People are always expected to recycle themselves, but wouldn’t going through the garbage be easier in the dumps themselves to sift all recyclable waste from non-recyclable waste and sending it to the appropriate places be a more efficient and reliable way of doing things? Is this being done in any country, and if not, why not?
In: Earth Science
It’s much easier and more efficient to have people sort their own recycling and this will probably remain true unless and until someone designs a robot that can do it very efficiently at bulk.
There’s no “professional” aspect to recycling, as it’s a straightforward task of “aluminum cans here, plastic bottles there, etc”. It’s the very definition of unskilled labor. So there’s no labor advantage to having the professionals do it, they aren’t significantly faster or better at it than you. But it _is_ much easier to sort wastes when they are separate than when they are mixed together.
Just think about it in terms of your own house. Say you, personally, are going to sort your own recycling. Do you toss recycling into its own bin as you go, or do you toss it in with the garbage and then, on pickup day, go through your garbage and pull it back out again? I’m betting nobody does the latter, because it’s much more difficult (not to mention unpleasant). You have to dig through the garbage to get to the recyclables, move them to another bin, all in all it’s pointless.
Furthermore it decreases the number of things that can be recycled. Cardboard, for example, can get contaminated with food waste and become unrecyclable.
So all in all, it’s much easier to have things get split up from the start, even when you factor in the issue that not everybody does so.
Honestly though recycling is a pretty borderline process for a lot of materials. It’s a shame because the waste stream represents a lot of untapped resources, but it’s _difficult_ to extract most of them in a way that makes sense financially or even ecologically.
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