In the office I work with smart tech people, I see mistakes all the time. You basically have to read the entire recycling guide to get it right. So yes, it has to be built for 90% compliance.

In Switzerland they have a “simple” solution to this problem. The onus is on the consumer to make sure all recyclables are washed and split appropriately. There are different bins for metals, paper, compost, and the different kinds of plastic. The municipality randomly checks your bags and fines you if you don’t do this right. Regular trash has to go in specific bags that are much more expensive.

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.

“ 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.”

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

Hear hear. And even then, plastic grocery bags are part of a beautiful, closed system of becoming trash bags. Now I have to go to the store, buy a literal roll of plastic bags, and carry it home in a non-plastic bag, then throw my garbage in this one-time-use garbage bag.

Congratulations! Progress has been made at you.

Do you have to use bags or do just do it because you've always done it?

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

We are not allowed to throw trash without bags for obvious reasons. I'm not sure I understand what you even mean by that.

What are the obvious reasons? Doesn't your trash go in a trash can?

Where do you empty your trash can?

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.

All buildings have larger bins (between 240 and 1100 litres) on the outside or in a specified area. Those are picked up by the waste companies. There is no need to specifically place waste into a bag. You can just put it straight into the container.

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.

Where I live, the large trash bin is collected by a small company that sends non standardized trucks. The workers open the bin and manually empty it, one bag at a time, by hand.

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.

That sounds tedious.

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.

Just in case your request for a non-plastic bag was a real one, you can buy large strong paper bags for yard waste at home improvement stores.

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.

The implementation of this was interesting in Switzerland. Because consumers had to pay a lot for waste, they started to remove packaging at the store and dumping it there for the store to deal with. Stores had the cost of removing packaging waste and put pressure on the supply chain. If customers start removing toothpaste tubes and cereal from cardboard boxes and dumping it the store's door, then the store has to deal with the overproduction of waste.

Take the habit of putting bags in your car, reuse them. It takes a while to have a system but now I have bags in my cars, a bag in my work backpack, etc.

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

I've spent a few months in Switzerland in 2020 and all I've seen were PET and non-PET bins for plastics.

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.

Sounds like a regressive tax to me - rich men can pay sorters to avoid ever wasting their own time on recycling, poor men who can least afford the time and effort and fines if they get it wrong meantime suffer under the system.

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.

Austria is kinda the same way. We had to sort everything into one of 6 bins. But there was only one bin for all plastics.

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.

There are containers for recyclables where you personally dump your bags brought along, so there's no bag for the municipality to check. You maybe mix this up with the fine for using non-fee garbage bags? The only check they can do is when looking at your recycled paper stack whether it has also cartons, then they'll leave it on your roadside (and if you're around they'll also tell you why). But that's hardly noteworthy.

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.