"I can't recycle at all, there are a million barriers to me recycling, and any idea you propose that isn't 'they pick it up at my house' absolutely can't work for me."
That seems to be what you are saying here. Do you just want a bunch of people to go "Yeah! Fuck recycling anyway!" so that you can write off recycling as a stupid idea?
Where do you work? Does your company not have a recycling program? Have you looked? Does your grocery store not have recycling bins located in the store?
Same goes to you Bowen- you claim that it is a huge production for you, but I thought you worked at a hospital?
Most hospitals have an institutional recycling program for employees to use.
Guys, seriously, recycling isn't this difficult.
And if it is? The only answer is to do what you can to make it easier.
A lot of people are being huge geese when it comes to this, and I can't help but agree with @Poshniallo.
Honestly, having grown up with curb side pick up, and then having lived in apartment buildings where the porters just took recycling from the trash rooms, I was really surprised to find that a nice pretty well off private community like mine did not provide for recycling. I made the post because I wanted to know if this was unique to long island or if it was not that uncommon.
My company does not have a recycling "program" (we are in a large office building in Manhattan) but we do recycle paper and plastic in the office. I can't bring recycling there though, because I commute by train. I shop at a small local grocer for the most part, and they do not have recycling bins. The big chain places have bottle deposit machines though. As I said before, I looked for the location of public recycling drop off sites, and it appears that we literally do not have any. It seems like public recycling is only handled by pick ups here, which seems very strange.
I did some searching, and apparently there are no public recycling plants in my entire township (there are tons of villages in the township). If you are not in a pick up zone, there is no where you can go to recycle. My car also doesn't get very good gas mileage, and takes premium, so I guess the cost of recycling would outweigh the benefit? The only place I can think of that I could go to recycle would be those machines outside stores where you collect the bottle deposits, and I'm just not doing that. Even if I wanted to hire a private recycling company to come to my house and pick up my recycling (no idea if this exists) I don't think that they would let them past the gate.
And to the people who said I should lobby the housing association, the only thing it does is meet once a year to pass the budget, and it never takes any action that would increase monthly payments, or which would hurt our ability to run at a surplus.
As far as I can see the best thing to do is:
1.Make an effort to recycle batteries, electronics and other really hazardous stuff.
2. Compost what you can.
3. Check for recycling pick up at local areas you go to like supermarkets and malls. Save up your items until you go to said places normally.
4.If none of that works it is probably more efficient to just throw it out.
5.Talk to your neighbors and see if any of them want recycling. If you find people receptive point out the benefits and look for a company that could do so (the current management company would be a good start). Then bring it up to the board once you have many people on board and a full plan.
6.Look into state or county programs that might be able to subsidize pickup or creation of a plant in this township area. There are sure to be some politicians who would be willing to back a green job creation proposal in your area.
I have single stream recycling and like it. Having machines and trained experts sort the trash is much more efficient then having every single person do it themselves.
Also be careful and research the companies you send your e-waste to, some are really crummy and just take out the most valuable metals then ship it off to Africa without decontaminating it of other hazardous waste.
He's a shy overambitious dog-catcher on the wrong side of the law. She's an orphaned psychic mercenary with the power to bend men's minds. They fight crime!
Omaha used to have the truck go around with the sorter-guys riding on it that would pick up the recycling bin and sort things out. You had to leave cardboard under the box, etc.
A year or two back they changed the contractor or something like that, and now they just throw it all into a normal dump truck and take everything except glass (because it would shatter when they compress it down). If you want to recycle glass you have to take it to the glass recyclers yourself.
In any case I don't see how you can expect normal people to be so activist when it comes to recycling @arch. It's a real untenable position to say that realistically speaking.
The fact that "if you don't have curbside pickup for your recycling, sort it at home, find a drop center on a route you normally use, and dump it every few weeks" is considered some crazy level of activism that normal people don't do is infinitely depressing.
Look, not everyone has access to recycling any reasonable distance from where they normally drive. As several people have already said, when there is a place to drive to, the use of gas outweighs the energy savings of recycling.
Actually that wasn't demonstrated at all. Someone thought they did until it was pointed out no one takes they recycling out every single day.
Didn't it also assume a 100% return from the recycling?
Might be good to get a solid bunch of numbers, maybe a spreadsheet of when it no longer behooves people to drive "out of their way" to recycle. Maybe it's 2 miles for paper/glass and 25 miles for aluminium cans.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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Deebaseron my way to work in a suit and a tieAhhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered Userregular
Honestly, having grown up with curb side pick up, and then having lived in apartment buildings where the porters just took recycling from the trash rooms, I was really surprised to find that a nice pretty well off private community like mine did not provide for recycling. I made the post because I wanted to know if this was unique to long island or if it was not that uncommon.
