Recycling is failing in America

Recycling, Once Embraced by Businesses and Environmentalists, Now Under Siege

I once took a job at a company in downtown San Francisco. One factor that swayed me in favor of taking the job – when I went to interview at the company – were the recycling bins in their kitchen area. I felt glad to work at a company which was practicing recycling – as I knew that many or even most do not.

Yes – it’s a fact that many if not most businesses don’t recycle. In San Francisco the rate of recycling is abysmally low. The city has been sued because it was sending too much solid waste to landfills, in excess of the per-capita allowance. This means that basically stuff wasn’t being recycled – it’s being thrown into the garbage and taken to landfills.

I constantly see recycling bins that are full of garbage instead of recyclables. There’s a compost bin in my building – I remember years ago when the city was crapping its pants in full swing trying to force gardens to accept the compost from the city – this bin in my building is constantly filled with garbage and not compost. Always. It’s used as a trash can. People fucking don’t care and thrown their garbage in it.

The city is a general trash pit to a level that’s shocking. Today when outside near where I live there was just a huge amount of trash along the street.

When I lived in Germany recycling was required and if people do not recycle properly they’re fined. In Germany you have to sort your recycling properly. And there are no trash cans anywhere. There are only recycling bins. Needless to say there’s also no trash just littering the streets.

In Germany any store that sells a recyclable container must also accept them back and provide the refund for the deposit value of the container. They have machines to accept the containers in grocery stores.

It should be a law that every business which sells a product must also accept that product back for recycling – this means everything – electronics, furniture, etc.

One day at that job I had taken I happened to be outside at the back of the building when the garbage truck came. I witnessed them dumping the contents of the recycling bins from the kitchen area into the garbage truck with all the general trash. The recyclables were not being recycle. It was a total sham. Just another sham in a sham city.

As far as recycling goes, the “single stream” approach mentioned in the article is a sham. Recyclables should be separated. The idea that a society is so fucked up that people can be trusted to put a glass container into a glass bin – there’s something profoundly wrong with that.