this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (10 children)

Do plastics go in the landfill too? Or is it somehow separated so that only stuff that decays in years rather than centuries goes there?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (9 children)

The regular trash doesn't get separated, it's just dumped. There's also almost no restrictions on what can go in there, our trash cans are massive, and we have to pay for recycling, so many people just don't bother (and a second trash can is not much more than a recycling bin).

We do have a recycling service that accepts most plastics (#1-#7), and they claim to recycle it, but they have pretty strict standards (needs to be clean, need to separate caps from bottles/jugs, etc), so I wouldn't be surprised if most of it just ends up at the landfill anyway. Our area is a "single sort" facility, meaning people just dump everything into one bin and they sort it on their end. This means workers are even more likely to just throw stuff out that isn't easily identifiable as recyclable.

One big issue is that they don't accept glass, so to recycle glass, you need to take it somewhere special. I'm pretty obsessive about recycling, so I go out of my way to recycle everything I can (I have a bag of dead batteries in the garage, I make regular trips to recycle glass, etc), but I highly doubt most people bother. In fact, I have a few neighbors with 2 garbage cans and no recycling can.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

Wow weird. May I ask where that is? Not recycling glass sounds WILD to me, it's one of the most common recyclables, even decades ago when plastic recycling was uncommon, glass "dumpsters" where everywhere.

Being forced to separate caps from bottles of very exotic as well, considering the EU just introduced a regulation that forces manufacturers to make caps that stay on the bottle even when opened.

[–] JJROKCZ 2 points 4 months ago

Almost guaranteed to be U.S.A. as it sounds almost identical to my area except we have even fewer options. Here it all goes to the landfill, you can pay for recycling cans and pickup on recycling day but it gets contaminated by people putting trash in the recycling nearly every time so it all just goes to landfill and the local government just doesn’t care

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