Single Stream
Sep 18th, 2008 by Andy
I live in the City of Falls Church and they recently changed their curbside recycling program. They now accept more stuff (parts of pizza boxes, aerosol cans, books, lids (can you believe it!), and even those stupid plastic bags that you bring all your groceries home in) and they take it all in one bin. No more sorting. This is crazy!
Actually, a few weeks ago I heard about this kind of stuff on NPR. Robert Seigel (who apparently lives in Arlington, who knew?) was trying to figure out why different jurisdictions have different recycling programs that take different kinds of things. It was really quite interesting.
Apparently the technology around sorting recyclables has really evolved making it easier and more affordable for them to sort through stuff back at the recycling shop (factory? warehouse? not sure what you call it). At the same time it has gotten more expensive to deal with regular trash. Also, running trucks that can pick up sorted materials is more expensive than just using your regular trash truck.
Anyway, the way the equation works out is that they want to encourage people to recycle more so they don’t throw as much stuff away (expensive to deal with). By accepting more things the theory is it’s easier to get people to recycle (it requires less thought to decide what to recycle and what not to recycle). Certainly taking away the sorting aspect of things makes it easier for people to recycle. Then you get to the trucks. With single stream recycling you can just take all the crap and throw it in the back of a regular trash truck. This way you can eliminate an entire fleet of specialized trucks - that’s got to save some money. You even get side benefits - like now you don’t have to flatten cardboard boxes. With the old trucks you had to get the cardboard flat so it would fit - now they can just chuck the whole box in the back.
I think it’s a great move by the City and I hope they keep up with these innovations in recycling. I’d love to see them start a food waste recycling program (they’re doing it out West) - I think that would be great.