My company does not have a recycling "program" (we are in a large office building in Manhattan) but we do recycle paper and plastic in the office. I can't bring recycling there though, because I commute by train. I shop at a small local grocer for the most part, and they do not have recycling bins. The big chain places have bottle deposit machines though. As I said before, I looked for the location of public recycling drop off sites, and it appears that we literally do not have any. It seems like public recycling is only handled by pick ups here, which seems very strange.
That really baffles me having grown up on Long Island (631 represent). When I was a kid they gave us the orange bins quickly followed by the green bins. Does your town not do recycling at all or do you live in some sort of heavily wooded enclave on the North Shore?
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Honestly, having grown up with curb side pick up, and then having lived in apartment buildings where the porters just took recycling from the trash rooms, I was really surprised to find that a nice pretty well off private community like mine did not provide for recycling. I made the post because I wanted to know if this was unique to long island or if it was not that uncommon.
My company does not have a recycling "program" (we are in a large office building in Manhattan) but we do recycle paper and plastic in the office. I can't bring recycling there though, because I commute by train. I shop at a small local grocer for the most part, and they do not have recycling bins. The big chain places have bottle deposit machines though. As I said before, I looked for the location of public recycling drop off sites, and it appears that we literally do not have any. It seems like public recycling is only handled by pick ups here, which seems very strange.
That really baffles me having grown up on Long Island (631 represent). When I was a kid they gave us the orange bins quickly followed by the green bins. Does your town not do recycling at all or do you live in some sort of heavily wooded enclave on the North Shore?
I live in an unincorporated village in the township of Hempstead. The township handles recycling, but does not appear to have any drop off centers. It may be that we truck recycling outside of the county, like I think we do with trash. I have family who have lived in the five towns for 15 years, and recycling just started there 2 years ago.
Speaking of glass, there was an earlier post that talked about how it's basically a waste to recycle the stuff. Where I am, they actually just reuse the returned bottles. I don't know what the energy cost is to cleaning them though (or how well they do it. . . ). It's definitely the cheapest option cost wise over recycling or making a new one, or they wouldn't be doing it.
Do you have a deposit system? It is generally hard to get buy-in for bottle collection schemes in the US without a deposit system. Part of the reason I suspect is that soft drinks and milk are no longer delivered in glass and as such the average consumer isn't likely to collect glass bottles of a uniform size that can actually be gathered easily. If I eat a jar of soy sauce every 2 months that comes in a glass jar, it probably isn't worth it for the soy sauce company to organize a collection scheme, especially given that each company would need their own. There aren't very good economies of scale I suspect in other words.
But yes, if you can get that going it works well. Cleaning bottles is almost free, the real cost is in collecting them I believe. Even sorting isn't too bad if you can assume a given shape.
It isn't really a waste to recycle it, it just isn't usually worth it IMO. Glass is inert, so it doesn't outgas methane like food waste, paper and plastics, nor does it release anything into the water table. Smelting glass cullet (the glass shards created at the end of the recycling stream) in lieu of sand, soda and limestone creates energy savings of approximately 2-3% per every 10% substituted, which really isn't that great since it doesn't take transportation costs into account. Additionally like I said in single stream systems there are liability issues that come into play and often the glass cullet produced is pretty shoddy due to impurities. Some of this is alleviated in multiple stream systems however.
I want to talk about recycling plastic. Here's my thought: since oil in places like Saudi Arabia is dirt cheap to get out of the ground, it will be extracted and used eventually. Perfect planet-wide cooperation to prevent it is impossible. In other words, even if nearly everybody agrees to cut CO2, someone will buy oil to burn at $2/barrel.
However since oil makes plastic without being burned and therefore not releasing nearly as much CO2, putting plastic into landfills is effectively carbon capture/sequestration. Conclusion: make sure to throw away your plastic instead of recycling to save the planet from global climate change.
They don't break down currently because microbes generally have a hard time recognizing them as food. Given the rate at which microbes adapt, it seems likely that plastic devouring microbes will eventually become prevalent. Nature abhors a vacuum et al. At which point your plastic isn't really sequestered very well anymore.
Don't just check for recycling plants. There are some construction supply companies that take in recycleables to turn into building materials. There was recently a bank built here using as much sustainable material as they could from companies like this, if you walk around in the bank there are little signs saying what things are made of. For example glass, is made into countertops and a kind of cement, I know they use other stuff, but I can't remember off the top of my head.
Whether they find a life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet.
So this morning I made the mistake of being outside when the recycling man came. He said my corrugated boxes were too big for him to fit in his truck. If I wasn't there, I know he would have made them fit. I have the option of throwing out as much trash as I want each week, so I went and got my spare garbage can and shoved those boxes in there. Funny how they can fit in my garbage can, but not in a truck. The regular garbageman came and picked it up no problem.
