Multiple businesses around me have gone fully single stream, garbage included. People keep messing up the sorting so bad that the trash companies were paying people to sort at the dump. So they figured they’d stop sending 2 trucks
No wonder. That was bound to happen after the humanity as a collective decided to replace the clear labels written in an actual alphabet for some undecipherable monochrome pictograms. Majoring in egytology shouldn’t be a requirement for recycling.
I haven’t found the symbols to be an issue, but the majority of my waste with a recycling triangle are “trash” numbers (6/7, then 4/5, now even 3s are excluded here) or borderline lying (numberless plastic bags making it seem like they can go in with my bottles, or making it seem like it’s my fault I haven’t sought out a bag collection station). It should be fine to have the numbers marked clearly but the acceptability is neither clear nor standardized.
Special shout out to food containers predominantly being 5s and the adorable recycling triangle on greasy pizza boxes.
Isn’t recycling basically bullshit fed to us to make us feel more comfortable with over consumption and waste products?
From what I understand, very few things are actually recyclable in a profitable way and are thus not actually recycled but sent off to SEA to be “recycled” in their landfills instead of ours.
Mostly paper, metals and PET. All other plastic is turned into asphalt at best.
The Penn and Teller episode is what originally gave me this idea. Im not sure if this is really true and it’s not hard to just do the bare minimum to recycle things correctly so I just do it. But I try not to let the idea of recycling justify over consumption or excessive waste.
Which is why it’s: reduce, reuse, recycle – in that order.
