That moment when New York City realized that it doesn't have to resort to clogging its curbs and sidewalks with loose bags of trash and can instead rely on sophisticated technology: Trash cans
Car brain in the comment thread...
Trash bags take up exactly as much space as a trash bag for exactly as long as it is on the sidewalk. Trash cans take up more than their maximum capacity regardless of how full they are, 24 hours a day.
And the tweeter's reply...
Despite having the best public transit system in America, New York City has 3 million on-street parking spaces, more than 95% of which are free, and your concern is… trash cans taking up too much space? Sorry, but if you love the rats so much, why don't you marry one?
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Hippie cities lmao.
The entire UK does this and we're shit.
A ton of places in the US have this as well, curbside recycling pick up. But for the last several years most of it doesn't really end up actually recycled anymore because it's unprofitable to do so. Only aluminum and steel cans usually, most plastic just ends up in a landfill
Paper? Cardboard?
We split into:
Glass, plastics, metals, food waste, paper/cardboard, general-other-waste, garden waste.
where i live, it's blue bin for glass, paper, cardboard, metals and plastics
green bin for garden waste
and black bin for everything else
Interesting, I'd ask which council but probably best not to say.
We get a separate bag for paper/card, separate bag box for glass/plastic, small box for the food waste, and then blue bin/red bin.
I assumed this was the case everywhere as it has been the same experience I've had at 3 different councils at opposite ends of the country for me.
huh, weird
not going to specify the council, but it's in east anglia
In Seattle, it's the three bins. I assume that's how it is in most places in the US that bother with recycling and compost.
Garden waste is usually separate here, not at all considered recycling and handled differently (and compared to everything else well and effectively) for the most part. Paper and cardboard get recycled pretty effectively on larger scales by commercial outfits that produce a lot of them to make it cost effective. Separate food waste is rarer for curbside pickup but some larger cities do it, or there are smaller nonprofit like volunteer programs to keep it out of landfills.
For everything else, most places here that do curbside pickup have commingled recycling, everything "recyclable" gets put together in one bin and then sorted at a facility. And since only the metals are profitable to recycle mostly every thing else ends up in a landfill either directly or eventually. A lot of rural areas have recycling centers that you have to take your stuff to and sort there and more of that ends up actually being recycled because it's not all jumbled up together.
A few years ago when China stopped taking the world's plastic recycling and the cost of oil dipped to a more economic level almost none of the plastic "recycled" in the developed world stays out of a landfill. Unless you know exactly where it goes or what happens to it, plastic usually doesn't get recycled often.
I feel like I did a really bad and haphazard job of drunkenly trying to explain this but hopefully you get the jist. Also why did I write an effort post on recycling, why do I know this useless information?
Interesting.
The separation of food waste reduces regular waste pickup by 30%, which is how they make it more affordable by reducing regular pickups to bi-weekly.
Food waste and garden waste both get composted and the offshooting methane gets used for electricity generation. This keeps it out of landfill where it would otherwise cause greenhouse gases.
Yeah I'm aware not much of the plastic is actually recycled. I think we need to ditch plastic for glass. Glass is nicer anyway. We have at least made some pretty significant improvements to the quantity of single-use plastics being used, and there is a complete ban on most of the worst ones coming into force in October.
I hate how much simpler and more effective it could be here with a modicum of effort and thought, ugh. And of course not having to rely on a profit motive would basically solve most of it, but even that notwithstanding there are so many less dumb ways to make it more feasible to actually recycle stuff here.
On the smallest of silver linings it's usually a really good example to show libs how personal responsibility doesn't effect positive change if large systems they operate in run counter to their efforts.
Much of the recycled plastic ends up being burned for energy anyway