When I lived in Chicago we had the best recycling system.
You just through everything into the dumpster. Then, some guys would drive down the alley in an old pick up and take all the large scrap steel, or anything that might be repaired and resold. And then after the truck went through, a bunch of guys with shopping carts would come and pick out all the cans.
My old weight bench, was picked up from the curb in less time than it would have taken me to drive the 5 miles to the scrap metal place. Great service, no cost. Can't be beat.
In any case I don't see how you can expect normal people to be so activist when it comes to recycling @arch. It's a real untenable position to say that realistically speaking.
The fact that "if you don't have curbside pickup for your recycling, sort it at home, find a drop center on a route you normally use, and dump it every few weeks" is considered some crazy level of activism that normal people don't do is infinitely depressing.
Look, not everyone has access to recycling any reasonable distance from where they normally drive. As several people have already said, when there is a place to drive to, the use of gas outweighs the energy savings of recycling.
Actually that wasn't demonstrated at all. Someone thought they did until it was pointed out no one takes they recycling out every single day.
My main point was that even with perfect 100% energy savings you're just not saving all that much on recycling, unless you buy an enormous amount of aluminum cans. Recycling is nice, but it's better to just not buy the stuff in the first place, and more important to worry about how much were driving and flying.
We have separate blue recycling cans. No separation- everything goes into the the blue can. It's actually pretty convenient because it gives us more capacity to throw stuff away. If it was more troublesome than that, I doubt I would bother.
On the other hand, my parents live out in the Shenandoah where there is no trash pickup or recycling. There're a couple of large dumpsters that everyone in the town uses for everything.
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
In any case I don't see how you can expect normal people to be so activist when it comes to recycling @arch. It's a real untenable position to say that realistically speaking.
The fact that "if you don't have curbside pickup for your recycling, sort it at home, find a drop center on a route you normally use, and dump it every few weeks" is considered some crazy level of activism that normal people don't do is infinitely depressing.
Look, not everyone has access to recycling any reasonable distance from where they normally drive. As several people have already said, when there is a place to drive to, the use of gas outweighs the energy savings of recycling.
Actually that wasn't demonstrated at all. Someone thought they did until it was pointed out no one takes they recycling out every single day.
My main point was that even with perfect 100% energy savings you're just not saving all that much on recycling, unless you buy an enormous amount of aluminum cans. Recycling is nice, but it's better to just not buy the stuff in the first place, and more important to worry about how much were driving and flying.
The thing with recycling is that it's not just the energy use from production of new stuff that's being saved; you're keeping things out of landfills. When you're recycling something, you're putting it through a facility designed to handle the chemicals used in treating things like plastic and aluminum, rather than just burying it in the ground where it can find its way to the water table. There is a huge area in the Gulf of Mexico where there is nothing that lives because of all the chemicals that end up running off into there (which is, to be fair, largely agricultural runoff, but still, landfills certainly aren't helping). There is also something to be said for limited resources; we certainly don't have enough oil to last forever, or enough aluminum, palladium, etc. So the more of that we can recycle (oil in things like plastics), the longer we can make what we do have last.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
My home owners association recently had the annual meeting, and elected not to contract with a recycling company, which made me think of this thread. In the year since I started this thread I have spoken to some people in the area who have also found that if you don't get curbside pick up, there is nowhere to drop off, other than bottle deposit places. Fortunately, I found that the local best buy does e-recycling so the really bad stuff is covered at least.
Earlier in the thread someone said that buying recycled goods is just as important as recycling, and while I understand that, I am continually baffled by how much worse certain recycled products are. At work we switched to recycled paper cups some time ago, and since then we keep changing brands and they keep getting worse. I have also bought recycled plastic cups, only to find that there were little brown specs in the plastic. I wound up returning them. I also notice that the recycled printer paper we have at work is worse than the non-recycled paper. Why is this the case?
The only thing about recycling I have to say is be careful about introducing weird financial motives (like refunds of fees collected at purchase).
My hometown is experiencing a minor crimewave based around aluminum cans - trespassing to get to peoples' bins, helping yourself to other stuff once you're trespassing anyway, people getting shot because they're trespassing, and weird turf violence on trash days as people fight over who has "rights" to cans in certain neighborhoods.
I still recycle too, I just sit on my porch in a rocking chair with a shotgun on pickup days.
