Letter – Puzzled by recycling schemes
Saturday 28th August 2010, 11:30AM BST.
Can anyone explain to me the logic behind council “recycling”? Like all people of my generation I hate waste and agree that if something can be re-used it should be.
It is the arbitrary and confusing way this is decided that I find bewildering; aluminium beer cans are accepted but an aluminium saucepan weighing far more rejected; plastic milk bottles are okay but not clear small sheets of plastic; a bean can is snapped up but lumps of iron discarded.
I am sure more re-usable material is wasted by such pointless discrimination than is saved.
Perhaps, as long as one appears to be doing something what is actually achieved is not important.
John Phillimore, Shrewsbury
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I would imagine it has something to do with economies of scale.
Specifically, weighing several factors against each other, such as: What types of waste are households most likely to output & the quantity of this rubbish, VS the cost of implementing a service or paying for the facility to recycle it.
Most of the metal waste output from my house is ‘tins’ (albiet aluminium) and cans. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I would imagine other people would be in the same position. Therefore as a local authority, when implementing a service for collection of recycling, I would imagine that they would not be prepared to spend a large amount of taxpayers’ money for in order to provide a solution for every possible type of potentially recyclable waste. It’s not practical, or cost effective.
The myth surrounding recycling is that a facility or process that allows for one type of waste (e.g. Aluminium) to be used anew can be applied to every other type waste (e.g. Iron, Tin). This simply isn’t true. Metals react in different ways, at different temperatures.
Plastics are the same. You don’t have to be a chemist to appreciate that if substances have different properties (therefore often different applications) they have a different molecular makeup, meaning they should never be recycled together otherwise it could render the entire batch of recycling unusable, defeating the objective in the first place.
In short, you have the correct sentiment about recycling. If something can be used again, it should be, however there is a lot more to this issue than you might expect when you put your bins out, and other considerations that need to be taken into account.
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