The amount of additional water needed to wash the yogurt container, compared to the massive amount of water mismanagement in agriculture and industry, is minimal. We learned this during the recent California drought.
The real reason that people (myself included) don't always wash plastic containers out: it's a hassle.
There are several ways we can try to solve this:
- Separating recycling materials at the curb, so the yogurt container never meets the clean paper (although I thought Canada already does this).
- Biodegradable plant-based plastics suitable for food packaging purposes
- Better automated sorting technology at the recycling center.
The point is to change processes and habits so the entire sum of resources used and pollution produced is minimal.
Reuse is almost always better, so maybe yoghurts can come in glass jars instead of tiny, hard to wash plastic cups? Maybe smallest containers, that discourage reuse should be taxed extra? Much easier to wash 1l yoghurt cup than 4 x 250ml.
Biodegradable - that's cool, but sometimes they can be toxic, not really biodegradable or require a lot of resources to produce, and a lot of waste is produced as by product.
Sorting is great, but only recycling, which requires cleaning - which is attacking the problem from the wrong end.
Curbside separation in my mind involves me keeping huge amounts of different bins in my tiny apartment so that I can sort everything, and then finding where the landlord has put the brown glass recycle bins this week, then walking over to the other end of the 15 acre complex to locate the green glass bins, then walking to the opposite corner to locate the aluminum can bin.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but any system that requires individuals to pre-sort recyclables needs to account for the fact that most of us live in places that were designed before recycling was a thing.
Yea Canadians have to sort out recycling materials into categories and separate out paper from plastic containers or else its not picked up by the waste collectors, I think issue is when it is put into recycling to be reused for materials.
The real reason that people (myself included) don't always wash plastic containers out: it's a hassle.
There are several ways we can try to solve this:
- Separating recycling materials at the curb, so the yogurt container never meets the clean paper (although I thought Canada already does this).
- Biodegradable plant-based plastics suitable for food packaging purposes
- Better automated sorting technology at the recycling center.