
People are recycling too much garbage, and it's threatening the industry - weiming
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny-news-recycle-garbage-economics-20180620-story.html
======
andrewstuart
The real problem is that we manufacture garbage and buy it at a virtually
infinite pace.

 _Everything_ you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has
been consumed.

Tell you what is garbage - recycling is garbage.

Our planet is already awash in plastics and that isn't going to stop until we
put a stop to the garbage manufacturing industry - i.e. the packaging
industry.

"Recycling" is the concept that the packaging industry maintains so that you
don't scream in anger at how that industry is polluting the planet.

The truth about recycling came out recently when China stopped accepting
recycling from overseas and now the "recycling" i.e. garbage is piling up in
incredible mounds here in Melbourne.

Local recycling companies have started to admit they are just throwing it all
in landfill.

We need to turn off the garbage manufacturing tap.

~~~
grecy
> _Everything you see in the supermarket is garbage - one what is in it has
> been consumed_

Only when you buy junk, which I assert is not actually food anyway.

Stick the outside and you'll buy fruit, vegetables, meat, beans, rice and
pasta.

You can put all of those into re-usable bags or containers and buy everything
you need to eat very healthy meals with no waste at all.

If it comes in a shiny plastic package, plastic bottle or tin can, you
shouldn't be eating it anyway (in general)

~~~
brian-armstrong
Do you carry chicken breasts uncovered in your cloth bag or do you just carry
them in your bare hands?

~~~
Regardsyjc
You can bring a container that they can weigh and use like a Mason jar.

~~~
maccard
I live between two major supermarkets, and neither of them provide any way for
me to do this. All the meat in both is pre packaged (in store) before it hits
the shelf. If you go to the butcher counter, they will package it in front of
you.

~~~
chopin
But this is something which could be changed.

~~~
EADGBE
AS far as I know, meat MUST be labeled, which kind of necessitates a container
for the label to affix to.

~~~
herpes
They can just use ... butcher paper.

~~~
EADGBE
I'm pretty certain you can't recycle waxed butcher paper.

------
oldcynic
The rules are too complex. If you move home to a few miles away the rules
change.

Various parts of the recycling chain are highly fragile and far too easy to
pollute (as the article discusses), or too susceptible to not being
profitable. We've known that for years. Seems like a giant exercise in missing
the point.

Should profit be the prime motive? Should we be recycling when re-use used to
work so well for many products? Do we want to _actually_ preserve the planet
or merely go through the motions with recycling theatre until waste grows
_another_ order of magnitude? The waste from a weekly supermarket shop is
horrifying compared to the equivalent waste in the nineties.

I think the time has come to take a cue from earlier times and simply require
the manufacturers and retailers to cover the cost - you made it, you pay for
its disposal, recycling or reuse. Suspect things would start to resolve quite
quickly.

Before you say that can't possibly work, for many categories it used to, and
it worked very well. For other categories, it should be ample encouragement to
return to less packaging, or for fruit and veg, no packaging. We'd start to
see some properly biodegradable solutions.

No, I don't suppose this will be too popular, especially with me wanting
regulation to "encourage" it.

~~~
pintxo
We actually have this in Germany for over a decade [1], if not two.
Personally, I'd say we got more packaging not less. So I am not sure such we
can say it failed, but it's not really working either.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_\(symbol\))

~~~
Reason077
Deposit-return schemes are also required in Germany for all disposable drinks
containers, and are gaining momentum in other European countries.

At the very least, these schemes are effective at reducing litter and ensuring
less plastic waste reaches the environment and oceans.

~~~
pintxo
Yes, and the introduction of deposit-return for non-reuse bottles "killed" the
reusable bottles. See [1] on page 8 (only in German), "Einweg-Kunststoff"
(non-reusable plastic) won the game. With "Mehrweg-Glas" (reusable glass)
loosing the most.

Not sure if reusable glass was so much more environmentally friendly (think
transporting heavy empty glass bottles through the countryside by trucks), but
environmental effects through transportation might be easier to mitigate long-
term than plastic pollution.

Side node: While plastic won the race for water and soda/juices, Germans still
prefer their beer to be served in glass.

[1] [https://diw-econ.de/wp-
content/uploads/2017/05/DIW_Econ_BGVZ...](https://diw-econ.de/wp-
content/uploads/2017/05/DIW_Econ_BGVZ_Oekonomie_der_Getraenkeverpackung_v2.0-1.pdf)

~~~
oldcynic
I'm not sure either - and there's one of the problems. We're not given the
full cost and consequence of each alternative.

