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 too labor intensive, not profitable, and far from perfect sorting. Until everyone buys in to recycling at home it won’t get any better. Everyone just assumes it will get sorted out down the line.
My company does split top recycling carts where one side is paper/fiber and the other side is recyclable containers. We do split carts so that we can do it with a single truck in a single pass to reduce labor and fuel costs. The cart is dumped into a split body truck that keeps the materials separate. But if it isn’t being sorted properly at home then it’s already cross contaminated by the time it’s “separated” in the truck. Every single load we dump is contaminated with trash, carpet, wood… you name it and it’s in there.
The truck then dumps everything at a processing facility and the material is put on conveyor belts and picked through by a lot of line workers trying to clean up the stream of material. This is far from perfect and the end result is still not clean enough for many recycling facilities to take so it is just being stockpiled. It is also dangerous for the workers who are at risk of being cut or stuck while picking through it all.
To make things worse, China has stopped accepting most recycling shipments for processing. They are the ones with the infrastructure to process it all so as it sits here in the US it has nowhere to go to even be recycled.
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