this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Zero Waste
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Being "zero waste" means that we adopt steps towards reducing personal waste and minimizing our environmental impact.
Our community places a major focus on the 5 R's: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot. We practice this by reducing consumption, choosing reusable goods, recycling, composting, and helping each other improve.
We also recognize excess CO₂, other GHG emissions, and general resource usage as waste.
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One big issue is using single-stream recycling where everything goes into the same bin and it's the responsibility of the recycler to separate them all back to individual types. That is simply way too complicated and expensive for most of the materials so they just don't do it, and most of it simply goes into a landfill.
When the sorting is done by the consumer as it's done for example here in Finland where we recycle more than 90% of bottles and separate everything else into their own bins, you end up with much higher recycling rates. We do still lack enough processing capacity to deal with it all so a lot of it is burned for energy, but at least essentially nothing is going to a landfill any more.
I don't think that tasking people to sort waste makes long-run sense. Not an efficient use of human time -- you cannot just treat that labor as zero cost.
If recycling becomes important enough, we can develop waste sorting machines and they can harvest the landfills. If we aren't to the point where that makes economic sense, then we aren't to the point where recycling a given item is sufficiently warranted.
I remember bringing the old glasses bottles to the store for a deposit. That system worked pretty well and provided incentive to not just toss them.