good recycling info

[chelidon]

How to Recycle Practically Anything: Old Myths are Shattering and New Options Come Online

The info about recycling styrofoam peanuts, in particular, was new to me (and very useful -- I hate throwing those things away).

Comments

[anthologie.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I was sorting out my trash/recycling at a Whole Foods after eating at their deli a couple of weeks ago, and one of the clerks actually complimented me for bothering. This was at a Whole Foods. In the Bay Area. Where recycling things should be so commonplace that it should not be remarkable in the slightest. I thanked her, but it ultimately made me a little bit depressed.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

mmm, yeah. Recycling should be the default, not the exception...but when everything is so cheap, but time is dear, it's hard to get through to people, except those most inclined already to recycle. I figure it's a bell curve -- the a small group who will recycle because "it's the right thing to do," even at some inconvenience, a similar number at the tail who are purely selfish and won't bother under any circumstances, or who actually want to consume and throw away for whatever weird pathologival reason, and a huge bump in the middle who will recycle if it's easy, or there's some other immediate motivating factor.

Here in my town, most folks recycle, both because it's the old New England ethic to never waste anything if possible (put another way, folks is cheap ;>), and because almost all taxation here is local (property-tax-based), since we have no state sales tax or state income tax. The property tax is based on a strictly-balanced budget, and a big part of that is trash disposal costs. The fee for that is a total of the cost of hauling away solid waste, minus the income from recycling, so if you don't recycle, you cost yourself, and the rest of the town, twice -- less income, and more costs. Your neighbors give you a very hairy eyeball if you pull into the transfer station with no recycleables and a bunch of bags of trash. That's another aspect of it -- there's no public trash pickup (some folks provide that service on a private basis, tho'), so dropping your trash off at the transfer station becomes a social event -- you see your neighbors, and you know whether they're recycling, too ;>

Direct and immediate feedback works, I've noted. In our society we're kept, in general, way too distant from the actual results of our actions. We don't have to see many of the negative results of our consumer choices, on the environment, on workers, on the economy, etc. If it weren't so, I think we'd probably live far differently.

[anthologie.livejournal.com]

Sounds like your town is on to something. I wonder why more cities don't make the rules that way ... to encourage people to stop throwing things away, for one thing.