Perhaps a combination approach: $5 for a pack of small bin liners, or return your waste to the shop for free.

If Tesco were filled with piles of consumer waste given back to them I posit the problem would be on the way to being solved within weeks.

EDIT: Reading more of this thread, it looks like everyone is suggesting this, so my comment does not add much.

So why is this obvious solution not implemented?

So is driving your garbage back to the store where you bought something.

The whole process, taken as a whole, just doesn't make any environmental sense.

This is also what we did with soda cans when I lived in Michigan. You'd pay 10 cents extra per can, and then get it back when you returned them. If you didn't return them, the state had 10 cents to use to clean up waste produced by that can. If you did, you got your money back and the can got recycled. It seemed to work pretty well. I remember a year after they started the program noting how much cleaner the roads seemed because people were going out and picking up cans to return them and fewer people were throwing them out their car windows.

It's how recycling used to work. There were big skips for glass, paper, textiles etc in most supermarket car parks. They were well utilised by shoppers before entering the store. Before that we used to return the empties for reuse within the store.

If a campaign of returns caused supermarkets to restrict suppliers, and create less in the first place, I would do so diligently.

It also seems like a massive environmental waste to ship individual packages of garbage around, when you can handle it locally just as well, and have manufacturers pay for it.

I have no inside information but I think it is because manufacturers will collude to add this as a visible added cost to the cost of the product. Consumers will think stuff became more expensive because of some idiots in DC/Brussels.

Sure it does. If you're going to slapped with a $200 fine every time you screw up with your recycling, and you have to pay by the bag to throw stuff in the landfill, if you have half a brain, you're going to think twice about every purchase you make, and if you really need it. That $1 water bottle that costs you $200 because your kid threw it in the wrong bin is going to make you not want to give your kid another disposable water bottle.

Producers only produce as much product as consumers purchase. Less consumption will result in less production.

Not sure how that could be prevented.

I vaguely remember seeing something about this happening in Germany where households are charged by the amount of rubbish that has to be collected. So people unwrap things in the shop and leave the packaging behind.

Also - consumption isn’t all bad. There’s many poor people who can’t afford much, and we very much are promising a better life where they can consume goods and lead healthy lives (goods such as medicine, clean water and chocolate as much as Coca Cola in a plastic bottle)

And also - if people were charged for old school packaging, costs would go up. People wouldn’t buy as much and this would start a new round of economic troubles.

At its price point, I suspect that plastic is so cheap, that even with all the pollution and waste being collected, it’s still ends up with positive utility.

There’s a report on carry bags which shows reusable cloth bags have significantly higher environmental impact because of the cost of production costs, water use and eventual decay into some carbon gas like Methane.

Seems better to put that effort towards development of techniques to sort en-masse. Likely controversial, but I think there is also an argument for simply throwing hard-to-recycle items in a landfill. If consumption continues to increase, it will likely become economically viable to eventually mine those landfills for raw materials.

Improperly sorted plastics are burried in a landfill. They will not fill the ocean with plastic whether recycled or trashed. Global warming is mostly a matter of energy usage, so recycling only helps that when it's more energy-efficient than the alternative.

-Population crisis

-Peak oil & oil crisis

-Global cooling concern in the 1970s

-Ozone crisis

-Rainforest crisis

-Worldwide food shortage

How about the fact that we are going to be 10 billion by the end of the century?

And the only reason that we have managed to avoid a food shortage has been the increase in the use of fertilizers which in turn is depleting the soil at a faster rate than ever before turning arable land into dust bowls and rivers becoming so polluted by the chemicals that there are massive extinction events in the population of fish all around the world?

Same for the oil crisis, the shale oil has stopped the crisis in its tracks but only for a short amount of time as the demand keeps on rising and inevitably the price per liter/gallon is going to be back to what it was before the GFC. Also, fracking is polluting the soil more than ever before.

In short most of the crises that you mentioned have not been solved, but simply delayed.

Eventually, they will catch up with us and somebody is going to have to pay? But who? Most likely taxpayers as always.

What I find baffling is what are you going to say to your kids/ grand-kids when they ask you where the forests went? Why is the air so polluted? Why are the rivers so toxic and completely empty?

Should I go on?

