Why is recycling still so inconvenient? It is the year 2008 and paper, plastic, aluminum, and glass are still all thrown in the same bag and buried in a landfill. I try to recycle but it is a bigger job than it should be. Shouldn%26#039;t recycling be required?

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2 months ago

I%26#039;m not being lazy. I live in an apartment so I do not have room for several trash cans. In my town I have found recycling bins for paper but not everything else. I think it should be required to recycle even if it requires trash companies to make changes.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwasteless/htm...

Yeah, we have to drive 45 minutes to get to ours. Supposedly there is one closer but I have never seen it. Pretty much the only things you can recycle are cans and cardboard, too. We still do it but we wait till we have a lot.

Your best bet is to avoid buying goods with unrecyclable wrappings/materials, etc. Limit your use of plastic, foil, stop drinking beer and soda out of cans. That%26#039;s a better answer.

I like what Ireland did-- charged a 33 cent tax per plastic grocery bag. Use of the bags went down by 94% in a week!

There are several strands to this one. Probably the most important for you is to find a place which will take the recycled stuff. Councils seem very variable on this one. In our area (North Devon) HDPE - i.e. plastic milk bottles - are accepted, where in Redhill, Surrey, they aren%26#039;t. This quite possibly has to do with finding a firm who will take this plastic, although why North Devon can do this, and Surrey can%26#039;t, frankly puzzles me.

Another point is just how much political will there is to do this, and, again, things seem very different in different areas, although this is improving steadily. Recycling involves ordinary people as well as councils, of course, and, again, watching the way some (young, sadly,) drivers simply toss their trash out of the car window onto a country road makes me doubt that some will ever get the point.

But probably the major problem is in the packaging itself. It is important to recognise that in order for things to be recycled they must be in a fairly %26#039;pure%26#039; state, i.e. cardboard cannot be mixed in with plastic and vice-versa.

Unfortunately manufacturers and many retailers really don%26#039;t help here. Drinks packaging is one of the best illustrations here. Ordinary drinks bottles are OK, their plastic being relatively free of of other potentially contaminating materials. Cardboard squash cartons are the exact opposite, the cardboard being interlayered with polythene and, often, aluminium foil, and then having a plastic pouring closure as well. These are all but impossible to recycle.

Finally there is the issue of transport. If it costs more to transport the recycling material to a plant which can process it then economically it makes no sense to do this. Whether it is seen to make environmental sense is another matter of course, but this all swings around the price we put on clean air, water and natural resources, and, historically, much of this traditionally is deemed to be free. That attitude, sensibly, is changing, if too slowly in my opinion. I am a retired Chemistry lecturer.