I know which one's preferable.

Zero waste is already technically achievable with the technologies we have today. Kamikatsu, Japan is an extreme example where they sort their waste into 34 different bins.

We don't have to do all that but we would see extreme immediate benefits from even slightly abandoning George Bush's "the American lifestyle is non-negotiable" proclamation

Don't forget to account for the costs of 34 separate dumping operations, generally with 34 different trucks, which is itself and environmental disaster.

Plastics are pretty much an optimum in terms of energy required to produce vs. durability, so deliberately decreasing the latter is the real waste and the result of an agenda of planned obsolescence.

As is standard, perhaps, the concept and ideas are already well-established, the only requirement is to enact them. I also suspect that many of the initiatives are pretty weak, watered down by packaging producers who don't want to bear the full cost of waste management.

Or you can decry society for doing the easy thing, but remember that trying to shape outcomes when dealing with large numbers of people almost always leads to consequences that seem obvious in hindsight but were unpredictable at the onset.

I think the "education" aspect has been attempted and it's not working. It's time to go nuclear and have the government dictate what types of materials can be used for packaging and ban everything else.

If I never see another blister pack it will be too soon.

Why should the buyer be responsible for cleaning up the seller’s mess?

If it’s possible to economically create products that don’t produce waste then this should be mandated, because otherwise there will always be some asshole corporation who is willing to undercut competitors on price by externalising costs to the environment.

It's not something anybody wants to put energy towards because they're trying to keep 50 other plates spinning at any given time (which as an aside, is also a huge source of plastic waste because nobody has the time or energy to cook) and there's also a chunk of the population who will take any kind of push to change behavior as a personal affront.

You can probably get a small percentage to adhere fully and a slightly larger to partially adhere, but I agree with parent comments that it's better to make companies use materials that are easier to recycle in the first place.

Putting the onus exclusively on the end consumer is the easiest way to ensure the industry doesn't bear the burden and expense, and that's entirely the point.

Glass -> fairly straight forward to recycle Metal -> fairly straight forward to recycle Paper -> depends and very water intensive but kind of OK and not totally terrible if it is just burnt. But nearly as all over the place as plastic. Plastic -> All over the place and dozens upon dozens of differing types rules regulations and depending on your local area how much is actually 'recycled' (a lot less than you think)

Then on top of that we are to reduce, reuse, recycle. The manufactures have skipped the first two steps and blame us for it.

Plastic is the worst of them to recycle it has the least recyclability. I have seen estimates from anywhere for 5% to 10% of the total plastic stream. Then customer shaming and deceptive tactics to make me feel bad for this. The bottom line is plastic is the worst for recyclability yet we use it for a good portion of our containers. We are worried about plastic straws and yet a good portion of the food I buy comes in a plastic container. Instead we should be putting pressure on the upstream to give us containers that they and we can reuse.

If you buy a plastic lawn chair there may be no packaging, but still a sizeable lump of plastic.

Package recycling (and reclamation) rates are surprisingly good, even in the US which you'd think is culturally incapable based on the anecdotes you hear. It seems like big cities where lots of people live are doing better than less dense areas where relatively few people live, which keeps the stats high.

See historical graphs and charts here:

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

And code them in such a way that allows easy automatic sorting, say by requiring type-specific colors (e.g. PET is allowed only certain shades, and HDPE different shades, etc.).

Basically the incentives are setup such that everyone takes the 10 extra minutes to do it right. People are annoyed but once you have a system down it’s not really hard to do.

I think this is the way to go. Everyone pitches in to make recycling work. In the long run it may even incentivize sellers to make their products easy to recycle, as buyers are forced to care.

Note I may have some details wrong as this is based on what I remember from living there 10 years ago.

I just bought about 15 pounds of plastic in the form of bottles and material and whatnot from the store. Then at the front they refused to give me plastics bags weighing a few grams.

There’s no way in hell any reasonable person should be on board with these kinds of taxes or policies. All they will end up doing is making people pay money to the rich, while the rich don’t do anything but continue to use more plastic for their purposes

You want change, charge the company for plastic straight away. Stop expecting consumers to bear the burden of corporate greed

Congratulations! Progress has been made at you.

We have similar recycling setup in Germany. I don't use bags for any of them.

Let’s say you throw away something sticky, maybe a dirty diaper, or something else. You don’t want to get that stuff on your own trash can, and the garbage collectors don’t want to deal with soiled garbage bins either. It is simply about sanity, residues and stuff attracts rodents and other pests.

Both in apartment buildings and in houses with trash collection, the rule is that you put the trash in bags.

We generally don't have all that much super sticky trash. We also simply clean our bins when needed. Our organic waste bin, for example is simply lined with an unbleached kitchen paper towel that gets dumped into the container as well.

Not everyone lives in a big city. I'm not sure what I could put my garbage in to make their job easier other than some sort of bag. Find me a non-plastic bag that can fulfill this purpose and we'll have a reasonable solution. But since there is literally no other trash collection game in town, for now, the bags stay. I'll find other ways to reduce my plastic consumption, but I don't expect to fully eliminate it.

Part of the solution to that is to standardize it. Even outside of cities, the bins are the same and can be picked up by the trucks automatically. The only manual part is rolling it to and from the truck.