(more like I lock my bins, keep them out of sight, and only take them out to the curb the morning they're to be collected. I have had people snooping around my back yard looking for them though)
Earlier in the thread someone said that buying recycled goods is just as important as recycling, and while I understand that, I am continually baffled by how much worse certain recycled products are. At work we switched to recycled paper cups some time ago, and since then we keep changing brands and they keep getting worse. I have also bought recycled plastic cups, only to find that there were little brown specs in the plastic. I wound up returning them. I also notice that the recycled printer paper we have at work is worse than the non-recycled paper. Why is this the case?
Recycled input material is different from virgin inputs, for everything except metals basically. That is part of the reason recycling metallic material is so lucrative. The reasons for this are multifaceted. In paper, the actual process of turning old paper into new paper results in shortened fibers. That impacts the quality of paper produced from those fibers (which is why it is usually blended with virgin pulp). In almost any sorting based process (like for plastics and glass), you end up with some error margin of products that are misorted. That means the output from the recycling process is going to be impure. Those impurities mean the recycled material is often unsuitable for direct re-use. So it is hard for instance to make a new glass bottle out of recycled glass cullet. The end result is prone to breakage due to impurities. You can sidestep that issue somewhat by repurposing that ground up glass for other projects, which is what is often done. That is part of the reason you see landscaping mulch made out of tire rubber now.
I've seen a bunch of approaches to this:
1. Dover, NH - Pay for trashbags, recycling is free - basically my favorite system, as the lazier you were, the more you paid
2. SF, CA - Recycling, Trash and Compost - while I hated the compost element at first (I had done it as a kid at home, but not for a while as I had no garden), I came to love it as my actual trash would take forever to fill up compared to the constant composting
3. Lake Tahoe, CA (didn't live there but heard about it) - All grouped together, but town pays for separation after pickup. Ultimate solution for ensuring proper waste splitting
My current building recycles, but also has trash chutes, so I imagine a lot of people don't even bother recycling. I personally think there are merits to each setup, and something like a hybrid Dover/SF solution may be the most beneficial for a community, as it has the carrot of free recycling/composting and the stick of bag prices.
When I lived in Chicago we had the best recycling system.
You just through everything into the dumpster. Then, some guys would drive down the alley in an old pick up and take all the large scrap steel, or anything that might be repaired and resold. And then after the truck went through, a bunch of guys with shopping carts would come and pick out all the cans.
My old weight bench, was picked up from the curb in less time than it would have taken me to drive the 5 miles to the scrap metal place. Great service, no cost. Can't be beat.
And if you're not home, they'll even recycle your A/C and copper wires!
Yeah, the pickers are an interesting bunch, but the city and most of the burbs have separate bins and trucks for recycling. Started out as separate, but most are mixed now - glass, plastic, paper all go in the same bin.
I sometimes wonder how much waste was/is being created by those "reusable" bags everyone buys now. I would be surprised if it's been a net benefit as far as environment.
Moving from Seattle to NYC was a bit of a bummer as I lost the city wide composting program. I'd like to know how much compost NYC would create annually, and wonder if it would be lower due to a take-out culture?
A lot has been said about the energy costs to actually recycle items being somewhat high. I think it has been stated clearly enough by others that the energy balance still leans towards recycling, but what I haven't seen brought up is the ability of the energy grid to shift towards renewable resources somewhere down the line. All of a sudden you'll be recycling items with power generated from solar, wind, geothermal, and other sources, greatly improving system efficiencies, at least from a perspective of conservation. Hopefully you could even charge the recycling trucks with electricity generated from renewable sources as well.
As with a lot of conservation practices, many of the benefits will be much more apparent years down the road, though there are still plenty of benefits to engaging in conservation and recycling today.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Earlier in the thread someone said that buying recycled goods is just as important as recycling, and while I understand that, I am continually baffled by how much worse certain recycled products are. At work we switched to recycled paper cups some time ago, and since then we keep changing brands and they keep getting worse. I have also bought recycled plastic cups, only to find that there were little brown specs in the plastic. I wound up returning them. I also notice that the recycled printer paper we have at work is worse than the non-recycled paper. Why is this the case?
Recycled input material is different from virgin inputs, for everything except metals basically. That is part of the reason recycling metallic material is so lucrative. The reasons for this are multifaceted. In paper, the actual process of turning old paper into new paper results in shortened fibers. That impacts the quality of paper produced from those fibers (which is why it is usually blended with virgin pulp). In almost any sorting based process (like for plastics and glass), you end up with some error margin of products that are misorted. That means the output from the recycling process is going to be impure. Those impurities mean the recycled material is often unsuitable for direct re-use. So it is hard for instance to make a new glass bottle out of recycled glass cullet. The end result is prone to breakage due to impurities. You can sidestep that issue somewhat by repurposing that ground up glass for other projects, which is what is often done. That is part of the reason you see landscaping mulch made out of tire rubber now.
