Saturday, April 04, 2020

I'm Required To Pay Extra For The Privilege of "Recycling"

I required to put cardboard, plastics, and glass into a blue-colored garbage can that gets picked up every two weeks.  Two garbage trucks make the routes, one for garbage (the brown container) and one for the blue recycling container.  I'm seeing articles like this one more and more frequently, and I wonder if I'm paying more just for the privilege of going through a useless ritual:
Baltimore County residents have had their perceptions about recycling shattered. In early February, news broke that for the last seven years, the county has been trashing the glass it collects as part of the county recycling program.

"There are numerous issues with glass recycling, including increased presence of shredded paper in recycling streams which contaminates materials and is difficult to separate from broken glass fragments, in addition to other limitations on providing quality material," a county spokesperson told The Baltimore Sun.

Glass recycling reportedly stopped in 2013, the same year the county opened a $23 million single-stream recycling facility, according to the Sun...

Many of the recyclables that are collected end up in landfills or incinerators.

That's exactly what's been happening to Baltimore County's glass. Yet county officials are still encouraging residents to recycle the stuff, fearful that people will fall out of the recycling habit. Ritual is apparently more important than reuse.

3 comments:

Pseudotsuga said...

See Penn and Teller's "Bull$hit" episode on recycling-- they concluded it's all about feeling good rather than actually doing good.
People will inconvenience themselves to astonishing degrees in order to be "good" people.

David said...

I don't like the fact that I have to pay an extra 5-10 cents in California for a can or bottle. Then I have to go recycle it to get my own money back. If one truly cares about the environment, one would recycle it anyway without any cash incentive.

Darren said...

I don't like having to pay the 5-10 cents AND pay for a 2nd garbage can for recycling.