Largest U.S. Recycling Project to Extend Landfill Life for Virginia Residents

There's a lot of things that really jam up recycling.

One of them is plastic grocery bags. They just cause a lot of problems in the mechanisation of recycling so it's very non-trivial to work around them.

Oils and biowaste of course are of course another issue. Especially for corrugated fiberboard (brandname: cardboard) and the like.

And then also it's hard for machines or lineworkers to easily differentiate plastics without sufficient market or regulatory pressure. If consumers are already generally sorting by broad category then they take most of the legwork out (leaving the facility to check their work) and those consumers also apply market pressure on manufacturers to make it obvious how their product is expected to be recycled.

And of course also there's just a general component of everyone doing a little at a time to keep things organised from the start making the entire process an order of magnitude easier and more efficient for everyone downstream.

>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.

That depends. The big is there is so much volume that isn't recyclable that the costs of machines to sort everything (when most is waste) is just too high.

As the other post started to get to: for some things clean waste matters and is common enough to sort. If you have greasy paper about all that we can do is burn it, but clean paper has enough value as to be worth it. Thus a separate stream for clean cardboard/paper is something that should be done early.

For other things cleaning isn't as big a deal (unless you can get perfect clean they will need to clean again - but you still want it not to stink). Throw all your plastic (no bags - unless you have the rare system that can handle them), cans, and glass together: They have to sort anyway, but compartments for each (or separate trucks) are going to add up costs - One week there is more cans than others so you end up going back to the facility with half full compartments all the time burned fuel each way.

You still want to separate trash, (even if the bag issue was solved) as there is so much that we can't really do anything about that the quantity means the sorting machines needed to handle total volumes are too high unless most things we know can't be recycled are not in.

I'm not sure about organics. My impression is that most houses don't have enough of it as to be worth the bother in general. Businesses that have enough as to be worth it should also separate their kitchen waste but otherwise more fuel is burned in the trucks than we save.

We also have to ask what is done with regular waste. Landfills are slow compost piles for organics, and we do collect the methane these days. Incinerators turn organics and plastics into fuel which is often the best we can do with them (recycling plastics still needs a lot of energy/chemicals, burning releases some CO2, but perhaps less than the above - this has been argued many times to different conclusions)

It is a free for all in USA, sometimes the trash truck comes down and grabs both recycling bins and trash bins and just dumps all into the same truck. No one cares, customer or trash service company. Many facilities dont sort if sorting becomes too much work they just toss what was picked up as reycling into the trash. Walk inside any warehouse type facility in America and they throw anything and everything into the trash that has lost its utility for the business. Working inside an order fulfillment warehouse opened my eyes to how much waste is created just to pack and ship everyones cheap single use junk. Bottle deposits haven't been adjusted for inflation in decades, no one even talks about it. States that dont have deposit laws people just litter aluminim cans everywhere. When there are bottle deposit laws they have exceptions like no deposit required for aluminum can if its contents are not carbonated. Why should that matter? Most people toss their food waste into the trash, effectively no one bothers with the effort to return nutrients back into the earth. Why do that when we can just pointlessly haul it away in a fuel burning truck and seal it away with toxic everyday garbage. The people who actually care about re-use and or reducing waste are tiny vocal minority compared to everyone else. When I walk into a grocery story filled with 100+ shoppers I am always the only person using reusable, non-plastic bags. I also laugh when if you don't use plastic bags, they slap plastic stickers on your items thanking you for not using plastic bags LOL. I know other countries are worse with pollution but gosh. Sounds nice in Zurich if there's actually people that care.

> I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.

It’s a logical argument, but I feel another punishment in your future.

>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.

It's not about efficiency, it's about making some portion of the population feel good about their consumption. It is obvious that the production and use of pretty much all of these plastics leads to undesirable very long term outcomes, but very desirable short term outcomes.

Politically, it is untenable to completely ban the plastic as the people would revolt, but it is (or was) also politically untenable to not do anything about the problem.

Hence, the politically tenable solution is to pretend like society is doing something about the problem. It's the same thing with fossil fuels and carbon emissions.

I'd be more rational to give up on most plastic recycling and just burn it industrially, like in waste power plants or to generate process heat. You get decent heat output, it burns fairly cleanly, and any toxins can be filtered. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than burning 'fresh' oil or gas for the same purpose while doing this whole plastic-recycling charade

I agree that a lot of plastic recycling is greenwashing from the manufacturing industry.

I've seen the statistics, and we need to take dramatic steps in order to reduce the amount of single use plastics – but don't you think that it's better that we try?

I hear you about micro plastics, and I think that it's important to try to do better to fix this.

But given the limitations of our imperfect world, do you really think that we would be net-net better off without even making an attempt to recycle it?

This. I support recycling, but it is an absolute wasted endeavor so long as we continue to produce and dump plastic. No amount of recycling can hold a candle to the damage being done by the inability to recycle plastic, the insane production of new plastic, and the disposable of all of that plastic.

Until we learn to do something with the plastic, recycling is just a pipe dream to make people feel better.