I think our list of what can and can’t be recycled changes annually. A couple years ago we went from recycling all #1 and #2 plastics, to plastic bottles only. We did recently gain aerosol cans and food cartons like almond milk. I can’t remember ever being able to recycle plastic grocery bags or pizza boxes.
We are told to put food-contaminated paper containers like pizza boxes and napkins into the yard waste bin for composting. Recycling - the new directive if it looks like a jar or a bottle, put it in. If it is a weirdly shaped plastic - chuck it. We can request larger or smaller trash cans from the city and pay accordingly, but the recycling and yard waste bins are standard, giant size.
So @BunsenBurner that’s been a recent change? That’s similar to the directive we’ve received,
That’s what the most recent new leaflet from the city said, yup.
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It is probably the wrong question, the real question is whether any of it was/is ever actually recycled.
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I had the same opinion until I toured a recycle facility a few years ago. Conveyor belts all over and different sensors directing the product to the appropriate bins and piles. There were a handful of guys doing some manual sorting up front and others scoping up the product that fell of the belts.
They had a gigantic block of crushed aluminum cans. The president of the company said it was worth about $5K and he loves when people don’t return their soda cans.
https://dailygazette.com/article/2018/07/09/recycling-gets-more-expensive-as-market-shifts
In my community, you either haul your own trash/recyclables to the transfer station or pay an outside company to pick up. We haul. Recycling remains single stream with the exception of glass which now needs to be separated out.
Our country does an absolutely lousy job prioritizing recycling. We shouldn’t be dependent on foreign countries to handle our waste. I find that so wrong. Many other countries are leaps and bounds ahead of us. In Italy, for example, you’ll separate your trash out into 4 or 5 different piles and the actual amount of trash that gets trashed is very tiny every week. The United States needs to get on board and focus on the long term benefits of reducing our waste and recycling but that’s going to take another administration to get there. There are a lot of hidden costs to not doing so that don’t ever get factored into the discussion.
Some of our exported recycling was greatly desired by China. They deforested their own country so quickly that they didn’t have a cheap supply of paper pulp from which to make boxes for all the products they export. A Chinese-American woman noticed this and began shipping giant containers of our discarded cardboard to China and made a fortune. At one time, it was our largest export to China in terms of cubic volume. Not sure if it still is. I’m glad it was at least used!
No changes here either but there have been several times when people have reported seeing the trash and recycle bins dumped into the same truck (they are supposed to be separate pickups). Not sure if that has happened on my street as I am usually at work during the day.
However, they probably do not want to switch to the automated garbage trucks with the special cans, because then there would be fewer jobs.
We have to separate paper from plastic and metal. They are planning on adding cloth - maybe as soon as next year. The next town over is already collecting it at the Farmer’s Market. They compost our leaves and garden waste. I believe our recyclables go to a county center where they are cleaned and sorted and then sold. I know the towns save money the more they can get people to recycle. We recycle paper one week and comingles the following week. They come around once a week for the yard waste before they do regular pick ups.
Not really. The company that uses toters exclusively still has two guys working the truck. No one in my area has the truck with the electric arm. The advantage of working for a company that requires toters is that they can roll it out to the truck, and then attach it to the truck to be lifted and dumped. Our guys have to do the lifting and dumping.
The frequent excuses for suspending service started occurring around the time the other big trash hauler switched to requiring toters. At least that would help explain why the interruption to service started after 27 years of uninterrupted service.
Our city’s routes that have the trucks with electric arm have only ONE worker — driving the truck and operating the arm. Before they had 2 or 3 in the crew—driver plus one or two other folks to life and empty cans into truck.
@HImom, no trucks in my county have the electric arm, hence my post about continuing the use of two guys with the toters.
A hole 40 miles wide and 100 feet deep will hold all of America’s garbage for the next 200 years, and former landfills can be used for public parks and a variety of other beneficial uses. Recycling is often quite expensive. So why don’t you just save the environment and throw your garbage away?
Google: “dangers of landfills”