Why is recycling not done at the level of the dumps themselves by professionals as opposed to individual people?

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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

13 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Domestic waste is all being sorted manually or with the help of machines before being recycled. This is because untrained people can not be trusted to sort things correctly. However going through the waste before recycling is a quite tedious process that requires a lot of resources. So it helps if people have done a rough sorting of their trash before hand. That way sorting it properly is much quicker. The trash might even be handled differently before being sorted. Getting people to at least make an effort at sorting their trash helps out the recycling plants a lot.

However there have been quite a few innovations within trash sorting machines the last couple of decades. Some waste management facilities are now automatically sorting through large amounts of trash. This makes it so that people may not have to sort trash to the same extent as before. On the other hand that means that facilities without these machines are often not sorting through the waste in the same way they used to but instead only ships the trash that is already sorted into recycling bins to the facilities with these machines.

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