Really? Even in Germany where a ton of things go in household recycling bins (including basically all plastics and composites), you'd have to bring ruined clothes to the recycling center separately. Definitely only paper/cardboard in the paper bin.

Where I live in the UK we just put the clothes in a bag next to the recycling containers and they get taken away.

They also take away car batteries, car oil, small appliances, batteries etc

In an effort to not have to go to the dump with them, as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)

> as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)

And for sofas that aren't in unsalvagable condition there are furniture recycling projects around the country that will collect old furniture, give it a bit of a sprucing up, and sell it.

Yes indeed. These were perfectly good ones but the furniture salvage people locally didn’t want them and no one came on gumtree or freecycle :(

Ah, that's a shame.

Or Craigslist 'Free Stuff'.

I'd rather throw it away than deal with the flakes on Craigslist. It rains here so leaving it on the curb will only ensure it loses whatever residual value it might have held.

In many places in US you don't have separate bins for paper, plastics, glass and what not, but only one (usually green) recycling bin for everything that is somehow recyclable.

In Japan, I think there were like ten bins, with clear instructions on how each should be used (eg take the label off the plastic bottle before binning it). It was a bit stressful before I got used to it.

Here in Seattle, at least, recycling has transitioned to blue and green is now used for municipal compost bins. I think SF is the same.

We (Seattle) used to have separate bins in the late 90's or early 00's. A lot smaller total volume than the 96 gal toters, though.

I remember that as a kid in general King county (many of the suburbs of Seattle).

However it's still not enough.

    * More bins for more specific TYPES of plastic
    * Better, machine readable, (BIG) labels
    * Financial incentives (carrot and stick)

I'll elaborate more on that last point. Restaurants should be encouraged to create takeout packaging that is more easily recycled and/or composted. Similarly wrappers, boxes, cups and packets should have a per unit tax for non-environmentally friendly units.

There should also be a push towards the use of glass and metal and paper over plastics. Sturdy glass bottles can be cleaned, thermal blast smoothed and re-used or broken down and recycled completely. Similarly metal lids and cans can also attain a new life with ease.

There's always tradeoffs. If you require people sort at home, more recyclables end up in the trash and/or people missort anyway.

I agree we should incentivize use of more recyclable materials (in place of non-recyclable or more expensive to recycle materials) in general.

Blue in LA as well.

Where "everything" may be limited. For example, I just went and looked: I can recycle "recyclable glass, aluminum, cans, plastics and paper".

At least where I lived in Germany, in cities, there were dumpster-sized stand-alone donation bins labeled "Kleidung und Schuhe" (clothing and shoes) everywhere.

It's often far less convenient to get to a recycling center in the US (especially for people without a car) so they do more of their own sorting.

I wasn't going to share a link to a barely related discussion from last month, but:

Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste' | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827

... China doesn't want recycling anymore!

I've never heard of this, and have heard a presentation on how paper recycling works that makes me kinda doubt it.

Knowing something about how paper making works, I'm not at all surprised by the idea; since part recycling is going to have reduce everything to fibers anyway, I'm not sure why including clothes which you could use as feedstock to make paper would necessarily be functionally any different to the recycler than reducing those clothes to fibers, combining those with other fiber sources, making paper out of that, and then putting the resulting paper into the recycling.

I loved this article on making paper for U.S. currency, which is produced by one company out of cotton and linen. Up until very recently, the company used denim as a source of raw material.

> "But recently, Americans decided they liked jeans that stretched, so jeans companies began adding spandex to their fabric. Money with spandex in it wouldn't be money anymore, which means much of Crane's time is now spent on a global search for waste cotton that wasn't used to make elastic pants."

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24292/benjamin-hundred...

"Before the industrialisation of the paper production the most common fibre source was recycled fibres from used textiles, called rags."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Fiber_sources

What country are you in? It's technically illegal in New York to put anything but PAPER in the cardboard bin.

...is cardboard counted as paper?