Some recyclables are really valuable (metal, quality cardboard), but others that we really want to recycle aren't particularly (plastics, glass). Also, morons throw shocking amounts of obvious trash into the recycling stream, which is a huge pain for recyclers, and thus can significantly devalue what should otherwise be a profitable stream of recycling.

What's obvious trash? I look at the labeling on recycling and compost cans in my area and I honestly have no clue what I can recycle and what I can't. My choices are to throw away potential recyclables or recycle trash. People aren't morons, you've just built a bad system.

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 The labels are usually either out of date or incomplete or both.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.

So much this. The one at my previous office wanted "clean plastic". What's "clean plastic"? Is an empty soda bottle clean? Is an empty salad container clean? Is cling wrap from a sandwich clean?

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.

From what I was told, the food remains on salad or sandwitch container will be destroyed in the process of dealing with separated trash. Theoretically, you dont have to care about it much.

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.

Wow, Clean up trash before we throw it?

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.

I just wrote that you don't have to do it, provided you take it out often enough or don't mind smell.

Useless outrage.

Cat litter, needles, food, yard waste, diapers, etc.

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

There's ambiguous stuff to be sure. But I'm talking about people who throw food scraps, furniture, car tires, ash, bbq coals, construction debris, etc in the recycling. Yes, I've seen all of those things go into the recycling bins and more.

Tricky. The first three should be recyclable: good scraps can be composted, timber and metal in furniture can be recycled, and car tyres can be recycled.

You're being WAY too charitable to end users. People aren't talking about the compost bin. They're talking about the recycle bin. The one for glass, paper, plastics, and cans.

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 don't see how recycling paper products helps anything. Paper = carbon. There is too much carbon in the atmosphere now. Throwing paper away sequesters it from release into the atmosphere and drives up demand for timber - a renewable resource, which removes carbon from the atmosphere.

There is non obvious trash, like "paper" coffee cups that are not actually recyclable.

It's always cheaper to make new packaging than recycle old one. It's extremely hard to make any sort of business out of recycling old material. Like you said, reusing would help - but glass has the issue of being very heavy so you're burning more fuel to move it around, while it only takes a drop of oil to make a new plastic bottle that weighs 1/20 of an equivalent glass one.

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.

I wish this myth would die, or we fully priced-in the externality cost of plastic recycling.

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.

Why do they clean it before shredding?

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!

Going entirely on memory, so I may have misrepresented a bit or been out of order. I seem to remember there's an initial automated sort and wash before shredding to remove dead mice, contamination from single stream recycling, assorted junk thrown in the wrong bin and so on. Then after shredding there's washing and rinsing stages, and a steam and abrasive stage to remove glue and labels etc. It left me quite astonished how incredibly involved it is when I looked into it.

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

My college room mates and I were still doing this with Miller High Life bottles as late as 2003-2004. If you collected a dozen cases you'd have enough returnables for a free case of beer!

Similar for the plastic beer pitchers at UW-Madison's terrace. You'd pay like a $1 deposit on the pitcher, if you bring the pitcher back, you get the dollar. Drunk kids or the indifferent would leave their plastic pitcher and some enterprising person would come by pick it up and return it for cash. There is a lake nearby, so it's important these didn't make it in the lake.

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.

A festival in Brisbane, Australia had exactly the same approach.

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...

It was the same in Spain, we carried the casco in the basket (of course not plastic, but hemp)... only the meat and the fish were wrapped in waxed paper and of course the cans, but there were only a few products that weren't fresh.

Now there's an absurd mass of plastics.

Ridiculous isn't it? We even kept milk bottle tops and handed in the aluminium foil, and the daily milk was delivered in an electric vehicle.

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.

You have to look at it holistically. In one system everything is thrown in the trash.

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.

They still do that in Spain. It really is unfortunate it's not a standard practice everywhere. With most areas having local bottling plants, it really shouldn't cost /that/ much more to ship bottles back. Regardless, I would love to see us switch back to glass. Even if the bottle doesn't make it's way back into circulation, it will never be an environmental hazard. It's inert and breaks down into sand eventually.

Recycling is only economically viable if:

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.

Yeah, except you can pull the policy levers to change the results.