Recycling Household Waste: Do you or Don't you?

I'm not sure what they do with the ceramics - somebody must take them off their hands for use in something. They have a dumpster for them though. Brown goods are things like TVs, stereo equipment, microwave ovens, computer equip, etc.. They take any kind of wood. Wood scraps from the work shop, tree branches, wood furniture etc.. That all gets chipped and sold to a Bio-mass incenerator. It just has to be cleared on any metal (nails, etc..) They take both car batteries and regular flashlight batteries. You do have to pay a $3 fee on the car batteries though.



This is one advantage of a collection center. You can drop it off at any time. You can take stuff from the areas at mine too. I picked up a tire to use on my wheelbarrow come spring (instead of paying $15 for a new one) and I pick up most of my household cleaning supplies from there instead of buying new bottles at the grocery store.



Oooo.. They aren't inspectors. They're the garbage nazis!

nope

The recycler truck that comes around has various bin built on the truck and they dude put the garbage in the correct bin.

We also have a waste to energy plant here and they pay people to sort the recycled garbage out of the normal trash.

I put everything in one plastic bin for pick up each week.
news papers must be stacked, tied together, and put on top of bin
all plastic HDPE 1 or 2
tin cans no lids
bottles and jars-no green glass
No styrofoam

Well, of course recycling and the like is strictly regulated in Germany. So we collect plastic, cans, foil, styrofoam - more or less all the packaging - in yellow plastic sacks. It has to be clean, of course! There is a big blue trash can for newpapers, paper, cardboard etc. There is a brown trash can for all the organic garbage - potatoe peels, grass cuttings, dead flowers, cat litter if it's the right kind. And there is a grey trash can for the rest of the garbage that does not go into any of the other cans. Wooden stuff like old furniture parts is collected once a year, the same goes for other big stuff like furniture, old suitcases... Computers, screens, TV etc. will be collected once a year. You have to call the city to have it picked up. And of course all kinds of metal is being collected once a year.

So - we have trash calendar that is distributed by the city every year which tells what is being picked up when.

Just before I left Los Angeles they instituted the all-in-one giant bin with a once a week pick-up. They had developed a system where the contents would be put onto a conveyor belt and then picked off for diff types of recycleables. This was all in the LA Times at one point, I think. Whether it works or not, I have no idea.

Here in northern California, we get some plastic crates in different colors for newspaper, glass and tin cans, and the third I think is for cardboard. Well, I break down my cardboard and put it in our big work recycle bin.

I do compost in a desultory way, that is, throw stuff in a pile and it'll break down sometime. (I used to do it quite seriously, am in my rest phase for that now.)

I remember reading that there weren't enough places for the
recycled matter to go to as end-product, but that was a while ago.

Generally, I try to reuse a lot of things and not get so much stuff in the first place. Magazines, for example, I try to drop by hospital waiting rooms... though I admit not very often.

I don't compost my food waste, but there is a weekly puick up of yard waste that goes to the recycling center. There it is made into chips and mulch which I can get (for free I think) for my garden.

Same here littlek. It's every other week though.

One thing truly stupid in California though is the bottle/can recycling. Every bottle and can has a deposit, it varies from 2.5 to 5 cents, but the retailers aren't required to accept returns. No where will you find a return counter in any store. Some have an automated device in the parking lot.

We take ours to a local recycling center where they pay by the pound. But wait, I paid by the unit? What gives there? To top it off, deposits are taxable. Yup, taxable!! Unfriginbelievable.

How to fix it: Use Michigan as an example.

If you sell it, you gotta take the return back.
10-cents minimum deposit per bottle or can.
Deposits are just that, and not taxable.

I haven't seen a tossed bottle or can in Michigan in 20 years. Here in California people toss them out for the bums to collect to avoid a hassle.

I was on our townships planning commission for a term. during that term i was wondering about some of the services we payed for. We had a big recycling bin behind the twp building and people religiously dumped their glass, plastic, and other stuff into the appropriate bins. So one day, when the dumpster guys came to collect,, i had the township secretary call me and i followed the truck to the recycling center. Except, it didnt go to the recycling center. It went to the landfill where they just dumped the recyclables into the ordinary trash. I took a picture and it made the front page of our weekly newspaper.(Nothing much happened since the most news that occurs is if an amish horse gets loose and runs amuk in the town, or someone wins a pastry bakeoff , then we have the recipe on the fronnt page above the fold, very big headlines saying PRIZE WINNING RECIPE)
Now this picture and the accompanying story was full of misquotes and news tricks, like the reporter tried to get a statement from the trash hauler but they refured to answer our calls, stuff like that.
recycling market has gone away , so make sure your community is actually recycling. ours was not, and it led to a major scandal that was settled OOC for an undisclosed amount

farmerman- I have always been suspicious of the whole recycling by individuals bit. I have always suspected that many of the fat recycling contracts are given to some politico's brother-in-law, and am jaded as to whether it really does any good in the long run, when you factor in the pros vs. the cons.