I did read a piece a few months back discussing glass against recycled
plastic. Plastic apparently needs far more washing, and at higher temperature
and pressure, before it can be recycled. The washing to remove glue, labels
and dried food which are all more difficult to get off plastic, and also
because plastic recycling is so easy to pollute and ruin the whole batch.

------
csense
Part of the problem is that the rules are complicated and there's no feedback
loop.

Maybe once every week, 1/52 of the bins should be checked manually before
being dumped in the truck. And the owners informed if there are problems like
envelope windows or pizza boxes.

Yes, it's expensive to have a separate process to provide that feedback, but
it might increase the quality of the recycled materials enough to actually
raise the value above the cost of doing it.

~~~
ewams
For sure, my area doesn't allow glass or paper and there's some weird thing
about cardboard, has to be brown or white only or something like that. So we
recycle plastics (you can do numbers 1-5 now!) and brown cardboard in the
provided bins and take glass, paper and other cardboard to a recycle center
once a month. My previous home allowed glass, plastics (1-2 only), cardboard
(anything unless it had food pieces on it), and paper; it was about 6 miles
from current home. Just different county.

~~~
southern_cross
Officially our recycling program takes a lot of surprising stuff, including
wax cartons, all types of plastic, and even pizza boxes; glass and metal, too,
of course. But no plastic bags and no styrofoam!

Unofficially, though, they only want plastics 1 & 2 and very clean cardboard
and paper, if even that. And the metal, but probably not the glass. The thing
is that around here the same folks who handle the landfills also handle the
recycling, and they will take whatever they can get for free (no money changes
hands) if they think they can monetize it - a situation which seems to change
on a daily basis. I suspect that an awful lot of what we think we "recycle"
around here actually ends up in one of their landfills instead.

~~~
senectus1
its sort of worse than that, a lot of these recycling programs that local
councils start running are in fact just rubbish offshoring.

They do deals with big Chinese companies to send recyclables to china to be
recycled. Three big problems with this:

1) the climate impact of actually shipping this stuff over seas is huge.

2) There is no oversight on how these companies behave, there has been
numerous reports of them NOT recycling at all and many reports of slave labour
being used to "sift" the rubbish

3) China is now clamping down on it, they no longer want the rubbish, many
councils have no backup plan for this eventuality and yes its likely to head
to infill.

~~~
southern_cross
In our case we're too centrally located to make shipping stuff offshore
economically viable, unlike say the coastal cities. But around here we do have
plenty of cheap land available for landfill space, so that's where a lot of
our stuff probably ends up. I know that our local recycler does feel at least
some of the effects of the Chinese situation, though, and while it hasn't
happened yet I fully expect that sometime soon they will be making changes to
our current recycling system.

------
fourmii
Sometimes I feel that recycling for most of us is just another coping
mechanism. It's a way to explain away the amount that we consume. We throw our
recycling into the designated bins blindly without being critical about where
it's going. Just recently, here in Australia, some of us, including me,
learned that much of our recycling is simply being sold and shipped to China
and other countries:

[https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china-
recycling/stor...](https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2018/china-
recycling/story/index.html)

What we really need to do is stop and think about the consequence and
byproduct of our consumption. We can start with packaging, especially single
use packaging. It's difficult to go the supermarket and buy produce that
doesn't come pre-wrapped. Not to mention the issue of our online shopping
purchases coming in multiple packages.