People generally don't want to live in smog/pollution if they have a choice but will do whatever it takes to survive even if that means harming the environment.

For example, no amount of lecturing or rainforest protests are going to stop people that depend on slash & burn for survival. Best option is to open up trade, provide GMOs & fertilizer, and provide economic opportunity so they have options other than slash & burn.

You also see this with China, they've made huge progress environmentally, mostly because they can now afford to.

There is an entirely separate, less frequent service that collects organic waste, so there’s probably some overhead there.

The line you're drawing to define "labor done on behalf of a paid service provider" is laughably ridiculous. The service they provide is "picking up sorted bins of trash". You're not "doing their work for them" to meet the terms of the paid service agreement.

https://www.aoausa.com/magazine/?p=4982

I bet, each city, that enforces waste sorting, has a monopoly.

This is insanity on stilts.

I'm skeptical that it will ever be economical in a scalable way to mine landfills, but I don't know enough to dispute it.

Price mechanisms let you answer that question yourself. Say you have 5 bags' worth of rubbish of which 3 bags' worth is recyclable. You can either spend the time to sort the one from the other, or you can pay for 2 extra bags.

So yes it is good because it is the only solution we have on hand that is effective. Development of reclamation techniques should be done in parallel to landfill diversion.

They also enforce like Taiwan, $10,000 find for illegal dumping. And they actually look through your trash for bills and letters with your address. The Swiss don't seem to love the system, more like tolerate it.

Cool pictures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_management_in_Switzerlan...

There's a picture of the 10 bin recycling thing halfway down this page:

https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-make-Kathmandu-a-clean-city

The problem with recycling is it's recycling... There's a reason why the phrase is "Reduce, Reuse, and finally Recycle".

The upstream firms are Reducing their costs with little regard to reducing environmental impact.

The upstream firms guarantee you can't reuse - it's a missed sale.

So, you percolate through the layers, and then recycling is this all important thing.

edit: I'm struggling to wrap my mind around why this is getting down-voted. I'm providing a real world example of the behavior the person I'm replying to described. I'm not endorsing dumping things on the side of the road. Do people seriously not believe that above a certain price point people will illegally dump their trash and risk the fine?

The more rules, fines, restrictions the state implements, the less people will comply. And lack of compliance means stuff is thrown away in others' yards, dumped on the commons, or otherwise hidden to the nature of the trash.

Because of onerousness with local ordnances with regarding paint, many people just end up hiding the containers in dog food bags. I've seen quite a few of those already in the local dumpster.

Still not clear how people are prevented from throwing garbage into the recycle bins. Is the recyclable stuff not placed in bags and therefore easy to be vetted by the staff?

We're still going to need some amount of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. A yoghurt pot or a pizza box might not be recyclable using current processes, but it's perfectly good fuel.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187661021... http://www.vivis.de/phocadownload/Download/2017_eaa/2017_EaA...

13. There's a moment you have to choose between the fine and getting the fuck out of stupid land. Around 3 different bins will do it for me: consumers waste is nothing compared to industrial waste. Trash sorting is the little act which help some people feel good but helps a lot less than not going on their annual holiday to the other side of the world. It's green theatre.

Also, the way waste management is handled at the municipal level definitely complicates things for us.

(Recyclables are handled separately and there's no charge for them regardless of the volume you're leaving for collection.)

https://youtu.be/BtpWn6PuDX0

Recycling bags are free, but you have to pay for landfill bags (around $2). That way, there's an incentive to recycle as you save money.

Given an estimated 13 liters per person per week in the household here, $5 for 20 isn't providing a whole lot of incentive.

And the President is also in charge of local waste disposal, as we all know.

Which norms? Which administration didn't act differently than all others? Reagan firing the FAA unionizers was a new one.

Obama said he couldn't “waive away the law Congress put in place.” DHS went and legalized a few million anyway, years later. Sounds very familiar, but somehow different?

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it sounds awfully revisionist.

I’ve never understood why recycling wasn’t self-sustaining, isn’t there value in the raw material?

When I was young reusing was the thing; a glass milk bottle went back to the dairy was sterilised and used again the next day. One bottle, with a recyclable aluminium foil lid, could be used again and again and again. Nowadays we make a glass bottle, use it once, then melt it down and make a slightly different bottle, and we think that’s green!