Therefore, I do not adhere to the optional recycling of bottles, papers etc., except for yard waste, which has a separate pickup.

hence your green color print (jaded?)

Eek.

We recycle probably more in the 80% range. We have a couple of big bins for anything recyclable. In Pasadena the regular curbside service only accepted #1 and #2, we had to go to bins at Caltech to recycle other stuff. Where I worked, in The Valley, there was no recycling and I would take all of the papers and newspapers and stuff in my car and drop off at bins at Caltech.

Here, though, if it has a recycle symbol on the bottom, it's fine. Anything -- I just recycled something that was #6, I forget what. But like shampoo bottles, etc., etc. All in one bin, which I am now suspicious about. :-?

I don't recycle .... BOOM !!

Okay, I do, I just wanted to annoy you all, but I only do the paper and glass in separate bins not all the good stuff you all do above.

That was really interesting, Farmerman, about your "breaking" news story. And now there is no recycling at all in your area anymore, or just no pick-up of recycling?

Fishin' -- I would love it if we had a "brown goods" recycling. We can't get rid of that stuff unless we pay by the pound at the dump. I laughed to think of you digging through the hazardous wastes for good cleaning products though. The reuse/recycle/reduce mantra sounds like it is alive & well and living in Massachusetts.

Littlek -- I'm really surprised at the description you gave because... wouldn't all the plastics just be incinerated? I thought that when plastics were recycled, it was chopped up and melted for reuse.

Urs -- Is all that recycling in Germany free? Do you know which other European countries have similar patterns? There wasn't much recycling going on in Scotland that I could see, just a few places that asked for aluminum cans. When I was in Spain, there wasn't any recycling at all. We'd leave our garbage in a plastic bag tied to the window railings and it was picked up every night. On those British reality tv shows like Ground Force or Changing Rooms, they seem to toss out stuff that I think could be recycled.

cjhsa -- I'm glad to hear that some people have figured out how to make money recycling. I know a guy who (says he) makes a really good living recycling car parts. He buys them all over the west coast and sells to shops that will rebuild them. I also know someone whose husband seems to be doing quite well as a plastics recycling broker, but I have no idea how his business works.

Sozobe -- I'm wondering about the big bin recycling as well. I've heard that recycling is a cyclical (heehee) business... so do the plastics or whatever that they don't need this week just fall off that conveyor belt and into a garbage can?

Mr.Piffka is in the construction business and recycles amazing amounts of stuff besides what we might consider standard. Even used concrete is recycled! Large amounts of metal, of course. There are places that will take almost all old construction material (doors, cupboards, hardware) and reuse it. One thing that he doesn't seem to recycle is wood, though he often has a pile of free wood that just disappears. Maybe I just don't know about it, but I have seen him put treated lumber into the garbage dump because he says it shouldn't be burned. The local municipality here bought & paid for an expensive garbage incineration plant which can't be used because of our pollution laws.

piffka - I'm remembering this from college - a long time ago. I know there are electromagnetic seperators that do metals and computer parts. I think there was something that did other stuff as well. Maybe it wasn't an incinerator, maybe it was a shredder?

http://www.ci.la.ca.us/SAN/sanrlist.htm

I went hunting for the description of what the LA Sanitation department does with its various collected recyclables - haven't found that yet, but did find this breakdown of what they can take in their big blue bins.

Here's something on the single bin arrangement -
about single bin recycling

we have a huge recycling initiative in Pa. It has gone away because most of the market, with exception of
Al, is not there. Its all economics, not sound environmental policy.

Farmerman -- You might be amused by an engineering friend's comments. He claimed that our landfills would be the iron mines of the future.

Osso -- Thanks for that information. The description of the machine separator was very interesting. It was also interesting that the amount of recycling increased so substantially when people did not have to sort anything. (God, we ARE lazy.)