How do recycling bins work?

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The recycling bin at my apartment is just one bin for recyclables. Cardboard, paper, plastic, glass, recyclable foam – all just goes in the same bin. All of these materials, however, have to be recycled in different ways. So does someone have to go and sort through the different recyclables to separate them after we put them all in? If that’s the case, why not have the bins win different compartments to begin with to make it all easier?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Recycling in North America is mostly brought to a sorting facility that organizes the various materials by type, and removes the large quantities of non-recyclable materials that inevitably end up in the bins.

We could resolve this by having separate bins for different materials, but you would still need a degree of sorting and filtering at the other end.

The problem to be perfectly frank is a cultural one. North Americans can’t be bothered to sort things properly in the trash and even if we did have multiple bins enough people wouldn’t bother to make it a problem.

In Japan by comparison they have lots of individual recycling bins for different materials, and culturally they are much more likely to follow instructions so it’s less of a problem.

The solution in North America is a financial intensive. People are surprisingly meticulous at sorting and returning items like pop cans if you pay then 5 cents a can.

The other side of the coin is that Recycling in a lot of ways is a giant make work project. One of the big goals of recycling was to generate a new government backed industry that employ large numbers of people. So sorting facilities and the like are encouraged because they fulfill that goal.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Allowing people to put all their recyclables into one container is called “single stream” recycling. The advantage is that, because of the simplicity, the participation in recycling goes up dramatically. We used to have separate bins for each of the recyclable types. That made a lot of work for the consumer, and so participation was low.

With single-stream, all the material is taken to one facility to be sorted. Magnets lift out the metals, blowers push out paper and plastic bags, etc. Then what is left, a line of workers sort through to remove the non-recyclable items. This process is much more efficient than teaching consumers how to properly separate their things.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It depends on where you live and what recycling system is in place. There are places that have more bins. The threshold at which people stop bothering to sort their waste is fairly low (depends on society). So while in theory the best thing is to have the individual households presort their waste, in practice it isn’t easy (plastics have to be sorted by type) and things have to be fairly clean. All of these user difficulties means these programs have very mixed results in reality.

To answer your other question, yes someone has to sort the material in another facility.

Anonymous 0 Comments

As others have said, it does end up getting sorted. This is done at a Material Reclamation Facility, or MRF. Much of the process is automated, but there are still lots of humans involved to do the sorting. The other written descriptions here are great. To help you see the process, here’s a video tour of an MRF, showing you how it all works:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nmNKVNCBw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nmNKVNCBw)