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As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

nytimes.com

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Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#61

Post by rdtsc »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #23
rdtsc wrote: post #19

> In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. I heard other cities doing that. It is interesting in municipalities where people diligently separate their recycling into multiple streams, everything neatly going into a separate bins and so on, and then it all goes and gets dumped in the landfill. That says som…

Well no, the environment gets ruined so it's more of a "everyone suffers and die ahead of time" situation

That's why I called it a "a dystopian win-win" :-)

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#62

Post by ish »

dredmorbius wrote: post #46
coldtea wrote: post #16

Recycling was always a lipstick on a pig. Inefficient, subsidized, hypocrisy. Wanna help the environment? Reduce consumption overall.

In order of priority: 1. Reduce. 2. Reuse. 3. Recycle.

I hope you don't mind if I add to your list -- I like the 5 R's:

1. Refuse 2. Reduce 3. Reuse 4. Repurpose 5. Recycle

Arguably Refuse and Repurpose are derivative, but I still like calling them out.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#64

Post by tyoma »

ddebernardy wrote: post #11
tyoma wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, single use packaging is a godsend to people with food allergies.

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with single use paper packaging or some other non-plastic alternative to the same effect?

The original poster specifically mentioned plastic bottles, which, I imagine, are hard to make from paper.

Refillable glass allows for exactly the kind of cross contamination that makes otherwise safe products inedible.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#65

Post by mymythisisthis »

maxxxxx wrote: post #12

In Germany you pay a deposit when you buy a bottle and when you bring it back, you get your money back. At least when I lived there the system worked well. there is always a lot of pressure from industry to go one-way though.

That's what happened in Ontario Canada. We had a deposit system for glass bottles, but it was lost when 'recycling' and plastic bottles came. Both recycle and plastic bottles where an industry reaction to not wanting to have a deposit system.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#66

Post by iguy »

glial wrote: post #22
aviv wrote: post #14

Recycling is treating the symptom and not the root cause. The real problem is people buying too much crap they don't really need or shouldn't consume in the first place.

That's a narrow perspective - the root case is the broader expectations about packaging, from both producers and consumers. Lots of food comes wrapped in single-use plastic, too. It's one way to keep food shelf-stable. We need alternative packaging (or package re-use), since can't stop buying food.

There's no zero-cost way to have food, and it seems important to look at the total, not just packaging.

If (as I seem to remember for cucumbers) the un-wrapped version means significantly higher waste, then the film (which is completely single-use petrochemical) has to be balanced agains the farming and transport (also lots of single-use petro-products!) of the wasted ones.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#67

Post by zanny »

nraynaud wrote: post #20
coldtea wrote: post #16

Recycling was always a lipstick on a pig. Inefficient, subsidized, hypocrisy. Wanna help the environment? Reduce consumption overall.

very specifically: don't take the plane, don't got to work with your car, and live in high density housing.

And then rue in the fact your individual, or even the individual contributions of the personal lives of all citizens, are a sliver of a pie dominated by agriculture, manufacturing, and resource extraction. Almost all of which have much less impactful changes to make that aren't lifestyle shifting but who are not incentivized to without the regulatory initiative to force them to.

Make whatever changes in your life you want, "every little bit helps", but remember that individual willpower and grit is taking a cup of water out of an ocean. You don't change the tide that way, you need to recognize the importance of political action to see the situation improve.

For everyone who goes vegetarian instead of attending town halls or petitioning their representatives or staying home from protesting business waste they are missing the forest for the trees on what matters in environmentalism.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#68

Post by School-Cotton »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #23
rdtsc wrote: post #19

> In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. I heard other cities doing that. It is interesting in municipalities where people diligently separate their recycling into multiple streams, everything neatly going into a separate bins and so on, and then it all goes and gets dumped in the landfill. That says som…

Well no, the environment gets ruined so it's more of a "everyone suffers and die ahead of time" situation

Recycling is completely unrelated to most of the actually serious environmental issues. (E.g., climate change)

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#69

Post by coldtea »

zanny wrote: post #67
nraynaud wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very specifically: don't take the plane, don't got to work with your car, and live in high density housing.

And then rue in the fact your individual, or even the individual contributions of the personal lives of all citizens, are a sliver of a pie dominated by agriculture, manufacturing, and resource extraction. Almost all of which have much less impactful changes to make that aren't lifestyle shifting but who are not incentivized to without the regulatory initiative to force them to. Make whatever changes in your life you…

>And then rue in the fact your individual, or even the individual contributions of the personal lives of all citizens, are a sliver of a pie dominated by agriculture, manufacturing, and resource extraction.

Agriculture, manufacturing, and resource extraction all exist to serve consumerism society.

Our personal individual contributions might be just a tiny slice of it, but aggregated individual contributions are 100% of the problem.

Society is us.

Re: As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

#70

Post by irrational »

Is there anyway to get transparency on what individual communities are actually doing? At our last county fair, the recycling department had a game set up to help people understand what should go into trash versus recycling. I was asking the manager about the specifics and he said that the recycling was taken to a local facility where local people were paid to sort through it on a conveyor belt to pull out stuff that should've gone into the trash. It sounded feasible at the time, but reading through these comments I wonder if the recycling was actually being shipped to China (this was before the whole thing about China refusing recyclables started). We are on the west coast by a large port, so I would think it would easier for us to have been shipping recyclable to China that people farther inland.
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