Recycling in America
economist.com
Recycling in America
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: Recycling in America
#2America is way behind from living overseas for 3 years.
I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct.
Should be more like some areas in Germany where you pay for the amount of trash you have(weight), the more you throw away the more you pay -> encourages recycling!
I also work for a brewery and it is sad that none will re-use bottles in the united states, all beer goes into brand new bottles :(
Re: Recycling in America
#3Will never forget how I (German) walked into a Safeway in San Francisco with my bag full of bottles and asked the cashier where the deposit-machine is. She had absolutely no clue what I was talking about.
Re: Recycling in America
#4America is way behind from living overseas for 3 years. I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct. Should be more like some areas in Germany where you pay for the amount of trash you have(weight), the more you throw away the more you pay -> encourages recycling! I also work for a brewery and it is sad that none will re-use bottles in the united states, all beer goes into brand new bottles :(
>I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct.
what.
Who's charging you? Local government?
Re: Recycling in America
#5On a side note, I am consistently reminded of the extraordinary skill level the staff of The Economist employs when writing photo captions and article headlines.
Re: Recycling in America
#6"Most recycled materials should be cheaper than virgin commodities"
Surprisingly this just isn't true. It takes a lot of work and chemicals to clean inks and glues out of paper for recycling.
Penn & Teller looked into this in an episode of Bullshit! a while back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4
Aluminum and clear glass are very efficient to recycle, plastics and colored glass depend on commodity prices, and paper is just a terrible idea to recycle. It's much better for the environment to farm trees for making paper, then put that paper in landfills and harvest the methane gas the paper emits when it decomposes.
Re: Recycling in America
#7Will never forget how I (German) walked into a Safeway in San Francisco with my bag full of bottles and asked the cashier where the deposit-machine is. She had absolutely no clue what I was talking about.
New York has those bottle in/ cash out machines. If you have a bottle that the store doesn't sell it would reject it.
Recycling is very regional. Some states don't have bottle deposits.
Where I live now, they gave up on the rules that nobody followed (plastic # types in particular) and have "single stream" where everything that might be recyclable goes to one plant and is sorted by machines/people.
I remember having to buy my bag in germany because I didn't have one. Ikea did the same thing here for a while (no bags), but they have plastic ones now.
Re: Recycling in America
#8Will never forget how I (German) walked into a Safeway in San Francisco with my bag full of bottles and asked the cashier where the deposit-machine is. She had absolutely no clue what I was talking about.
They just have a weird implementation of the redemption:
http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/BevContainer/Recyclers/Director...
(I see California on all the returnables from my state (which requires stores accept any that they sell), so I wondered what you were talking about)
Re: Recycling in America
#9America is way behind from living overseas for 3 years. I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct. Should be more like some areas in Germany where you pay for the amount of trash you have(weight), the more you throw away the more you pay -> encourages recycling! I also work for a brewery and it is sad that none will re-use bottles in the united states, all beer goes into brand new bottles :(
> Should be more like some areas in Germany where you pay for the amount of trash you have(weight), the more you throw away the more you pay -> encourages recycling!
With some regard, there are areas of the US that do this. The city i live in charges extra for more than 1 trash can and really limits what is picked up, while a neighboring city has tags that go on trash bags (charged by the bag). Then again, another neighboring city does neither and will pick up pretty much whatever you put on the curb. For a nationalized system there'd have to be consistent infrastructure and federal funding...and there's really no push for either. Rather, the current method is to incentivize the public to recycle on their own through bottle deposits (though most states don't do this) and/or education.
Re: Recycling in America
#10America is way behind from living overseas for 3 years. I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct. Should be more like some areas in Germany where you pay for the amount of trash you have(weight), the more you throw away the more you pay -> encourages recycling! I also work for a brewery and it is sad that none will re-use bottles in the united states, all beer goes into brand new bottles :(
>I have to pay extra to recycle, which I do not think is correct. what. Who's charging you? Local government?
In many municipalities, they contract trash and recycling collection out to private companies. Many times those companies charge separately for recycling collection.