It sounds like we may be better served not making direct consumer goods from recycling then, or at least not the type where the difference is noticeable.
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Giggles_FunsworthBlight on DiscourseBay Area SprawlRegistered Userregular
Clearly we should go back to creating plastic out of new petroleum. Speckled plastics are unacceptable.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Clearly we should go back to creating plastic out of new petroleum. Speckled plastics are unacceptable.
They just look dirty. They can have uses (benches or playground equipment come to mind) but I don't think they should be used for containers that hold food or beverages.
I agree the quality of most recycled materials isn't as nice. But I'm generally not too concerned with the quality of a cup or piece of paper I'm going to use once then throw away.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I don't think it's so unreasonable to want the things we use to look clean. If that is the trade off, then recycled goods simply aren't good enough.
If they're just out of the plastic and/or freshly washed they look perfectly clean. You just don't feel that they are clean. Which is your own issue. Don't but them. Not everyone else cares that the harmless specks inside the plastic cup they are going to throw away are there.
I agree the quality of most recycled materials isn't as nice. But I'm generally not too concerned with the quality of a cup or piece of paper I'm going to use once then throw away.
Reduce>Reuse>Recycle
If you don't like the crappy disposable recycled products and actually give a damn about the environment, there is the totally viable option of not using crappy disposable products.
Works good for crap like cups.
Paper... we shouldn't use so much of the stuff, but paperless office endeavors aren't really all that practical, even with all the computers, tablets and e-ink. Lower quality recycled paper should be pretty acceptable for most things clients won't see, and as I understand it, and for more than just ecological concerns, electronic discovery is becoming a pretty big thing in law. Which should cut back on consumption a fair bit. Electronic transaction processing can also reduce a lot of paper, and really can Increase efficiency a lot.
Honestly, I'm not 100% sold on recycling paper, when it would probably be equally good for the economy to clean up the production a bit, capture useful stuff out of some of the waste streams, and dispose of it by dumping paper in a deep enough hole where it won't rot(be eaten by bacteria releasing co2). Screw saving poplars grown expressly to be made into paper. Those trees are jerks anyway.
Or, whatever. There are options for high quality environmentally responsible products other than disposable pre-garbage made from virgin materials. They do come with other costs of course, but sometimes they have nice side effects. In Germany, for instance, you aren't going to receive too many cheesy plastic/paper cups. You will leave a deposit when you buy a beer/coffee/gluhwein. You will get a decent glass/mug, often made expressly for a given event, and if you don't return it you get a keepsake and the business's costs are covered.
They moistly come out at night, moistly.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
If they're just out of the plastic and/or freshly washed they look perfectly clean. You just don't feel that they are clean. Which is your own issue. Don't but them. Not everyone else cares that the harmless specks inside the plastic cup they are going to throw away are there.
I disagree that they look clean. A clear plastic cup with random brown specs in it doesn't look clean, or at least not the way it's supposed to. If you don't care that's fine, but I personally know a lot of people that feel how I do. Contrast ketchup bottles which are apparently made of plants now, but look fine.
If they're just out of the plastic and/or freshly washed they look perfectly clean. You just don't feel that they are clean. Which is your own issue. Don't but them. Not everyone else cares that the harmless specks inside the plastic cup they are going to throw away are there.
I disagree that they look clean. A clear plastic cup with random brown specs in it doesn't look clean, or at least not the way it's supposed to. If you don't care that's fine, but I personally know a lot of people that feel how I do. Contrast ketchup bottles which are apparently made of plants now, but look fine.
You are literally saying that X product that helps the environment isn't exactly what you want and therefore companies should stop producing it altogether for everyone else. That is not a reasonable statement. That you know people who agree with you does not make it a reasonable statement.
I agree the quality of most recycled materials isn't as nice. But I'm generally not too concerned with the quality of a cup or piece of paper I'm going to use once then throw away.
Reduce>Reuse>Recycle
If you don't like the crappy disposable recycled products and actually give a damn about the environment, there is the totally viable option of not using crappy disposable products.
I agree. I was irked by the idea that companies making disposable recycled products should stop because they do not meet SKFM's personal desires.
And yeah pretty much everywhere I work has been about reusing over recycling. Every office had a coffee maker but it was generally expected for people to bring their own mugs. There would sometimes be extra mugs available but that was a rarity and I don't really trust a lot of those people to properly wash a cup anyway.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
If they're just out of the plastic and/or freshly washed they look perfectly clean. You just don't feel that they are clean. Which is your own issue. Don't but them. Not everyone else cares that the harmless specks inside the plastic cup they are going to throw away are there.
I disagree that they look clean. A clear plastic cup with random brown specs in it doesn't look clean, or at least not the way it's supposed to. If you don't care that's fine, but I personally know a lot of people that feel how I do. Contrast ketchup bottles which are apparently made of plants now, but look fine.
