My wife and I try to take advantage of whatever recycling options are available to us (and we compost, too), and because I've dragged her around the country following my jobs for the past couple of decade we've lived in places with varied levels of availability. Travel has brought us in to contact with still more way to organize the process.1
Now, I'm far from an expert on this industry, but I know it can be a challenging domain to work in. The work of sorting mixed waste into coherent categories is non-trivial and costs real money if done in bulk after the material is turned in or depends on ordinary people's willingness and ability to get the sorting right. And sorting errors are significant:2 batches of material are often diverted to landfill due to "contamination"; a word which apparently covers a lot of sins from including food-waste (pizza boxes in your cardboard recycling, anyone), to mixing different categories of material together, or carelessly tossing plain garbage in a recycling bin.
Our local arrangements require individuals wishing to recycle to bring recyclables to a central facility3 and load them into dumpsters and big bins in six different categories (paper, cardboard, glass, plastic, aluminum, and ferrous metals4). Which leads us to some questions:
- Just what plastics are allowed?
At least these are generally marked with the numbered recycling trefoil, but we're encountered places with an added requirement specifying only bottles with necks. Huh? And in most places I've lived plastic bags can't be recycled in the municipal system. You have to take those to the various stores that accept them.
- What is the difference between paper and cardboard?
How do I decide? Does it matter if the paper is glossy or not?
- What aluminum items are accepted?
In some places it's just cans; in others you can bring foil and disposable cookware (if clean). What about substantial pieces of structural meta?
- Glass?
Does is need to be sorted by color? What if it's broken?
- About that food waste thing...
Does it rule out greasy paper? What about bottles and cans with beer or soda remnants?5
- Batteries?
These are a significant source of hazardous waste in landfill streams, but in most places they are hard to recycle. It's generally the case that you have to sort by chemistry and that cracked and leaking batteries are an extra pain.6
And so on and so forth. It's not trivial to know what is expected. You have to find, read, and indeed pay attention to the documentation supplied by your locality. Uhg.
Then there is the matter of what to do if you're not sure (or if, say, you and your spouse disagree about what the rules are). Should you submit things which you are unsure of at the possible cost of "contaminating" a load or contributing to a contractor terminating a contract? Or should you knowingly send things to landfill to insure that other stuff gets recycled?
I haven't traveled widely enough recently to have a good notion of how they do these things outside of the USA, but when I was going to Japan regularly in the noughties they seem to have a much more unified system (same bins and iconography in Tokyo and Osaka airports, JR station in several places, and in the small villages in Toyama prefecture. Europe was more varied than Japan but more consistent than the US.
1 When we attended a wedding on the big island of Hawaii just after the turn of the millennium the resort provided us with a laminated copy of the island's waste disposal guidelines card, listing approximately thirty different categories of trash, recyclables, and hazardous waste and detailing how/where each was to be disposed of (there were three categories of used batteries).
2 In one place we lived the city recycling unit made yearly reports on actual the levels of waste in various categories and the target's their upstream contractors would accept. And you can learn something about the process just be examining those targets: they would accept a much higher rate of ferrous metals in the aluminum then other types of contamination, so you have to figure that magnets were employed to divert the unwanted metals to the correct processing chain.
3 At least the lot in question is open 24/7. In one place the lot was open about seven hours a days (except on Sunday) with some days of the week including morning hours and others evening hours.
4 They mean iron and steel. I've checked because, the bin is labeled "tin cans" even though no one has used tin for cans in many decades. Linguistic habits can linger long after they are no longer strictly applicaable.
5 Not rinsing is a pet-peeve of mine. Not so much because of the smell, but because the aluminum bins at our local places are often swarming with bees. But I've met people who argue (not without a point) that we live in a desert currently experiencing a drought and they don't want to waste water on the effort.
6 I've had at-work arrangements for batteries when I worked on-site at national labs, and in my last job where we had an environmental health professor who knew all the right people and maintained a drop-off site in has departmental office. Which gives you some idea of how arcane that process can be.
