I live in Chicago and we have one of the worst recycling rates in the country, even for valuable materials like aluminum. I have read about the Oregon bottle bill which has been successful.
I live in Chicago and we have one of the worst recycling rates in the country, even for valuable materials like aluminum. I have read about the Oregon bottle bill which has been successful.
I don’t think my country does anything special for recycling, we have the bottle and can return machines at stores, and then for general recycling we have the colour coded paper, plastic, and glass bins :p
Does your local government have any places to put all the separated materials though? Because ultimately collection is only one part.
Yeah, there’s quite a few dotted around places. I know at my last job I worked basically down the street from a textile recycling warehouse (the bins for textiles specifically are rarer than the standard recycling ones in my experience), and there’s a glass and metal recycling place not far from where I live, which I know cause we were to load off some of the waste materials we had left over from construction that could be recycled ^^
There’s plastic and other materials in other nearby cities as well
Interesting thanks for sharing. I think that Chicago could definitely have something like this. I think the root of the problem is lack of transparency. If people could see their recyclables being sorted and stored properly, they would be more interested. So I think the first step is setting up a transparent location, which the first step for that would be creating an organization?
If it’s sorting and disposal that is the issue, then yeah, more transparency within the recycling organizations would help
If not enough people recycle to start, then I suppose it would be a bigger push for recycling in education. That certainly was my first real exposure to recycling and it’s effects
And of course if companies don’t recycle then there’s need to be more incentives for them to do so, or making not recycling more costly or inconvenient
It’s a bit of a negative feedback loop, because if the system that picks up your materials doesn’t properly route it to recycling hubs, then you are less inclined to care. And honestly, that’s completely fair, why waste the time separating your materials when whoever picks up puts it all back into one container?
I learned about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sure_We_Can which is pretty interesting, I think Chicago would benefit from something like this. I think I’ll create a web page for information about Chicago recycling to start, because yes I think education/transparency are the core key to getting the community to be more interested. If people don’t care to take that effort then it will never happen.
This sounds a bit like the bottle and can return machines we have in stores here in europe. Here there’s an additional charge for the packaging for most drinks (10 cents for my country) which you get upon returning the bottle/can to a recycling machine. I know when it got introduced here the recycling statistic for plastic jumped up by quite a bit
It’s weird that I see aluminum can coke and plastic bottle coke, similar volume, basically the same price. Where one container is much more valuable and 100% recyclable, the other is harming the planet and is almost never recycled.