Recycling efforts in 2026

It should have ended by revealing that every hole leads to the same bin anyway, I’ve seen that in real life for those “trash/recycling” cans

At my place of work all of our “recycling” gets tossed in the very same trash contactor as everything else. The recycling bins are just to make folks feel good

What needs to be remembered is that consumer recycling campaigns were basically corporate propaganda to make us feel like we were responsible for industrial wastefulness and that most consumer recycling is done on a “for profit” basis, and if it isn’t profitable for them to recycle the product, then they trash it anyway. It’s why more and more places no longer accept glass recycling; recycling glass is more expensive and no longer “economically viable at scale.”

Yup. Coca Cola. The crying Indian dude wasn’t even Native American. We see it with other green initiatives too. Large corporations need to fix their shit to make any significant dent. Consumers aren’t the problem. The Resnicks and the Wonderful company are an interesting read on how they control water in California.

> recycling glass is more expensive and no longer “economically viable at scale.” Which is wrong on so many levels as recycled glass uses less energy than making new glass and glass is one of the few things that’s 100% recyclable. It shows how distorted and corrupt the markets are.

Glass doesnt even have to be recycled, it’s 100% reusable. If we had some standardization we wouldnt need plastic liquid containers at all. If we can do it with milk, we can do it with soda, soaps, detergents, water, wine, beer, etc.

Yeah glass beats everything even if it isn’t as energy efficient if you look at recycling because it’s a tier up from single use plastic in the Reduce -> Reuse -> Recycle chain.

My region stopped picking up glass because it was too expensive to transport and it was constantly shattering and contaminating all the other recyclables. Now they use dozens of glass recycling drop-off locations that are in convenient places with decent parking. They’re recycling more glass than they ever did using the previous method. It’s also rather fun to break glass containers when you chuck them in the bin. And because the glass is much less contaminated (with other materials), companies are actually buying the glass by the ton for recycling elsewhere. Some localities are turning a decent profit from it.

See.. that i what I had thought. Brb! Edit: Yup, glass is like the gold standard of recyclables… from a material science POV. Doesn’t degrade from the process. Recycled glass requires less energy to reform than first creation. Reuse systems, deposit/refill, also make it appealing. Seems like the big catch, it’s heavy. So logistics alone makes the cost insane. However, in heavily populated areas, it may pose viable. The system is pretty broke atm to adopt that. One other thing i found: large companies lobbying against taking any responsibility themselves through ‘extended procedure responsibility’. Instead saying to the consumer “you should be recycling. We put it on the bottle!”. Not really a big conspiracy, but not innocent.

Yeah ive always said we do profitable recycling only here in the states… If it makes money it will get recycled… if not then no…

In fairness, more specific sorting of recycling (like in this video) is one of the things that makes recycling more economically viable because you don’t have to pay so many people to sort the stuff that gets recycled and where it needs to go based on the material.

There are automated recycling machines which do quite a good job. Because you also need to sort plastic by type. PETG, PVC, ABS, PS, PLA, all different plastic types which you need to differentiate between to even begin to be able to recycle them…

Not nearly as good a job as manually pre-sorting it, as Germany shows. Last year, 100% of aluminium, 92% of paper compounds, 83% of glas, 71% of plastics and 70% of tetrapaks was successfully recycled. Paper can be almost fully recycled if it’s properly separated, same with glass if it’s separated by color. You can also get a perfect recycling quota for compostable organic trash. For plastics, bottle deposit systems that separate by material allow reusing glass and thicker plastic bottles, while getting a >99% recycling quota for PET bottles and bottlecaps. And then you’ll only have to feed your recycling machine with the remaining plastic trash, and it’ll do a much better job at separating the contents. Then there’s still about a third of the original trash volume left, but you can burn that to generate heat and power, and filter the remaining ash and gases to produce many useful chemical products for the industry. (See e.g. https://www.mvkiel.de/die-anlage.html?file=files/mvk/Downloads/MVK-Anlage_Schnittzeichnung.pdf&cid=136 ).

In my jurisdiction, glass is accepted in a central location, broken up and tumbled to remove sharp edges, and used in landscaping. It’s not actually recycled into new bottles or whatever. And our regular recycling has so many restrictions that either it becomes almost impossible to recycle properly, or they probably throw 99% in the trash. Only #1 or 2 plastic is recycled, every item is supposed to have caps and labels removed, and washed out. Sorry, but I’m not washing my trash, and I don’t think anyone else is either.

Maybe we would if brands used the label to indicate how to recycle their products. And designed most products to be recycled easily. I’m sorry but I’m not busting my hand separating the plastic handle form the metal beer keg.

Exactly. Everything is recyclable. Whether or not it turns a profit is a different story.

Yeah my work did this, and after getting fed up and just chucking something in the nearest bin, an old lady started laying into me about it. So I just took a step back and pointed at the dumpsters the facilities guys emptied the bins into, and pointed out they were there at that moment, just chucking the bags in any one they felt like. So I had to have a chat with my manager and HR.

Reals. HR is about narrative control. 🙁

Since China stopped taking a lot of it I think that’s been a pretty common outcome.

and then we found out they were just burning it anyway

I went to the dump yesterday. I had a load of bricks/concrete and wood. There used to be places to drop this off separately from the general trash for recycling, and mostly no fees. I tried to verify with the front person and she said it all goes to the trash area. On the way to the top, where I normally saw areas for concrete, appliances, wood, etc, there was nothing. Just a road to the top to dump it all. I got charged the full trash fee for it, too. Guess we’re not recycling anymore.

Are the bags different. My trash collector says recycling should go I to clear bags.

“aspirational more than operational” as they used to say

That happens at every place of work. Where I work the only thing we recycle is boxes. We can’t trust the customers not to throw trash into the recycling bins.

Depending on the area, people may be so unconcerned with separating that it’s cheaper just to combine the stream and separate it at the recycling center. The point of having separate bins is to build a social habit, which can take many years to do. During that time, sure, the town might just be doing single stream under the hood. But once the habit is built up, then you have streams that don’t need to be separated, which means less labor and maintenance costs at the recycling center, less wasted product, and more pure output (which can be resold for more money). That’s a lot of savings to the taxpayer, just by getting into the habit of separation. (Most of the USA is single-stream, but you can recover deposits on bottles and cans by taking them to separated collection sites, at some grocery stores. Many businesses also have separated streams before collection, for stuff like boxes and office paper. Many countries in Europe have separated streams at residential collection, though, but people have to learn. Go to some other countries, or some areas of the USA and Europe even, and people haven’t even properly learned yet to put trash into a single bin, or how trash collection works. So society needs to learn this stuff.)

Conversely you see the labeling doesn’t do anything and you lose trust in the system. This reasoning is stupid if true which I suspect is actually a bullshit explanation after the fact.

To build trust and healthy habit, trash bags must be separated. They must also be taken away separately. Only at the landfill/sorting station can they be disposed of together.

The company that picks up mine from the curb explicitly tells us not to put our recycling into plastic garbage bags and offers a list of what’s acceptable and what isn’t. So I’ve taken to using paper grocery bags to toss my “recycling.” Even with that in mind, I’m pretty sure most of it is still unusable.

You do not build trust by lying, only distrust.

Mostly it’s just business only wanting or being able to pay for one dumpster pick up while also knowing their customers want to recycle