Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

I just checked our website again, and the flyer I remember seeing is gone, replaced with one that says pizza boxes are recyclable now. "No food residue. No liner." Accompanied by a picture of a clearly never used pizza box.

So now I'm not sure. Is oil soaked into it OK as long as you scrape every last bit of solid food out of it? Do you need no food residue (literally impossible), or is a small amount acceptable? I'm more informed than when I started, but still uncertain.

Apparently we can't recycle shredded paper, that's news to me. This list is now standardized across all of Connecticut. You can search an item and see what to do with it.

http://www.recyclect.com/

>You can put your pizza box in recycling if it does not contain food residue. The liner should go in the trash.

Just like the classic "blame the user" mentality, the users were given an impossibly complex system with barely any incentive to get it right. Nothing about the interface is intuitive or discoverable.

The creators of all this garbage do so because it's profitable. They can create disposable and single use items, in thousands of variations, out of materials that create hundreds of years of environmental impact, and none of that consequence comes back to their bottom line. They'll happily point the finger all day long at us stupid users and inept local governments and bad China, as long as it all distracts from their culpability.

If we forced all producers of trash to account for its safe reuse, recycling or disposal as part of the cost of doing business, this problem would disappear quickly. Because here's the thing, the bill always comes due. If we let them skip out on it, then we will be the ones who pay.

Modern dumps are sealed very well and can hold huge amounts. At $50 a ton we will never run out of space. Put everything in the dump. Plastic, green waste, garbage, paper, electronics, etc. Sort out pure metals like steel and aluminum. Do methane recovery on the pile and burn it for power. This will sequester a lot of carbon and at some point these dumps are likely to be mined as ore bodies. People can compost at their home if they like, but moving all this green waste around is costly and causes many plant diseases to spread much more quickly. Not to mention how horrible it is to get a load of chipped wood to put on your yard that has poison oak mixed in. We don't really need this little ritual of recycling to cleanse us of our consumerism sins. If we are really trying to help the environment, reduce, repair, and reuse is much more effective. Buy high quality stuff that lasts a long time.

Edit: Another bonus is that you and your neighbors only have to be woken up early once a week by the one garbage truck that comes by instead of three times with the current separate garbage, recycling, green waste trucks.

Seattle and the region have been leading recyclers for decades. Waste Management sends a similar brochure to King County residents: http://wmnorthwest.com/kingcounty/calendars/guidelines.pdf