Although, there does appear to be change coming. Just recently, our biggest
supermarkets just announced that they will cease providing single use plastic
bags:

[https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-
start...](https://www.sbs.com.au/news/woolworths-plastic-bag-ban-starts-today-
here-s-what-you-need-to-know)

~~~
colechristensen
That is not the point of the article.

The point is that people are putting things which are not recyclable into
their recycle bins. You can't recycle greasy paper. You can't recycle grocery
bags. If it isn't clean and well sorted, it costs more to process and
ultimately becomes a "feel good" way to send things to the same dump.

People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle so as to
keep costs down and have fewer things which could be recycled thrown in the
dump.

A load of paper can be contaminated with food scraps so that is becomes
impossible to recycle.

TL;DR don't put something into a recycling bin unless it is clean and you are
sure that it is recyclable (read the guidance you get from your local
authority)

~~~
mehrdadn
> You can't recycle greasy paper.

> People need to be much more careful about what and how they recycle

I'd say maybe pizza boxes should stop saying they're recyclable and start
saying "DO NOT RECYCLE AFTER CONTACT WITH FOOD"...

~~~
mick87
My local recycling company clearly states that I should recycle used pizza
boxes in the "paper packaging" box when searching on their webpage. So I guess
it depends on the recycling process.

------
cordite
Can 98% of my mail not come just so I put it in the recycling bin without
review?

As for the disposal industry, we can learn a lot from Japan, but it starts
with cultural expectations and education. It can get weird in some countries
like Argentina (this knowledge is over a decade old, this may have changed)
you don’t get the cartons or jugs for your milk. You get a plastic bag. The
store keeps the carton and recycles it for their own monetary reasons.

------
pmontra
> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European
> countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options
> that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We
> continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all
> readers with our award-winning journalism.

~~~
moviuro
AKA: "Tracking you without consent was part of our DNA; oops"

------
petermcneeley
I would bet its globally more optimal to have all trash sorted and cleaned and
recycled at a plant than to have each individual in every household do a poor
job of it themselves.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I tend to agree with this although I haven't done all of the math.

It seems however that their might be a net social good to create a recycling
industry which consists of living accomodations, facilities for sorting,
facilities for cleaning, and facilities for reconstituting bulk goods out of
recyclable material, and then a set of factories that would use that to create
50 - 100% post consumer products for sale in the general market.

The purpose of these economic units would be three fold, one it would provide
housing and an income to anyone who was willing to work and it would not
require a lot of pre-requisites for the work. Second it would reduce the
landfall load and burdened cost of recycling by minimizing transportation
costs while effectively recycling. And lastly it would provide a stream of
goods and bulk materials for industry that would provide a means to offset
some if not all of the cost of the operation.

As a government sponsored activity I feel it could simultaneously provide
living accommodations and meaningful work for a large chunk of the homeless
population and an even larger fraction of the post-felony population.

~~~
cam_l
Recycling goods and people, so to speak.

But seriously, why should businesses get to externalise the costs of disposal
of the junk they make? Just make businesses responsible for the life cycle of
their products.

~~~
djrogers
Businesses will simply pas that cost along to consumers, making consumers
ultimately responsible - just like we are now. I’m not sure what model of
‘make business pay for it’ doesn’t translate to ‘make consumers pay for it’.

~~~
cam_l
Of course, that is the point! Then the business which produces lots of waste
(and has to charge for it) is competing with business which produces little
waste.

>edit

Consumers pay for some of the cost individually now, and some of the cost
socialised through government. But neither consumer nor government have the
power to minimise waste in the production of goods. Putting a clear monetary
incentive on the backs of consumers and the responsibility with the market
_will_ actually change things.

------
seba_dos1
The page is GDPRed. Cached copy:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JDyVEp-
rR3cJ:www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/environment/bs-md-
recycling-20180618-story.html+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=pl&lr=lang_en%7Clang_pl)

------
poster123
My wife tells me that growing up in India, people would come door to door to
collect metal and paper to be recycled -- to make money. That's not practical
in the U.S. because people's time is much more valuable. If recycling really
made sense, you would not need to mandate it.

~~~
colanderman
People (like, random people, not officials) still do this for aluminum cans in
US states with bottle deposits. They go door-to-door pulling cans out of
recycling bins and bringing them to deposit centers _en masse_. I've seen this
both in Boston and in the rural town I grew up in. The guy who frequented my
childhood home actually made enough money to leave each "customer" a jar of
peanuts each year at Christmas.

