nah its not whoever’s putting the bags in, it’s either management deciding it’s too inefficient to deal with two streams, or the people using the bins weren’t capable of separating so just threw it wherever and so it all ended up mixed anyway
Also a lot of municipal waste systems just don’t pick up general recycling from commercial buildings. Usually just one dumpster for trash and one for cardboard.
I can all but guarantee it’s the latter. I have even noticed this at most Starbucks. They got rid of separate bins for recycling and just do trash/landfill now.
Fwiw, recycling doesn’t work anyway, except for metal. But even then it’s highly dependent on people cleaning the metal before recycling.
Paper can be effectively down cycled, and corrugated cardboard is absolutely worth recycling. Glass is just borderline, it’s not significantly better energy wise to recycle, and colored glass makes it more difficult. Plastic is better off in a landfill.
It als depends on the distance and transportation costs to get to a glass plant.
Which is dissapointing, because glass should be relatively easy to recycle into new containers. The core process isn’t much different than making new glass.
The problems are breaking glass back down is more expensive than using raw material and there’s the color issue. What glass excels at is reuse, it would be far better to have a handful of standard containers that could be easily cleaned and reused rather than attempt to recycle.
My understanding with glass is that it’s still cheaper to make new glass than recycle it whereas metal the costs have just about evened out.
Last I read about high density plastics is that they aren’t as strong after the first use. So they can’t be reused as high density plastic and have to be mixed in with other plastics.
Glass is recycleable to infinity. The greatest issue that used to exist was the colourants added to tint the glass. Nowadays, to my knowledge, with enough temperature and chemical correction the tint can be removed. Even windshields can be recycled nowadays; no plastic survives after being put to a kiln thousands of degrees hot.
Plastics can be reused. Even if we start with PEHD, crushed, melt it down, and the end plastic is of lesser quality, the biggest problem is finding a new use for that weaker material.
nah its not whoever’s putting the bags in, it’s either management deciding it’s too inefficient to deal with two streams, or the people using the bins weren’t capable of separating so just threw it wherever and so it all ended up mixed anyway
Also a lot of municipal waste systems just don’t pick up general recycling from commercial buildings. Usually just one dumpster for trash and one for cardboard.
I can all but guarantee it’s the latter. I have even noticed this at most Starbucks. They got rid of separate bins for recycling and just do trash/landfill now.
Fwiw, recycling doesn’t work anyway, except for metal. But even then it’s highly dependent on people cleaning the metal before recycling.
How about paper, glass and high density plastics?
And if wasn’t for negative propaganda, pyrolotic incineration would deal with the gross majority of non recyclables.
Paper can be effectively down cycled, and corrugated cardboard is absolutely worth recycling. Glass is just borderline, it’s not significantly better energy wise to recycle, and colored glass makes it more difficult. Plastic is better off in a landfill.
It als depends on the distance and transportation costs to get to a glass plant.
Which is dissapointing, because glass should be relatively easy to recycle into new containers. The core process isn’t much different than making new glass.
The problems are breaking glass back down is more expensive than using raw material and there’s the color issue. What glass excels at is reuse, it would be far better to have a handful of standard containers that could be easily cleaned and reused rather than attempt to recycle.
My understanding with glass is that it’s still cheaper to make new glass than recycle it whereas metal the costs have just about evened out.
Last I read about high density plastics is that they aren’t as strong after the first use. So they can’t be reused as high density plastic and have to be mixed in with other plastics.
Glass is recycleable to infinity. The greatest issue that used to exist was the colourants added to tint the glass. Nowadays, to my knowledge, with enough temperature and chemical correction the tint can be removed. Even windshields can be recycled nowadays; no plastic survives after being put to a kiln thousands of degrees hot.
Plastics can be reused. Even if we start with PEHD, crushed, melt it down, and the end plastic is of lesser quality, the biggest problem is finding a new use for that weaker material.