I'd say yes it is a good use of our time. I really want ours to be the generation that stops punting problems out to the next generation. I'd be happy if my friend's children don't need to grow up worrying about how to deal with oceans filled with plastics, global warming induced fire storms and flooded coastal cities.

Isn't our generation the most overworked, least-amount-of-free-time one? How does this extra job fit into that major issue?

By exercising other parts of your brain you let those used for work recover.

I'm hoping this is sarcasm. If not, I don't need the government assigning me work to "exercise other parts of my brain" thanks.

I'm pretty careful about following my city's recyling guidelines, but I don't think recycling is always the right way to handle a material. It doesn't neccessary solve the problems you mentioned.

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.

The fact that beaches around the world are covered in huge quantities of washed up plastic suggests that someone, somewhere is dumping an awful lot of it into the ocean. (And not just in Asia)

It's mostly Asia dumping.

Interestingly, many of the things that we've though would be huge problems in the future turned out to be non-issues or much less of an issue than we thought. A few examples:

-Population crisis

-Peak oil & oil crisis

-Global cooling concern in the 1970s

-Ozone crisis

-Rainforest crisis

-Worldwide food shortage

You mean to say that we have stopped cutting down entire rainforests??? Do tell me when this miracle happened?

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?

I'd highly recommend checking out "Enlightenment Now". Lots of interesting points in there but one of the most eye-opening is that many environmental problems are best solved indirectly.

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.

Putting a coke bottle in a recycling vs trash can does nothing to reduce its probability of ending up in the ocean. But doubling the number of trucks picking up waste at my house does double the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.

Trucks in my local area of London pickup both mixed recycleables and landfill waste in a single visit - waste is separated into two bins, and the truck has two separate receptacles for waste. No extra ongoing emissions, streams are kept separate, and the household overhead of sorting is negligible.

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

Assigning me a chore that benefits a business that I pay a service fee for is unacceptable. I'm paying them to take away my waste. If they want to sort it or alphabetize it or apply the Dewey decimal system they're welcome to. But I won't do chores for someone else without an employment agreement and adequate compensation.

Do you feel the same way about putting your trash in bins (or even bags), as opposed to leaving individual items strewn about your lawn for them to pick up? Do you feel the same way about getting your car to the mechanic instead of having him pick it up from wherever you left it?

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.

I can get the car picked-up for repair if I want to. Where can I subscribe for a service "picking up unsorted garbage"? The problem is that garbage collectors are granted monopoly and use it to extract free labor from customers.

This is govt monopoly btw, not some private monopoly like Google (which is earned and can go away).

No one stops anyone from providing that service.

Maybe it depends on the city, but often it's a municipal government granted monopoly. E.g. in San Francisco it's Recology.

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

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

Sorry, I should have been clearer. What I meant is a sorting service, not a collection service.

I feel the same way. There need to more options to waste management. I don't want to feel obligated to sort out trash. Take my trash, sort it out and bill me.

This is insanity on stilts.

If everyone is personally familiar with the effort that goes into sorting trash/recycling, then they may be more likely to reduce their trash usage.

I believe some of them can't be mixed, like if you throw something oily and paper in the same bin, the paper can't be used anymore. Also plastic bags make things very difficult to sort, and are difficult to separate from other things.

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.

> Is careful sorting of trash/recycling really a good use of time?

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.

Yes it is a good use of time. Our community (400K) has a green bin program as well as recycling. Green bins are for organic waste. Our community's landfill diversion rate is 81%. Landfill waste only needs to be picked up once every two weeks. We are looking to increase landfill diversion rate through textile recycling.

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.

Whoever's first to figure out garbage mining will be phenomenally wealthy.

Is mining something from a landfill really a good use of time?

Only if it can be automated in the future.

Single-stream recycling is pretty wasteful, so probably.