American Trash

Is This the End of Recycling?
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/is-this-the-end-of-recycling?utm_source=pocket-newtab


E-trash
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20992240/e-waste-recycling-electronic-basel-convention-crime-total-reclaim-fraud


Trash is something we don't often or want to think about. The movie Wall-E did a good job depicting a future in which trash build up got so bad that humans essentially could no longer live with it, while cracking jokes about humans being fat and lazy, letting computers and robots do all the work.

The creators of the movie were trying to warn people while trying to get them to care about the effort to clean up our planet BEFORE things got too bad. With all the innovations we have pushed by technology there seem to be few innovations and new ideas about trash.

But here's one that's pretty good.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ocean-cleanup-device-catches-plastic-in-rivers-2019-10

But as this article suggests, there's no one silver bullet solution. We need ideas from new materials and fabrication techniques that allow greater biodegradability, as well as some kind of robots that can recycle waste into resuable materials, especially for 3D printing.

What are your ideas? How much do you think about our environment and our impact on it? How should we deal with our trash? Seen any new recycling technology you can share? Any related crowdfunding projects we can talk about or share?

Here in North Carolina USA- we recycle largely and openly to the point there are recycling centers for neighborhoods and malls n such even at the mall them self’s. Where I’m at , the city manages it. What they do is awesome. They sell the recycling stuff to places each year. Always selling and making money of deals they do here and there. It’s public. Every year. That goes to the city and county and pays for taxes n such. If ya work own or anything city ya get a break at the end of the year and such. Keeps taxes down. Now, I can’t say every one should or does do this but ... I would hope managers understand managing- and truthfully - it’s all done in the greater 48 states, which means all the stuff we toss gets re used here locally. How? A few willing people. That’s all it takes really - those few willing.

You, Americans, are quite lucky because you at least HAVE recycling. Because in Belarus, we don't have a proper recycling system at all, and not because our government is doing it wrong, but because the people are indifferent. We had several places with special trash containers for different types of trash. Later, they were removed because almost nobody used them in a proper way. Even my own family thinks that all this recycling and trash sorting is just a waste of time!

Even my own family thinks that all this recycling and trash sorting is just a waste of time!

Maybe it is?

After you go through all that hard work of sorting things into the prettily coloured bins - what actually happens to it after that? what's the waste/recovery rate like? what's the resource drain to do it?

Mayhap it would be better not to use or create the waste in the first place than to imagine recycling is an efficient and worthwhile solution to a problem.

It's relatively expensive to recycle, largely depends on the private industry in a given area, and not everything in the bin gets recycled. NPR's planet money did a fantastic exposé on the costs of it

A lot of the issue as far as I know is material engineering plastics to either be biodegradable (read flimsy) or reusable (read not biodegradable) while remaining cost effective

Well, producing less waste is also a problem... For example, I try to use paper for such things as unimportant notes and new pen checking untill there is just no place to write left. But my mother always tries to through away any sheet of paper which have less than 50% of blank space on it.

It seems that recycling is actually a bit of a waste of time and money. It really only delays the inevitable consumption of the resource that will end up in a trash pile. And it is very expensive, so the better solution should be to evolve to boidegradabe and after that I shall be starting a space trash business to shoot all the toxic chrap into the sun with reusable rockets like elon musk has!

so the better solution should be to evolve to boidegradabe

Elimination comes before Substitution.

No thing at all is better than a biodegradable thing.

Except a giant space rocket full of nuclear waste headed to the sun! The world is sustained by nuclear power and the waste is no issue.