recycling, is it confusing?
 

so in recent months I've been seeing more videos on social media trying to educate on what is actually recyclable and what is not

the kicker: every municipal is a little in what is deemed waste/or recyclable

trying to familiarize with what CoV is doing
http://vancouver.ca/home-property-de...recycling.aspx

but everytime I'm out and about ie. surrey or coquitlam and I see multiple receptacle...I literally have to stand there for 10 seconds just deciding where it should go. Is this a dilemma for most?

I also don't understand why a little bit of grease stain/residual food and it's automatically deemed a waste, I don't mind if the box of my iPhone smells like pizza (they recycle in China right?) :nyan:

Fuck that shit. Just toss it all in the dumpster.

I thought you drive a prius though :okay:

Fairly straight forward. No issues or any confusion here. In the start there was, now you get used to it.

You haven't seen recycling until you have seen Kamikatsu.

why do we need to sort recycling?
people would throw anything into garbage bin.......

In Vegas, everything goes in the garbage... they sort it when it gets to the facility.

IF you were to ever give up and decide to do it yourself at a recycling depot it's a lot easier. Any cardboard gets thrown in a cardboard bin, any soft plastics in a separate bin, hard plastics, styrofoam, metal etc. Yeah it'll take you 5 minutes to do so, but it'll get done right.

I do my part but the way how the recycling works here is weird..... Liek for container/juice boxes it have to be all dry or the stickler peal off. If it is wet the whole batch basically gets treated like garbage and is sent to the landfill. Same with cardboard boxes if there are food scrap that whole bin is sent to the landfill. That's what I understand.

Sure I usually let wash and let the containers dry before I throw them out but for cardboard boxes sometimes is hard to get rid off all the foods on it IE pizza boxes or they have oil stains on them already. It sucks because living in apartments I know some people will just throw whatever into the recycling bins without cleaning it so that whole bin of recycling is wasted.

Is so common in the food scraps to be in plastic bags just throw into the food scrap bin and that's not allow. So that whole bin in food scrap is also going to the landfill. Nothing you can do. I see this everytime I throw my garbage out just makes me wonder why put in the effort when it will end up in the landfill anyways coz some people are too lazy.

Plastic bags probably seem like the obvious choice for some people to use for food scraps since people usually get quite a few of them while shopping. It's much easier to get a package of little brown paper bags to use daily.

Bag to Earth

Couple bucks and will last you over a month. I usually get them from Save on Foods.

^^ I just use plastic bags and them dump all the food scrap at the bins for all the food scraps in the garbage and then throw the plastic bag in the garbage bin. Not sure why people just don't do that. It takes an extra 2 seconds.

Our Condo has recycling bins for everything, Glass, Plastics, Card board, compost, all except soft plastics. We're even provided with green bags for compost. The GF bascially turned me into a full time recycler. We literally separate all our garbage and recycling items to the point we only have 1-2 shopping bags of garbage per week and most of that is just cat litter with some odds and ends. Its like working out, once you've created the habit, its just natural to stick to it.

The worse people are those who just throw everything into one big garbage bag and just dumps it all.

It’s confusing because people are idiots.

So glad I don’t live in an apartment anymore where I have to deal with the morons who think dumping green waste into a plastic bag and the puting the whole bag into the green bin is appropriate..

I make a trip to the north van transfer station at least once a month for cardboard and other things because Vancouver system of having the full sized garbage and green but retaining the stupid little blue bins is retarded. Why have they not gone to the full sized recycling bins like surrey etc. recycling is pretty much the majority of waste now and it’s getting to the point where even with my wife and myself that we have too much recycling on a weekly basis so I have no other choice than to start putting cardboard etc in with the garbage.

I’m not going to stuff my blue bin in the alley so full that it’s falling everywhere creating an unsightly mess I have to clean up later. Fucking stupid they don’t have the full sized recycling cans.

Also, going to the transfer station is so ducking cheap for garbage it really pisses me off when I see illegal dumping (outside of drywall, I honestly completely get why people dump drywall in alleys etc because the cities make it virtually impossible to get rid of)

Yesterday I took pretty much a full load to the transfer station, half my truck box was filled up with old clay bricks and cinder blocks, essentially the worst case scenario for the dump because all you’re bringing in is weight. That whole load only cost me $50 to get rid of. Mattresses are only $20 etc.

Cause oily pulp makes shitty paper. A little bit of grease can ruin a whole batch of paper/cardboard. You're actually causing exponentially more waste of you throw a pizza box in the recycling.

This is fucking stupid. Just take everything into the dump and then hire a few guys to sort it out. Job creation and overall ease for the general public.

This. Maybe my momma taught me well and it’s just instinctual now.

I'm not in the recycling industry but I do work in processing. I've had the chance to work with sorting technologies and I'll try my best to clear up some points people have brought up.

1) as recycling programs have expanded, people throw more into their bins. This creates more material to be sorted. More sorting leads to more time and effort which increases the costs associated with recycling. Thinking of hiring more workers? Sorting technologies are able to do that now (more cost effective than hiring a bunch of workers). However, it can be challenging to implement (leads to my next point).

2) The possible reason why your soiled plastic or cardboard may be considered garbage now is because the technology used to sort the waste can't detect the material properly if it's covered in a layer of grease for example, or maybe it's the reason why you have to peel off the label. Also, what vitaminG has said, contaminated material can affect your end product.

3) The above two points might be reasons why municipalities consider different items as wastes vs recyclable. It comes down to the facility where they send the recyclables to and the technology/processes used at that facility.

Again, I don't work in the recycling industry so take my thoughts with a grain of salt but I would bet it's correct. Recycling isn't cheap by any means and sometimes it can be a hassle for everyone, but it's definitely the right direction instead of throwing all our waste into the ground.

it's really not that hard to sort out food waste, plastic bag/containers/packages, paper/cardboard, metal etc

the bottle depot (and the city of coquitlam actually has a good recycling yard at lafarge lake) will take styrofoam (meat trays, lunch boxes etc)

really not much needs to go int he garbage any more

before finding the website, I would just toss whatever I'm not sure of into the blue bin
i'd rather there be inefficiencies during sorting than to have it end up in the ocean
why do we keep tossing straws and 6-pack plastic rings into the waste receptacle if it might end up inside marine life?

Try telling the people in my apartment that. Most of the stuff is in the garbage/compactor. I mean when things like this happen in my apartment

https://i.imgur.com/ozC6RbF.jpg

You really can't expect people with common sense to sort out what's recycle what's garbage. I actually saw this online. Even though the person who posted didn't say where they are from I am 100% is my building. It have the same washer/dryer as mine, is the same hard wood/materal fro the laundry room and from the pictures and the layout is the same. I just wish I knew what unit is it from.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4153053/b...ling-mistakes/

separate lid if it's different material from container
says flattened pizza boxes, but I don't know when's the last time I haven't seen grease stains on pizza boxes