And even if you have to pay someone to take recycling it makes sense because
the damage to the environment is less than just dumping it in a landfill.
That's a cost that's externalized by manufacturers and not easily recouped
without mandatory recycling. (The alternative is to tax manufacturers and
importers for all the trash they generate, equivalent to the environmental
damage it causes. Bottle bills effectively combine these two approaches.)

~~~
southern_cross
> pulling cans out of recycling bins

That's illegal in my area, and I assume in most areas with recycling programs.
You want to pick up stray cans and recycle them then that's one thing, but
pulling them out of recycling bins is considered theft.

~~~
wang_li
It’s kind of funny. The waste management firms worked with the city to require
recycling. So now every home has to pay an additional fee for a recycling bin
plus pick up. And of course the management company only wants to be in this
particular business if they can sell the materials on to someone else. As soon
as China stopped buying our recyclables WMNW started asking the city for
permission to just stick everything in a landfill.

I am required to sort my trash, compost, and recyclables. I’m supposed to wash
and peel labels. I have to pay to have it picked up. The least that should
happen is that the waste management company be required to actually recycle
this stuff.

~~~
bonesss
See... we've known for ages that recycling is a bit of a losing proposition:
otherwise we'd get paid for our used TP rolls like we do with aluminium cans.

The distribution of labour in this case makes the economics even worse. The
scenario you describe is a (I'm guessing, you're on HN), well-paid highly
education citizen literally washing garbage before throwing it out, and paying
for the privilege of an inefficient disposal system that requires routine
intervention... I think an end-to-end total cost accounting wouldn't look too
favorable.

~~~
southern_cross
Penn and Teller (of all people) actually covered the recycling situation in
detail some years back, so in spite of the fact that I myself am a
conscientious recycler I know that a lot of this is probably wasted effort.
But in my situation it effectively doubles my weekly waste disposal capacity,
which I've used to great effect over the years.

BTW, our local recycler doesn't require a lot of effort on our part, nor do
they have a lot of restrictions on what we try to recycle. No food scraps, no
plastic bags, and no styrofoam, but that's about it. Also no washing, no label
removing, and no sorting on our part.

Penn & Teller Bullshit! - (2-05) - 205 - Recycling

[https://vimeo.com/216389085](https://vimeo.com/216389085)

------
yawz
Because partly, what can be recycled where is very confusing!

Where I live, our recycling facilities can't recycle certain "recycle
numbers". And they have a "no plastic bags" policy even if they have recycling
numbers and indicators.

We also have an additional bin for compostables, which sometimes increases the
confusion for certain items. For instance, paper goes into recycling but not
shredded paper, which needs to go with the compostables.

------
extralego
Let’s find the best possible explanation that doesn’t acknowledge the insanity
of accepted consumer packaging practices and made-to-replace product cycles.

------
swoongoonz
Placer County in California pays for one bin recycling. Don't make people
think, just allocate resources to cover recycling as a part of the waste
stream.

------
ggm
The economics are broken. Incent cleaner waste stream, and you'll get better
outcomes. I have no idea how to incent it except to note cash-back schemes
aren't being pointed to here.

The economics of garbage sorting are broken. but that doesn't mean garbage is
broken, or recycling is broken. It means we need to look at what we want. If
we want more people to recycle more, we need to tool up to handle more
incorrect waste going into the input buffer.

If we want people to recycle "better" we need to be prepared to lose some
inputs, because of the cost burden in the community of dealing with
contamination. Or, we need to remove the complexity by making it easier.

Personally, my bugbear is the local (Qld, Australia) refusal to take the
shopping bags full of recycles. The bags are recyclable, the contents are
recyclable, but our local provider has decided not to accept the bags, but
only the contents "because reasons"

------
pedalpete
This needs to be removed from the hands of the public and forced onto the
recycling industry. These are solvable problems, and I would go so far to
suggest they perhaps are not that difficult to solve.

Recycling as a profit center is part of the issue.

Some areas I've lived in have a single recycling bin for all recyclables, some
force it on the households to separate paper from metals and plastics, and
some have a bin for each.

As the article mentions paper and cardboard can be mechanically separated from
other materials, the reason some areas don't do this is not because they don't
have the resources, it sometimes because different recyclers are paying the
municipality (or whoever is in charge) for the material. So the sorting is
then pushed on to the households to do.

