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My previous employer just put signs on all the trash cans that they were processed for recycling after collecting. That always sounded like bullshit.
It’s called “single stream recycling”. We have it where I live. I wish I could have confidence in any recycling these days. Too many stories of separated trash all ending up in the dump anyway.
The problem is that mixing everything means massive contamination, so only metal is going to really get pulled out.
Only the metal should be pulled out. Plastic recycling is a scam invented by the bottling companies and there’s not a single plastic bottle that couldn’t be replaced by paper or aluminum. Even the plastic lines cardboard cartons use less plastic overall.
There’s plenty of paper that could get recycled as well that can’t in a single stream. I agree plastic going to a landfill is better though.
Plastic can be burned and be used for urban heating.
At the very least, paper is renewable and biodegradable.
It doesn’t really degrade in a landfill though. Industrial composting is something I wish was more popular though, that would probably reduce my actual trash by about 50%.
I actually separate my burnables and compost the ashes, but I understand that most people can’t diy that. I think Japan has separate receptacles for burnables.
Protest Art or not being paid enough?
Just where each bin goes at the end of the pipeline. They streamlined it for efficiency.
This is one bin with one volume inside. The lid might have been designed for a bin with two separate volumes inside and some worker who doesn’t care put it in the wrong bin or an artist made the lid to protest ineffective, green washed recycling efforts.
I’m sure they’ll be really mad about the sorting when they burn it all on a beach in Turkey
That is pure laziness of whoever is responsible for puting the bags there.
Either there is a support bracket for two separate bags on the underside if that lid or the trash bin originally had two separate buckets that were taken away.
Recycling is literally a scam plastic either can’t be recycled, can but are not recycled, are recycled while producing more waste than would be saved by not recycled or incinerated. Recycling plastic has never been possible they knew that from the beginning and nothing changed with modern technology. This is just shifting the blame back to himself.
It’s also way, way cheaper to make new plastic than to recycle it. As long as that’s the case, it’ll be a scam.
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.
Glass is just borderline
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.
What usually happens is that people are uncultured pigs and don’t separate. So the trash ends up being mixed anyway. After a few years of that, they decide there’s no point in separating.
Or it’s well known most places don’t actually recycle.
They do, if it’s profitable. Most recycling, unfortunately, costs too much for a subpar product.
Or the manager saw the same trash truck pick up both recycling and general waste one day … and decided it wasn’t worth doing double the work for no reason
The same truck picks up recycling and general waste at my home, but between picking up one and the other some kind of hatch articulates in the receptacle. I choose to believe they’re going into separate sections even though it looks like they’re both being dumped in the same area.
Schrödingers bin
Neoliberal greenwashing go brrr
What does this even mean? Recycling doesn’t happen anyway.
It was an obtuse, lazy and (in hindsight) now very funny joke.
“Neoliberal” because one of the key ideological aspects of neoliberalism is the emphasis on individual responsibility. The big example that comes to mind is how the phrase “carbon footprint” was coined and popularised by oil companies as part of an advertising campaign to shift responsibility for climate change from fossil fuel companies to individual consumers.
“Greenwashing” was getting at the bullshit around recycling (which you also highlight in your comment). Often this isn’t as blatant as it is here: even if there were two bags, it’s likely that very little, if any, of the “recycling” bag would actually be recycled, and that the effort spent in separating recycling from regular trash is wasted energy that only perpetuates the feeling of doing something positive for the environment.
I found the image striking because although it isn’t hard to spot that there’s only one bag and that it doesn’t matter which hole someone throws their rubbish, I think it’s likely that someone passing by quickly wouldn’t notice this (especially if opaque bin bags were used). This is offensive to me because I’m finding that many people nowadays are struggling with chronic decision fatigue due to being worn down by the modern attention economy, and I consider the “personal responsibility” facet of climate change PR to be a facet of this. That’s what caused me to comment, but I didn’t know how to capture what I wanted to convey in a quick and straightforward manner, so I went for the lazy reply that, in hindsight, didn’t add anything meaningful to the conversation. I hope this is clearer, despite lacking in brevity