And to clarify, I'm talking about recycling bins in fast food restaurants and grocery store delis. I've got a pile of used paper and plastic that I just ate off of. What of it can I recycle? The labels are usually either out of date or incomplete or both. And none of the plastics have discernible labeling to help.

It's basically the worst system I can imagine.

I'm an environmentally conscious nerd. If my demographic can't figure out how the system works, what do you expect from the general public?

Of course only the trash bin was full at all times.

However, it can smell pretty quickly and bugs like it, so if you plan to collect plastic for multiple days especially if it is hot, then you clean it up.

We're throwing away our time is all we're doing. Looks like no one here values time. Sorting into 13 bins, etc. We need govt to get out of the way so someone can figure this out and make money (their incentive to figure it out).

Govt's not going to figure this out for us. It has no incentive to.

Useless outrage.

Lower your expectations a bit, the people doing the worst aren't wondering what to do with a clean plastic fork.

We have a trash bin, yard waste bin, and recycle bin where I live, and I've seen neighbors dump their grass clippings into the recycle bin. I've had family members toss paper plates along with the half eaten hamburger on them into my recycling (NOT compost) bin because the plate is paper.

I'd love to see all drinks being sold exclusively in glass bottles that you have to pay a deposit for - that's how it was when I was a kid in Poland, you had to pay a little bit extra for the bottle and you'd get it back when returning it.

Look into the roughly 15 step process of recycling those cheap plastic bottles, including pressurised steam, abrasive steps, cold and hot water, and chopping into pieces before yet more washing. It is probably vastly more expensive in energy costs, especially when after all that it's still common to lose batches to contamination. It's miles from returning bottles into the same supply chain and the factory having as first step washing and rinsing the old bottles.

Broken ones were recycled in place, and they were already of exactly the correct type and colour.

This process starts with the shredding:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyF9MxlcItw

And then giant bales of plastic chips are hand sorted by color in China!

Hand sorting? This really is fundamentally broken isn't it?

The deposit system seemed to be pretty effective. Folks took an active role.

Maybe there are modern day systems that could be developed. I wonder if people would subscribe to a Uber/UPS like system for fluids like beer, soda, milk, yogurt or water? Comes in sterilized glass bottles using an electric vehicle. I suppose it could be reusable plastic, but for folks paying a premium, glass would be nice. Something like $50 month for a couple cases of beer, going up in price as you order more.

The festival was Parklife and I think it was back in 2012?

$1 price increase on all cups, bottles and food containers. If you brought the item back (it didn't have to be yours!), you got a $1 back per item. It started off as coupons so you could purchase other goods with the coupon but at the end of the festival you could cash them in.

Never in my life have I gone to a one-dayer EDM festival and went home with significantly more money than I started with.

The economics of the choice being, the festival didn't need to pay for cleaners on significant overtime rates. And we're incentivised because I made a fucking profit from an EDM festival!

For the life of me I can't find an article on the event.

Needless to say after some choice after market vitamins, I was motivated to clean the venue during artists I wasn't too interested in. I was also incentivised since the festival was held in my cities Botanical Gardens which are around the corner from my office.

At the end of the festival, not a scrap of rubbish could be found.

It wasn't an absolute success though. Some people started fishing rubbish out of bins to get their own coin back towards the end...

Now there's an absurd mass of plastics.

Bottles got reused enough times (a little less with milk bottles) that older Coke, other pop, and beer bottles started to look rather archaeological from going through the lines 40+ times.

In another system you separate out recyclables to be sold, and to reduce how much trash needs to be disposed of. Now you need multiple bins, you need to ensure that trash is not mixed into the recyclables, different trucks or more trucks, more staff.

The cost of labor, the cost of disposing of trash, the capital costs to implement the system, and the income from recycling all effects whether it is sustainable.

cost of production from raw material > production from recycled material

and

value of recycle material > cost of recycling

My guess on milk bottles is some kind of sanitation and product liability issue.

A better solution would be human or robotic waste sorting at the dump, or clean incineration.

I suspect culture will have a huge impact on how well the solution works.

I would love robotic waste sorting, I hope someone is working on that!

It really is not hard to take care of your environment!