this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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You have incinerators in your area? Everything in my area is landfill, so it will eventually become dirt.
Do plastics go in the landfill too? Or is it somehow separated so that only stuff that decays in years rather than centuries goes there?
The regular trash doesn't get separated, it's just dumped. There's also almost no restrictions on what can go in there, our trash cans are massive, and we have to pay for recycling, so many people just don't bother (and a second trash can is not much more than a recycling bin).
We do have a recycling service that accepts most plastics (#1-#7), and they claim to recycle it, but they have pretty strict standards (needs to be clean, need to separate caps from bottles/jugs, etc), so I wouldn't be surprised if most of it just ends up at the landfill anyway. Our area is a "single sort" facility, meaning people just dump everything into one bin and they sort it on their end. This means workers are even more likely to just throw stuff out that isn't easily identifiable as recyclable.
One big issue is that they don't accept glass, so to recycle glass, you need to take it somewhere special. I'm pretty obsessive about recycling, so I go out of my way to recycle everything I can (I have a bag of dead batteries in the garage, I make regular trips to recycle glass, etc), but I highly doubt most people bother. In fact, I have a few neighbors with 2 garbage cans and no recycling can.
Wow weird. May I ask where that is? Not recycling glass sounds WILD to me, it's one of the most common recyclables, even decades ago when plastic recycling was uncommon, glass "dumpsters" where everywhere.
Being forced to separate caps from bottles of very exotic as well, considering the EU just introduced a regulation that forces manufacturers to make caps that stay on the bottle even when opened.
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.
Almost guaranteed to be U.S.A. as it sounds almost identical to my area except we have even fewer options. Here it all goes to the landfill, you can pay for recycling cans and pickup on recycling day but it gets contaminated by people putting trash in the recycling nearly every time so it all just goes to landfill and the local government just doesn’t care
Random question, where do you take old gasoline? Will auto part stores take a jug of old motor oil and gasoline that's been mixed? I guess I should probably just call and ask a local store after I'm done shitting on company time.
Where I live, it goes to the dump, they have a space dedicated to hazardous liquids/containers. However, you have to leave the whole container there, there's no spot to dump it
Same.
For separated motor oil (e.g. oil changes), it can go to my local auto parts store, but gasoline and most other car fluids (e.g. coolant, transmission fluid, etc) goes to the dump as hazardous waste. My area does an event once or twice each year to collect all of those hazardous materials, so it's worth checking that out as well, since it can be way more convenient than waiting in a line at the dump.
The landfill stuff doesn’t eventually turn into dirt. They purposefully make sure that it’s wrapped in plastic in such a way that it never decomposes. Landfills are terrible.
They do it to protect the water table from things like battery acid. But a good chunk of it will become dirt, because there's enough organic matter in mixed trash to decompose. It'll just take a really long time because of the mix of plastic and whatnot.
WM at least has rules that every load of trash must be in individual bags, and they must be tied. So you’re not getting that mix you’re talking about. Their goal (every landfill) is to make sure that nothing breaks down as it costs more to deal with (like leachate and methane).
Ours doesn't have those rules, and I and my neighbors put all kinds of crap in there: tree branches, lawn clippings, rocks, disassembled furniture, rotten food. If it fits, it goes in. And our bins are pretty big, so a lot goes in there. The main reasons to bag are to prevent the bin from getting too stinky and to keep stuff from blowing out if the wind flips the lid. AFAICT, there's no policy about what goes in the bin, other than hazardous materials like batteries (which they plan for because a lot of people toss those in as well).