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Anon has a question
(lemmy.today)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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Utah, USA.
We do have a few drop-off bins, but I have to drive to each of them. The going explanation is that, since we do sorting at the facility, it's not worth exposing workers to broken glass, which is inevitable when mixing all recyclables into one garbage truck. So people have two options: drive to a drop-off location (each a few miles away and not on the way to anything) or just toss it in the trash. So, most people just toss it in the trash.
The plastic in the caps is different from the plastic in the bottles and cannot be recycled together. I guess it's not worth the time for them to separate at the plant (plastic recycling isn't profitable as it is), so they put that responsibility onto trash customers (in other words, they want an excuse to just toss bottles w/ caps still on them).
I'm talking about these bottle caps btw. They're everywhere here (milk jugs, soda, bigger ones for pasta sauce, etc).
I'm guessing more urban areas have better recycling policies since they don't have massive landfills available for dumping.
Here we have door-to-door pick up now, which replaced dumpsters as a way to encourage recycling: you have limited pick-ups for unsorted trash, the bin has a transponder and a barcode, if you go over the limit you pay extra (albeit very little), while recyclables have unlimited pick-ups; but if they catch you putting normal trash in the recyclables they can fine you.
For door to door we sort as follows:
Then we have dumpsters for glass and dumpsters for gardening refuse, such as wood, leaves, cut grass. Now we have one for cooking oil as well.
For batteries there are usually bins near some stores or at workplaces.
Everything else you have to take to the recycling center, say metal, building materials, furniture... Usually each community has one, when I lived in the country side, my 3000-people village had its own. For furniture in some places you can arrange a curbside pick-up.
All of this is the same for urban and rural areas, though there are small differences between regions as the recycling facilities can be different. For example in some places milk cartons go in the paper bin instead of the plastic one. Of course rural in my area is probably way less rural than most of Utah.
As for caps, yeah, those are now attached to the bottle.. I guess the recycling facility has a way to separate and sort them.
Yeah, we're not nearly that fancy. Here's what we have:
If you want to recycle glass, plastic bags, batteries, light bulbs, etc, you need to find a drop-off bin, which are relatively uncommon (plastic bag dropoff is more common now). Target is my go-to since they have the bins I need the most (glass, plastic bags), but they don't take light bulbs or alkaline batteries. Since there are no fines for throwing stuff in the trash that shouldn't go there and recycling bins are inconvenient, most don't bother (and many don't pay for the recycling bin). I've seen clean cardboard, batteries, and aluminum cans in the trash, and it bothers me to no end.
Black bin goes to the street every week, blue bin goes every other week. Blue bin allegedly gets sorted at the facility, the black bin is dumped straight to the landfill. There's a weight limit for garbage, but I've never heard of anyone getting fined for it, and I've certainly gone over a few times (see: rocks).
My city has 35k people, and the larger metro area has over a half million. So we're a medium sized metro area, with a mix of farms and high tech business areas, with two major universities. There's no reason we can't be better about recycling...
That's very disheartening, all in all.