocery store, then put them in the recycling machine. You need to go to the store to buy more soda anyway, so it's not really an extra trip.
If anything, the problem in California (not sure about other states), is that grocery stores don't take back empties. Instead, they need to be brought to a recycling plant, which is usually out of the way as well. In practice, it just becomes a 5 cent tax since going to the recycling plant is an extra trip, unlike the grocery store.
Have you been to a landfill? We shouldn't be doing that to our planet even if it was twice the size.
The amount of garbage piling up on this rock is mind-blowing, and there's literally nothing we are doing about it once it's in the ground. It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area.
People are worried about tens of tons of radioactive waste material that we're sealing inside special containers and putting in specially designed vaults when hundreds of tons of trash are being dumped per day per landfill. I'm not worried about people getting cancer from radioactive waste 10000 years from now, I'm worried about people catching the plague from all the footlong rats crawling over their local landfill.
I just watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooRVhRt1p54, which another commenter said may be the catalyst for China's ban on importing recycling. I'd be hard-pressed to say a well-run landfill is worse than what I just watched.
> It just stays there seeping out heinous juices into the surrounding area.
A proper landfill has multiple layers of protection to the ground below it and a web of drain pipes to ensure that the fluids don't collect up or, worse, leak out into the ground.
How many landfills are proper landfills, and not half-assed landfills, or just holes in the ground? Out of all those proper landfills, how many are properly maintained? Like everything, protection and drainage degrades with time.
Are you asking about any first world country, or about random third world countries?
In rich countries the norm is all active landfills are properly maintained. There are a few bad apples that are caught once in a while, and a number of long abandoned landfills that cause problems, but for the most part a landfill in any first world country is not an environmental disaster.
In poor countries people just toss things wherever with no concern.
The issue is energy. Energy to build the robots, energy to power their efforts. Both the power and the plastics come from the same finite fossil fuel resources and will get ever more expensive as extracting that resource gets more expensive. To tackle the recycling problem we have to tackle the energy problem or we'll make no progress addressing the essential cost. The only viable thing to do otherwise is reduce plastic production and use.
I’d like to see the deposit required be calculated based in part on the length of the warranty. The longer the warranty, the smaller the recycling deposit.
If you want to sell a refrigerator with a 1 year warranty then it’s going to carry a $200 recycling deposit. Once you get to a 15 year, all parts (not just compressor), transferable warranty, the deposit can go to $0.
The sheer amount of cheap shit that’s built to simply self destruct in a year or two when it could — for 25% more cost — last 10x as long, that’s what drives me crazy.
It works out to be a regressive tax but appliances should last a lifetime not a couple years before breaking in a way where it’s cheaper to replace than repair. But since the durability is hidden information from the buyer, the market races to the bottom as long as durability is correlated with cost.
I like that idea, but I suspect the big stuff is actually pretty easy to recycle. It's the little bits of plastic and paper that are a problem to sort.
Paper should be sustainably harvested and at least it’s compost.
There are compostable alternatives to single-use plastic which with the right incentives will be adopted across more and more retail/restaurant. My understanding is that those compounds are only really good for single-use and aren’t durable enough to replace plastic in its many many other forms.
The problem isn't that people aren't recycling enough. The problem is that recycling is now more expensive than landfills, because it is not producing valuable enough material. If we encourage more people to recycle, it will just cost even more.
It depends Where you live, in a lot of countries/regions neither separated waste bins nor products from recycled material are available. In Germany Both is present, making the process much more ready and economic than in the U.S. I wished though that more People would support this System, both in countries Where it’s facilitated but also in countries that have no central System for that in place.
I wonder if PET bottles could be reusable if not crushed. If they are still usable then they would just wash them in the factory and fill them again.
Of course, they could get scratched or something during use, but people could be taught it's better if you buy a scratched bottle than putting plastic bottles in landfills.
It's relatively hard to sanitize PET because tiny defects hold contaminants really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate#PET... Also I would guess that the defects add up over time and you'd need a way to test each bottle's integrity before shipping it out again.
It can be done. Two years ago I've seen it done with Coca-Cola bottles in Germany. They'd have those thick bottles with visible scratches coming from cleaning and reuse. About the same time as I first discovered this practice, they abandoned it for some reason; on my next trip, I found only regular, single-use bottles. To this day I wonder about the reasons behind this change.
> It's relatively hard to sanitize PET because tiny defects hold contaminants really well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate#PET.... Also I would guess that the defects add up over time and you'd need a way to test each bottle's integrity before shipping it out again.
From your sibling comment. Just reposting since you might not other see it and it seems to address your question. Well, assuming these bottles are made from the same sort of plastic.
In Germany no beer bottle is discarded. It has .08€ deposit. Around bars, those bottles left on the street are collected by people with bags, or whatever. Bottles bought in the supermarket are cleaned, kept and returned.
I don't know the numbers, but I would be surprised if more than 1% of bottles are discarded.
This is definitely a great way to get people to recycle but I think the problem here is that because recycling companies can't send plastics and paper to China they don't have anywhere to sell the recycling to be reused. Not enough companies are buying it to make new products
Grew up in a rural area. 45 minute drive to nearest recycling center. My father would collect an entire truck load of bagged recyclables and bring it there. He would walk away with maybe 5$ if he was lucky.
5$ to bring 15 bags 45 minutes away... I don't see an incentive here for people who live in rural areas, which is quite a lot of people.
I took an entire truck load of household trash (cleaned out a house after tenants moved out), and it cost me $40 to dump it at the trash transfer station.
Landfill space isn't free, so by diverting trash to recycling, your dad saved more than $5.
Not to mention that there are often different bins for different color glass (have seen them in public areas, not sure if this happens for residential as well). And iirc you may get yelled at for doing it wrong
Some states do have a deposit. What it really does is ensure that people don't drink generic pop. The people who would recycle anyway recycle, and find it more convenient. The people who wouldn't don't recycle.
I'm probably being overly cynical above, but much.
A nickel bottle deposit was a lot more incentive to bother with collecting bottles and cans when you could get a coke for a quarter, than now when you need to trade in grocery bag full.
I remember in the 90s, we would always trade in our bottles before we went to the county fair, and that was enough for admission and rides and some fair food. I don't think the barrels and barrels of cans would get us in the gate anymore.
Someone still has to recycle it (which isnt really happening in the US) and then they need to sell it for more than they are paying with the deposit return. This is probably not going to be worth the effort in the US. China was our go to affordable recycling partner, and now they have found to not be profitable enough to be worth it.
Deposits at time of purchase have proven effective. Put a deposit on every product with recyclable material using some generic measurement (like “weight of packaging”), such that when you return it you receive a quick and approximate return (in this example, by weighing everything you recycled and just not caring too much what the breakdown was).