You are literally saying that X product that helps the environment isn't exactly what you want and therefore companies should stop producing it altogether for everyone else. That is not a reasonable statement. That you know people who agree with you does not make it a reasonable statement.
I question how much they really help the environment. If a cup has a speck, I throw it out, so more cups get used. If a paper towel or piece of paper has a brown mark, I throw that out too. And we have gone through a progression of worse and worse recycled cups at work, so while you used to be able to use one non recycled cup for water almost the whole day, now you barely get one cup out of it.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I agree the quality of most recycled materials isn't as nice. But I'm generally not too concerned with the quality of a cup or piece of paper I'm going to use once then throw away.
Reduce>Reuse>Recycle
If you don't like the crappy disposable recycled products and actually give a damn about the environment, there is the totally viable option of not using crappy disposable products.
I agree. I was irked by the idea that companies making disposable recycled products should stop because they do not meet SKFM's personal desires.
And yeah pretty much everywhere I work has been about reusing over recycling. Every office had a coffee maker but it was generally expected for people to bring their own mugs. There would sometimes be extra mugs available but that was a rarity and I don't really trust a lot of those people to properly wash a cup anyway.
All the newer offices we build are paper cupless, but they get dishwashers as a trade off. At my office, they started giving the new hires mugs, but nothing for us, and no dishwashers.
Edit: We used to only use glasses at home, but since the EPA mandates that dishwasher detergent become terrible, I don't like how glasses come out in the dishwasher as much, so we switched to plastic.
If they're just out of the plastic and/or freshly washed they look perfectly clean. You just don't feel that they are clean. Which is your own issue. Don't but them. Not everyone else cares that the harmless specks inside the plastic cup they are going to throw away are there.
I disagree that they look clean. A clear plastic cup with random brown specs in it doesn't look clean, or at least not the way it's supposed to. If you don't care that's fine, but I personally know a lot of people that feel how I do. Contrast ketchup bottles which are apparently made of plants now, but look fine.
You are literally saying that X product that helps the environment isn't exactly what you want and therefore companies should stop producing it altogether for everyone else. That is not a reasonable statement. That you know people who agree with you does not make it a reasonable statement.
I question how much they really help the environment. If a cup has a speck, I throw it out, so more cups get used. If a paper towel or piece of paper has a brown mark, I throw that out too. And we have gone through a progression of worse and worse recycled cups at work, so while you used to be able to use one non recycled cup for water almost the whole day, now you barely get one cup out of it.
Those materials are helping the environment perfectly well. You're the one throwing them away for no reason beyond "icky".
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Honestly, having grown up with curb side pick up, and then having lived in apartment buildings where the porters just took recycling from the trash rooms, I was really surprised to find that a nice pretty well off private community like mine did not provide for recycling. I made the post because I wanted to know if this was unique to long island or if it was not that uncommon.
My company does not have a recycling "program" (we are in a large office building in Manhattan) but we do recycle paper and plastic in the office. I can't bring recycling there though, because I commute by train. I shop at a small local grocer for the most part, and they do not have recycling bins. The big chain places have bottle deposit machines though. As I said before, I looked for the location of public recycling drop off sites, and it appears that we literally do not have any. It seems like public recycling is only handled by pick ups here, which seems very strange.
As far as I can see the best thing to do is:
1.Make an effort to recycle batteries, electronics and other really hazardous stuff.
2. Compost what you can.
3. Check for recycling pick up at local areas you go to like supermarkets and malls. Save up your items until you go to said places normally.
4.If none of that works it is probably more efficient to just throw it out.
5.Talk to your neighbors and see if any of them want recycling. If you find people receptive point out the benefits and look for a company that could do so (the current management company would be a good start). Then bring it up to the board once you have many people on board and a full plan.
6.Look into state or county programs that might be able to subsidize pickup or creation of a plant in this township area. There are sure to be some politicians who would be willing to back a green job creation proposal in your area.
I have single stream recycling and like it. Having machines and trained experts sort the trash is much more efficient then having every single person do it themselves.
Also be careful and research the companies you send your e-waste to, some are really crummy and just take out the most valuable metals then ship it off to Africa without decontaminating it of other hazardous waste.
A year or two back they changed the contractor or something like that, and now they just throw it all into a normal dump truck and take everything except glass (because it would shatter when they compress it down). If you want to recycle glass you have to take it to the glass recyclers yourself.
Actually that wasn't demonstrated at all. Someone thought they did until it was pointed out no one takes they recycling out every single day.
Might be good to get a solid bunch of numbers, maybe a spreadsheet of when it no longer behooves people to drive "out of their way" to recycle. Maybe it's 2 miles for paper/glass and 25 miles for aluminium cans.