Aside from being too complicated, with too many overlapping rules, the sorting
of packaging should be placed on the recycler who is in the business of
recycling.

------
dogruck
In 1996, the New York Times reported that recycling is often just expensive
virtue signaling.

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-
is-...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-
garbage.html)

------
swolchok
The system in the Bay Area is especially broken because it is built to nudge
everyone to put as much as possible in recycling/compost. We've got very
limited trash space, expensive upgrades to larger trash bins, and huge
recycling/compost bins.

------
xbkingx
Crazy bonkers idea...

The cities I've lived in (in the US) provided the garbage and recycle bins.
How about printing the recyclable materials and exceptions ON THE BINS. Put it
on the lid, so it can be easily customized for each community. It amazes me
that no one has proposed this yet.

Another idea - randomly choose streets to spot check recycling behavior and
flag the cans based on their score. Nothing exotic - don't have to do it
constantly or over large areas, simple 3 score system (good, acceptable, and
poor), and just a quick peak in the bins as they are manually thrown into the
truck. Your score is affixed to the bin, which you are rolling out every week
for all the neighborhood to see. Of course there would have to be some
discretion, like people just moving in, hence the process being manual, and
probably some exemption process. The next week, those rated poor will be
rechecked and rescored. Fail again and you get a warning that has the problems
checked off from a list. After 4 consecutive failures you receive a fine. Or
maybe you have to deliver your garbage to a sorting facility where someone
will go over the process. Or there's a class.

There are lots of options beyond throwing up a website hidden behind 3
different local government portals.

~~~
maxerickson
The items that are worthwhile to recycle change depending on what various
buyers are paying.

~~~
xbkingx
But that doesn't really matter to the average resident - I've never received a
notification that the recyclables list has changed, let alone fire pricing
reasons.

Different communities have slightly different rules (they've been 90%+ the
same from my experience), but that's why I said to print on the lid. Same bins
can be bought in bulk and the only logistics would be dealing with a smaller,
easier to transport lids.

Or just use a big, super strong sticker. New rules? New sticker covering the
old one.

------
edem
Wow. Did I just see a page informing me about the site being blocked in
Europe?

------
fergie
"And then there are items that should go straight to the trash — garden hoses,
wood pallets, or, on one recent afternoon, a bound stack of roofing shingles."

Ideally this stuff should be redistributed to places it can actually be used
("freecycling")

------
halite
Now this is something that AI should help with.

~~~
chrsstrm
Or you can just cut the problem in half overnight by mandating that
manufacturers indicate on the packaging whether or not it is recyclable. We
already have the recycle logo on the most common items, but as the article
indicates, the biggest issue is with people hoping that an item can be
recycled and throwing it in the blue bin in earnest optimism. Putting "Please
dispose in trash, this item is not able to be recycled" on the container will
take you further than any tech solution.

~~~
melling
If you make manufacturers label the material, it becomes an easier AI problem
to solve.

~~~
chrsstrm
I'm genuinely curious as to which side of the equation you'd like to implement
this solution - the consumer who throws the item away or the central sorting
center that receives the items? Sure, a metro area sorting center might be
interested, but many are government owned and require approval or even a
referendum to increase the budget for this type of system. Rural sorting
centers have no budget and the most high tech piece of equipment are the metal
detectors positioned along conveyors (just before a couple scores of humans
who do the actual sorting). You can give people an app to scan an item before
they toss it, but that implies they'll actually use it. I want futuristic
automated flying trash-sorting robots too, but I also don't think we've
exhausted the easier options before jumping right into the high-cost tech
solution.

~~~
melling
I don’t know the best solution, but making it an easier problem to solve is
always beneficial.

------
lbriner
Obviously the ideal is to reduce "disposable" waste and we have lived 6000+
years as homo-sapiens without most of this modern stuff.

