I've yet to see any recycling guidelines with anywhere near the amount of required precision. They cover a few obvious things (food scraps, junk mail) and miss 99% of the stuff I actually have to throw out.
At university there was an introductory talk about recycling, where they threatened that a single wrongly discarded piece of trash (uncleaned bottles or food containers IIRC) would prevent the whole batch from being recycled. The obvious conclusion being that if there's even a small amount of doubt about whether something can be recycled, it'd be better not to put it in the recycling bin (and risk the rest of the properly recyclable trash).
I reached out for clarification on various policies - what about bonded plastic + paper, how clean, mixed plastics in bottle assemblies, unlabeled products, etc and they weren't able to answer.
So I'm not at all surprised consumers aren't effectual.
That said, while I want to believe machines are doing a much better, do you have any sources on the recycling statistics? San Jose claims to be an outlier at 74% recycling (diversion rate?) https://www.epa.gov/transforming-waste-tool/zero-waste-case-... - nationwide municipal solid waste looks like only about 1/3 recycled https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-... . If these machines haven't been rolled out, are they very new, or are there some barriers to using them?
At university there was an introductory talk about recycling, where they threatened that a single wrongly discarded piece of trash (uncleaned bottles or food containers IIRC) would prevent the whole batch from being recycled. The obvious conclusion being that if there's even a small amount of doubt about whether something can be recycled, it'd be better not to put it in the recycling bin (and risk the rest of the properly recyclable trash).
I reached out for clarification on various policies - what about bonded plastic + paper, how clean, mixed plastics in bottle assemblies, unlabeled products, etc and they weren't able to answer.
So I'm not at all surprised consumers aren't effectual.
That said, while I want to believe machines are doing a much better, do you have any sources on the recycling statistics? San Jose claims to be an outlier at 74% recycling (diversion rate?) https://www.epa.gov/transforming-waste-tool/zero-waste-case-... - nationwide municipal solid waste looks like only about 1/3 recycled https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-... . If these machines haven't been rolled out, are they very new, or are there some barriers to using them?