That really baffles me having grown up on Long Island (631 represent). When I was a kid they gave us the orange bins quickly followed by the green bins. Does your town not do recycling at all or do you live in some sort of heavily wooded enclave on the North Shore?
I live in an unincorporated village in the township of Hempstead. The township handles recycling, but does not appear to have any drop off centers. It may be that we truck recycling outside of the county, like I think we do with trash. I have family who have lived in the five towns for 15 years, and recycling just started there 2 years ago.
Do you have a deposit system? It is generally hard to get buy-in for bottle collection schemes in the US without a deposit system. Part of the reason I suspect is that soft drinks and milk are no longer delivered in glass and as such the average consumer isn't likely to collect glass bottles of a uniform size that can actually be gathered easily. If I eat a jar of soy sauce every 2 months that comes in a glass jar, it probably isn't worth it for the soy sauce company to organize a collection scheme, especially given that each company would need their own. There aren't very good economies of scale I suspect in other words.
But yes, if you can get that going it works well. Cleaning bottles is almost free, the real cost is in collecting them I believe. Even sorting isn't too bad if you can assume a given shape.
It isn't really a waste to recycle it, it just isn't usually worth it IMO. Glass is inert, so it doesn't outgas methane like food waste, paper and plastics, nor does it release anything into the water table. Smelting glass cullet (the glass shards created at the end of the recycling stream) in lieu of sand, soda and limestone creates energy savings of approximately 2-3% per every 10% substituted, which really isn't that great since it doesn't take transportation costs into account. Additionally like I said in single stream systems there are liability issues that come into play and often the glass cullet produced is pretty shoddy due to impurities. Some of this is alleviated in multiple stream systems however.
They don't break down currently because microbes generally have a hard time recognizing them as food. Given the rate at which microbes adapt, it seems likely that plastic devouring microbes will eventually become prevalent. Nature abhors a vacuum et al. At which point your plastic isn't really sequestered very well anymore.
I feel no regrets.
You just through everything into the dumpster. Then, some guys would drive down the alley in an old pick up and take all the large scrap steel, or anything that might be repaired and resold. And then after the truck went through, a bunch of guys with shopping carts would come and pick out all the cans.
My old weight bench, was picked up from the curb in less time than it would have taken me to drive the 5 miles to the scrap metal place. Great service, no cost. Can't be beat.
On the other hand, my parents live out in the Shenandoah where there is no trash pickup or recycling. There're a couple of large dumpsters that everyone in the town uses for everything.
Rigorous Scholarship
Earlier in the thread someone said that buying recycled goods is just as important as recycling, and while I understand that, I am continually baffled by how much worse certain recycled products are. At work we switched to recycled paper cups some time ago, and since then we keep changing brands and they keep getting worse. I have also bought recycled plastic cups, only to find that there were little brown specs in the plastic. I wound up returning them. I also notice that the recycled printer paper we have at work is worse than the non-recycled paper. Why is this the case?
My hometown is experiencing a minor crimewave based around aluminum cans - trespassing to get to peoples' bins, helping yourself to other stuff once you're trespassing anyway, people getting shot because they're trespassing, and weird turf violence on trash days as people fight over who has "rights" to cans in certain neighborhoods.
Still sounds good to me.
I still recycle too, I just sit on my porch in a rocking chair with a shotgun on pickup days.
(more like I lock my bins, keep them out of sight, and only take them out to the curb the morning they're to be collected. I have had people snooping around my back yard looking for them though)
Recycled input material is different from virgin inputs, for everything except metals basically. That is part of the reason recycling metallic material is so lucrative. The reasons for this are multifaceted. In paper, the actual process of turning old paper into new paper results in shortened fibers. That impacts the quality of paper produced from those fibers (which is why it is usually blended with virgin pulp). In almost any sorting based process (like for plastics and glass), you end up with some error margin of products that are misorted. That means the output from the recycling process is going to be impure. Those impurities mean the recycled material is often unsuitable for direct re-use. So it is hard for instance to make a new glass bottle out of recycled glass cullet. The end result is prone to breakage due to impurities. You can sidestep that issue somewhat by repurposing that ground up glass for other projects, which is what is often done. That is part of the reason you see landscaping mulch made out of tire rubber now.
1. Dover, NH - Pay for trashbags, recycling is free - basically my favorite system, as the lazier you were, the more you paid
2. SF, CA - Recycling, Trash and Compost - while I hated the compost element at first (I had done it as a kid at home, but not for a while as I had no garden), I came to love it as my actual trash would take forever to fill up compared to the constant composting
3. Lake Tahoe, CA (didn't live there but heard about it) - All grouped together, but town pays for separation after pickup. Ultimate solution for ensuring proper waste splitting
My current building recycles, but also has trash chutes, so I imagine a lot of people don't even bother recycling. I personally think there are merits to each setup, and something like a hybrid Dover/SF solution may be the most beneficial for a community, as it has the carrot of free recycling/composting and the stick of bag prices.
