Donoreo This reminds me of another curiosity I have. It is the same here; all recyclable material goes into the same municipally-issued green bin (though now they’re being replaced with blue bins by the new contractor, as necessary). Recycling is picked up once a week, by a crew in a truck with hydraulic lifters that overturn the bin into the truck, then lower the bin so they can wheel it back onto customer property (or “close enough”). The strange thing is that, every so often, one of the guys will activate a compactor, squashing all of the material in the truck to make more room. For garbage, this makes sense, but for recyclable material, how will they ever consistently separate all of the squashed, torn paper from the plastic, broken glass, polystyrene, etc. once everything has been compacted like that?
When they first started collecting recycling here, decades ago, there was no such thing as “zero-sort”. You put your recyclable material in separate bags or trays, sorted by material type, then placed it in your squat tub (even labels were to be removed from glass). The guy would arrive once a week, in a truck with multiple compartments, and would throw paper into one, plastic into another, and enjoy himself flinging the glass into the other, with loud crashing and smashing sounds. I could understand how that would be recycled, but this?
Also, the lifters tend to leak lubricant onto and into the bins, which I assume would create contamination issues. So, other than dumping “recyclable material” onto the shores of another country, how does this stuff actually end up getting processed (assuming it does)? Years ago, there were reports that China was refusing recyclable material from Canada due to contamination. Whether they were trying to imply that we are slobs who don’t pre-rinse (and/or throw all manner of greasy paper in there), or it was due to contamination from lubricants or the inability to separate compacted materials, wasn’t clear.