Of course, generally usingess plastic is always the better option.

I live rurally in the us, and don’t use trash bags at all. Our trash trucks pick up the bin and dump it into the truck rather than unloading in manually. I have noticed more roadside trash on trash days, because of unbagged trash.

I don't need any plastic or paper bag ever and additionally, my bags are much nicer and much more heavy duty...

But the rest of the world has that already in the form of public bins for plastic bottle caps, as these are made from PET.

In any case fines or no fines I doubt this is enough if a single piece of trash can ruin a whole batch.

I can assure you that I for one have thrown trash in the wrong bin at least twice - or maybe more because I still don't know the details of recycling in that country.

Much better approach would be tax-funded recycling sorters - much more cost efficient to do all the work at the point of collection besides, allows for training and specialized equipment.

The 6 bins is fine (metal, glass, paper, organic, plastic, landfill), further sorting the plastics into the 7 kinds currently labeled might be a bit much (especially since only like 3 of them are commonly recycled).

I was curious about how they solved the mixed plastics problem, and quick searching around suggests most of the plastic gets incinerated.

In any case, Swiss shops are starting to take in also the new category of "non recyclable plastics" as in non-PET wrappings/recipients/tetrapack/anything. No idea where those go though, I never thought to check if they're burnt or exported.

For a great example of this, look at Japan.

Bags break really expensive machinery regularly and are probably one of the single worst things you could throw away

I've seen dedicated bins just for recycling bags, but as you mentioned, the problem is in educating people to sort plastics correctly.

Of course, reuse comes before recycle, and lots of things that are supposedly "single use" can really be reused instead of buying something else, but many people don't even bother to think.

People had to be taught to throw things away. Seriously, just look at vintage 1950s advertisements introducing the concept of "disposables."[0] This was commercial and government interests aligned on what to do about all the production capacity and factories from the war economy now that the war had ended. The conclusion was a total transformation of our society centered around consumption

I think it's important to bring some historical context and remember that what needs to happen here isn't so much "learning" as it is "unlearning"

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-ads-plastic_n_5cdb176...

However, the concept is older. One-use paper Dixie Cups started around 1910, replacing the shared cup.

"How unsanitary!" you might think of the old system.

Sure, but the Dixie Cup Company sure did promote that hard. "Just think of the luxury—a new cup filled with pure water all for a cent" - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ctx.2010.9.1.73

Do you think it’d help if the plastic type label was color coded too? Say yellow for PET, red for HDPE, etc, to help people recycle only the right plastics.

Generally I’ve seen that it’s not that people don’t understand recycling, it’s that it takes energy and effort to figure out what to do and it’s not always easy.

I think there just needs to be someone supervising saying "For real, seriously, no bags." I think people just don't know if it's a real rule, or an over-simplified kinda fake rule, like wear a helmet. In fact, I don't know, I just have a weird engineer mind that wants things to work right, whatever they are.

Actually I think we need people to be told, in school and at recycling points: "you don't have to pretend to be green, just throw it away if you don't care". It seems to me that recycling is one of the least controversial things, everyone knows it's good and wants to support it, just not many people evidently care that it's done in a way that actually works. Again, as an engineer, this bothers me.

[1] https://community.preciousplastic.com/how-to/create-marble-f...

I've thought about this a lot. Is it worth wasting water, derergent and energy to clean a yogurt cup, for instance? Does the plastic-waste-recycled outweigh the water-wasted? I never found an answer, maybe this is a really tough comparison? Too apple vs. orange? (Edited for spelling)

[1] https://www.danfoss.com/en/about-danfoss/articles/dhs/the-ca...

The people who believe otherwise seem to get their information from fossil fuel funded "libertarian" sources, that seem to magically always conclude that selling more fossil fuels is the best possible answer to every question.

The one that blows my mind is washing aluminum cans (or steel). How do you think they're going to get the plastic coating off the cans and remelt it?

I mean don't recycle a full can, but they have washers for recycled materials too.

> I mean don't recycle a full can, but they have washers for recycled materials too.

I'm sure they have washers, too, but how well will they work for sticky, dried on stuff?

Also washing helps prevent the bin from getting smelly.

Looking at it from the other perspective - the trash is rarely worth even the few seconds of the time you spend washing it.

(It is in German, but deepl translated the relevant section)

Do empty bottles and packaging have to be washed out?

No. Because the packaging is rinsed out in the recycling process, when the sorted plastics are shredded. It is only important that all packaging is emptied of residues [ed. The translation misses tmthat they mean large residue or levtover amounts], is not stacked and the lid is removed.

I once saw someone throw a couch away in the recycling bin...

I recycle correctly but one apartment in the block is being used as an AirBnB, every week there is random waste in every recycling bin.

Funny, I heard the exact opposite in a documentary about one of these recycling facilities, from the people running the facility. They should probably know. Though it may also very much depend on the facility itself.

It is completely unrealistic to expect the average trashbin user (as in literally everyone even if you can't read) to follow recycling instructions for plastic (paper tends to be simpler). It's much too complicated and a majority of the packaging you'll find in supermarkets involves way too much effort separating the materials.

Is it reasonable to expect every important problem or social responsibility to be easy or unobtrusive?

Sometimes you may both need to do something and it's inconvenient...