Mississippi is a butt.
Recycling is a local/city service, not a state service.
And if you're not home, they'll even recycle your A/C and copper wires!
Yeah, the pickers are an interesting bunch, but the city and most of the burbs have separate bins and trucks for recycling. Started out as separate, but most are mixed now - glass, plastic, paper all go in the same bin.
I sometimes wonder how much waste was/is being created by those "reusable" bags everyone buys now. I would be surprised if it's been a net benefit as far as environment.
A lot has been said about the energy costs to actually recycle items being somewhat high. I think it has been stated clearly enough by others that the energy balance still leans towards recycling, but what I haven't seen brought up is the ability of the energy grid to shift towards renewable resources somewhere down the line. All of a sudden you'll be recycling items with power generated from solar, wind, geothermal, and other sources, greatly improving system efficiencies, at least from a perspective of conservation. Hopefully you could even charge the recycling trucks with electricity generated from renewable sources as well.
As with a lot of conservation practices, many of the benefits will be much more apparent years down the road, though there are still plenty of benefits to engaging in conservation and recycling today.
It sounds like we may be better served not making direct consumer goods from recycling then, or at least not the type where the difference is noticeable.
They just look dirty. They can have uses (benches or playground equipment come to mind) but I don't think they should be used for containers that hold food or beverages.
They look dirty.
I agree the quality of most recycled materials isn't as nice. But I'm generally not too concerned with the quality of a cup or piece of paper I'm going to use once then throw away.
Reduce>Reuse>Recycle
If you don't like the crappy disposable recycled products and actually give a damn about the environment, there is the totally viable option of not using crappy disposable products.
Works good for crap like cups.
Paper... we shouldn't use so much of the stuff, but paperless office endeavors aren't really all that practical, even with all the computers, tablets and e-ink. Lower quality recycled paper should be pretty acceptable for most things clients won't see, and as I understand it, and for more than just ecological concerns, electronic discovery is becoming a pretty big thing in law. Which should cut back on consumption a fair bit. Electronic transaction processing can also reduce a lot of paper, and really can Increase efficiency a lot.
Honestly, I'm not 100% sold on recycling paper, when it would probably be equally good for the economy to clean up the production a bit, capture useful stuff out of some of the waste streams, and dispose of it by dumping paper in a deep enough hole where it won't rot(be eaten by bacteria releasing co2). Screw saving poplars grown expressly to be made into paper. Those trees are jerks anyway.
Or, whatever. There are options for high quality environmentally responsible products other than disposable pre-garbage made from virgin materials. They do come with other costs of course, but sometimes they have nice side effects. In Germany, for instance, you aren't going to receive too many cheesy plastic/paper cups. You will leave a deposit when you buy a beer/coffee/gluhwein. You will get a decent glass/mug, often made expressly for a given event, and if you don't return it you get a keepsake and the business's costs are covered.
I disagree that they look clean. A clear plastic cup with random brown specs in it doesn't look clean, or at least not the way it's supposed to. If you don't care that's fine, but I personally know a lot of people that feel how I do. Contrast ketchup bottles which are apparently made of plants now, but look fine.
You are literally saying that X product that helps the environment isn't exactly what you want and therefore companies should stop producing it altogether for everyone else. That is not a reasonable statement. That you know people who agree with you does not make it a reasonable statement.
I agree. I was irked by the idea that companies making disposable recycled products should stop because they do not meet SKFM's personal desires.
And yeah pretty much everywhere I work has been about reusing over recycling. Every office had a coffee maker but it was generally expected for people to bring their own mugs. There would sometimes be extra mugs available but that was a rarity and I don't really trust a lot of those people to properly wash a cup anyway.
I question how much they really help the environment. If a cup has a speck, I throw it out, so more cups get used. If a paper towel or piece of paper has a brown mark, I throw that out too. And we have gone through a progression of worse and worse recycled cups at work, so while you used to be able to use one non recycled cup for water almost the whole day, now you barely get one cup out of it.
All the newer offices we build are paper cupless, but they get dishwashers as a trade off. At my office, they started giving the new hires mugs, but nothing for us, and no dishwashers.
Edit: We used to only use glasses at home, but since the EPA mandates that dishwasher detergent become terrible, I don't like how glasses come out in the dishwasher as much, so we switched to plastic.
Those materials are helping the environment perfectly well. You're the one throwing them away for no reason beyond "icky".