Recycle items and regular trash (Philadelphia, York: gated, live in, design)

[Philly Joe]

I live in Northeast Philly, Mayfair section.


Why are the trashmen putting my recycle items in the truck with the regular trash?


I spend lots of time making sure these items are separate from regular trash. I feel I'm wasting my time.


I sent emails to the city streets department about this and all I get is canned responses.


Has anyone else noticed or experienced this?

[skintreesnail]

yes, they've been throwing trash into the recycling where I am for several months now. I believe that the city lost some sort of recycling contract, so they're incinerating 50% of the recycling. I think there was an announcement on this only recently, but for a while they weren't saying anything.

https://www.philly.com/opinion/comme...-20190227.html

[briantroutman]

For those who aren’t aware: We’re currently facing a genuine recycling crisis. Based on the conversations I’ve had with many everyday folks, the public appears to be completely unaware of that we have any kind of a problem at all. Just search “recycling crisis” on Google and you’ll quickly get a sense of the enormity of what we’re facing.

Here’s the bottom line: For many years, the vast majority of recyclables from the U.S. and the rest of the First World has been shipped off in giant freighters to China. Well, that was the case until last year, anyway. In 2018, the Chinese government decided that they no longer wanted to be the world’s dumpster, so they tightened regulations on the types of recyclable materials they’d accept to the point that it became practically impossible to send any recyclables there. Some other countries in southeast Asia have stepped up to accept First World recyclables, but their capacity is nowhere near large enough to cover the enormous hole China left behind.

As a result, municipalities and waste management companies across the country are sitting on (literally) tons of recyclables and have almost nowhere to send them. Many have started to incinerate them or dump them in landfills.

In part, we’ve created the problem ourselves, both at the municipal level by setting up overly broad recycling programs and as individual citizens by not adopting more responsible attitudes toward proper recycling. Where I grew up in central PA, all recyclables had to be separated by type and many items weren’t accepted at all. Only #1 and #2 plastics could be recycled; all others had to be trashed. So I was surprised to see that in Philadelphia, all numbers of plastic, all glass, cans, junkmail, etc. could be thrown into a single bin and left at the curbside.

That archaic central PA recycling program was (and still is today) inconvenient, and resulted in many people simply throwing their recyclables away. But from my observations, at least those who do jump through the hoops and recycle actually do it correctly, and the result is correctly segregated materials that can be recycled economically. On the other hand, I’ve walked down residential streets in Philadelphia and observed countless items thrown into the recycling that don’t belong there: Wads of plastic wrap, styrofoam take-out containers, used pizza boxes, broken dinner plates, broken table lamps, etc., etc. Whether placed there out of laziness or some naïve hope that everything can be recycled, these non-recyclable materials make processing the recyclables impractical.

Certainly it seems that one major hurdle we need to clear is thorough education of the public on correct recycling procedure...and perhaps the some mechanism of encouraging or enforcing compliance with those procedures. I won’t claim to be an expert on the economics of recycling, but I understand that reducing contamination rates will be key to making recycling sustainable from an economic standpoint.

Then the second major hurdle is finding a place for the recyclables to go, and that will means building recycling capacity right here in the U.S. and other Western nations. Doing so may require subsidies or government investment, but I believe that if we as a society believe we shouldn’t simply be burying mountains of waste underground, we need to invest in recycling infrastructure as we would roads, water, or any other element of infrastructure.

[thedirtypirate]

Originally Posted by skintreesnail

I believe that the city lost some sort of recycling contract, l

Correct, this has made international headlines.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/recyclin...ken-1833063010

https://www.wired.com/story/since-ch...-up-in-flames/

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...na-ban-imports

The dirty little secret of recycling in the USA is that it mostly never happened; some materials, like aluminum, are valuable enough to recycle in North America, and Amazon never has enough cardboard. But it was really all a ruse to make us feel good about single-use packaging and to avoid producer responsibility. Most of the plastic waste was stuck in shipping containers and sold to China, where plentiful cheap labour could separate the dirty from the clean and the polypropylene from the styrene.
So when China closed its doors to dirty plastics, American cities had a problem. Landfills are filling up, cities are turning to incineration, or as they like to call it, waste-to-energy. This is common in Scandinavia, and they used to do it in the plant shown in the photo above. Except it was closed because it couldn't meet the tough European standards for dioxin, so they spent a billion kroner or so to have Bjarke design the fancy new Amager Bakke facility with the ski run on the roof.

In the USA, the standards are nowhere near as tough as in Europe, and the incinerators are not even designed for this stuff. Oliver Milman writes in the Guardian about one incinerator in Chester, Pennsylvania, that burns recycling from as far away as New York City and North Carolina.

So in short, 50% of our recycling is getting melted down in Chester. The incinerator wasn't designed to burn trash so it's inefficient and pollutes a ton.

If there ever was a city that resembled a poorly played game of Sim City, it's Philadelphia.

[FamousBlueRaincoat]

Best thing to do for is to just consume less.

[Indiana Tony]

Originally Posted by Philly Joe

I live in Northeast Philly, Mayfair section.


Why are the trashmen putting my recycle items in the truck with the regular trash?


I spend lots of time making sure these items are separate from regular trash. I feel I'm wasting my time.


I sent emails to the city streets department about this and all I get is canned responses.


Has anyone else noticed or experienced this?

Yes.


Now we just don't care, everything goes in the trash.

[Philly Joe]

Thanks for the replies guys. I was not aware of all this, now it makes more sense.


Trash day today and my recycles were collected properly. It seems like ever other week they dump it into the regular trash truck.

[skintreesnail]

I wish we'd stop screwing our future selves.

[selhars]

I was late getting into recycling, and now that I AM doing it, I'll continue to do so.
But I have to say, this news is not exactly incentifizing.

[RichBeau]

Here's another link about this subject...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...-trash/584131/