I like the idea I heard about in a European country (sorry, forgotten which),
where there is a disposal tax paid on all goods by the manufacturer so that
the removal of waste is already paid for and doesn't require people to fly-tip
etc. This is presumably a nice financial incentive for people to make better
packaging to reduce their tax and therefore their sale prices.

~~~
Yetanfou
The country is Germany, the program is called 'Der Grüne Punkt' ('The Green
Dot'):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_\(symbol\))

------
user5454
In Sweden we incinerate[1] the trash in super hot ovens and use the resulting
heat to heat our homes. We do recycle as well but as we sometimes even import
trash to burn (it's a cold country after all) I don't feel so bad when
throwing something in the ordinary bin instead of sorting it proper.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration)

------
tomohawk
In our area, landfills are scarce, so local governments are incentivized to
push waste into the recycling stream.

The result is that they trained people "when in doubt, put it in recycling".
Now that recyclers don't want to accept the low grade stuff from them, they
have a re-education problem on their hands.

I imagine the government employees who put out the bad information leading to
this are all still employed and have probably been promoted.

------
himom
Stanford / Palo Alto gave up on a lot of recycling and went to “off-site
sorting.” Stanford used to have 5! bins.

Another fail is “recycling” at Costco, where basically no recycling happens
and people just throw things in carelessly into any of the 3 bins. Worse, the
staff contribute to its demise equally by eliminating the sorting signs and
turning bins around to hide their labeling. Red, green, blue ... go figure
which is which.

------
dawnerd
Up here in Portland they only give us a tiny trash can and a full size recycle
so we kinda don't have a choice BUT to recycle everything. When I lived
downtown they only picked up trash every other week. They've recently
introduced a 2 dollar/month "recycling surcharge" because they're effectively
just trashing all recycling.

------
tobyhinloopen
That GDPR wall made me LOL

------
eqdw
Straight up: If recycling things was valuable, recyclers would be paying
people for their recyclable goods, independent of what trash collection does.

Recycling may be the best option for the environment, but economically it's
somewhere between a wash and a cost. Cities should budget appropriately

------
wichert
"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European
countries".

Is there another way to access this?

~~~
jMyles
> "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European
> countries".

> Is there another way to access this?

GDPR (and, for that matter, all state interference in the internet) in a
nutshell. What a shitshow.

(Of course, it's also the fault of websites doing the sorts of bad-faith
tracking that GDPR, in good-faith, tries to prevent, but the result is
predictable all the same).

------
peterwwillis
Recyclable materials already have stamps on them to indicate how they should
be recycled (if at all), but it seems nobody was ever taught how to use them.

I'm not sure why this is downvote-worthy. Did you all get taught how the
recycling codes work?

~~~
jMyles
I can't fathom why you're being downvoted.

I remember clearly in elementary school being taught the names of every single
type of cloud, but I'm sure I never, ever had anyone sit me down and explain
the recycling codes.

------
docker_up
State and Federal governments should outlaw any non-recyclable plastic. I'm
okay paying higher prices, but they should streamline the plastics that are
used in packaging and in products so that everything can be recycled and
consumers don't have to think about it. When I order things from Amazon, and
it comes in things like styrofoam, it is absolutely maddening, in 2018.

The Federal government should pass a law where absolutely no non-recyclable
plastic can be used anywhere. Let our costs go up, it will make things like
recycling a lot more economically viable by simplifying things incredibly.

~~~
ars
This isn't going to help.

Almost all plastic is recyclable already - but not when it's mixed with other
junk.

What they should do is stop recycling glass, and recycle paper separately.
That would solve the problem much easier.

~~~
edude03
I think what docker_up is saying is that if all materials were recyclable
there wouldn't be "other junk" to mix in. I actually agree strongly with this,
although I'm not sure how it could be practically implemented.

~~~
ars
The other junk can be recyclables as well - glass for example.

But when mixed, it's too hard to recycle.

------
squarefoot
Site says it's unavailable in Europe. What happened to the first2 Ws in the
acronym WWW?

~~~
Tom4hawk
GDPR happened. But to be honest, if news site needs so much information about
me then I don't want to visit that website...

------
msie
I don't like to recycle cans at my apartment bins because I know the bins will
be contaminated. Not a big surprise. You can't guarantee that everybody will
follow the rules. And the rules change too.

~~~
msie
To be clear, I take the cans to a nearby depot.

