Incentivized Recycling Makes Little Sense

Shoot me.  I just can’t believe in recycling the way it’s being done today.  I just spent an hour driving to the place that pays out “the most” for 1 and a half trash bags full of cans and bottles and got back 5 bucks.

Why can’t this sort of thing be done at the waste facility where it ends up anyway?  Why should the only folks sorting through trash be the homeless and why can’t this be institutionalized?  A premium is being put on garbage sorting – and I’m paying it.  It’s not the 5 bucks that I care about – it’s the extra time being lost that I value.

In a perfect world (one that we attempt to be aiming for by having recycling programs in the first place), we wouldn’t have to think too much about recycling because it would be done “invisibly”.  I throw stuff in the garbage, it leaves my house ends up somewhere where things just happen (robots or humans or some combination find the recyclable elements and pluck them out) and all is well.  We sort of do this with sewage already and just flush shit out (pun intended) and expect that some treatment facility will do the magic for us.

It’s funny because in India, recycling happens passively.  People throw garbage out the window and it lands on the street where somebody (usually the misfortuned) picks it up and does something “useful” with it – cans, plastic bags, etc do get picked up by the smart few who know where to take it and earn money to sustain themselves through the night.  It really is a “one man’s junk is another’s treasure” system and while it’s not *completely* optimized (there’s plenty of garbage that is *noone’s* treasure), it works out pretty well since there aren’t mountains of garbage to navigate around.

I suspect that this isn’t being done here in the US due to the “eeew” factor – as in, “eeeew, after a can hits the trash bag and gets mushed around with all that other garbage, i don’t want to touch it!”  Surely, there are people who love their planet enough to want to solve this pretty small problem.  I’ve never been to a landfill myself but I would gladly pay another $10/month (with the CRV fees pulled off) to do my own part in funding this problem and I think others wouldn’t mind paying a small fee as well if it meant that throwing the garbage out wasn’t so guilt-causing.