Recycling: Curb Your Enthusiasm

We live in Buenos Aires, one of the dirtiest, loudest, most crowded cities on Earth and there are no recycling centers here. In fact, there are no official bins for trash, it is thrown out into the street in whatever container the disposer deems acceptable and picked up by city trash trucks that don't discriminate between actual waste and recyclable materials.

Here's the rub though, Argentina is full of desperately poor people who use things others think are trash to wear, eat, live in/on or build things out of. When we designed our apartment we wanted a pull out space in the kitchen for trash. We talked to the architects about it and had to ask them 3 or 4 times during the kitchen design to make it bigger. They kept wanting to create for us the standard Argentine sized trash receptacle that will hold about a gallon of milk's worth of garbage. It took us a while to get it, they don't throw things out. Milk, in fact, comes in a plastic bag. It's cheaper to "bottle" cheaper to ship, cheaper to buy and when it's gone there is a small plastic bag left to dispose of. No, the bag isn't recyclable, but it isn't a lot of trash either. If we throw anything out, bottles, cans, anything, it is picked up by people who roam the streets with hand pulled carts and taken away. I don't know what they do with it, but they want it.

There is recycling the old fashioned way, drink bottles, coke, beer, etc, get returned to their bottler and reused so you can take them back to the store for a refund. Otherwise people mostly use stuff until there is no further possible way to make it useful any longer. After that, the landfills get it, no question.

I believe even 3rd world countries need recycling programs, but 1st world countries need to stop throwing much away, need to stop consuming so much, need to stop creating so much trash in the first place...

Wow, I thought we would be bad, being behind the "Orange Curtain" here i Orange County, CA (bush country).

Since I bought my house in '96 anaheim has tree big trash bins for residences.
1. greeen recyclables
2. black land fill trash
3. brown yard waste

But it takes three big trucks, one for each bin.

pretty cool. we pay for it, and for apartments is just ONE bin that ends up in a landfill unfortunately

Hey I really count on MoJo to be accurate so what's up with this? Philly has had single stream recycling in most of the city for more than two years already, which is not exactly "just."
http://www.ucityphila.org/news/release/144

As a longtime recycler (San Francisco hauling newspapers to a parking lot in 1972), I am confirmed in the process. Here in Maryland, I noticed a neighbor putting everything into black trash bags, including all recyclables, for trash pickup, which I regarded as lazy and could not understand. Now, 20 years later, I notice more potential recyclables going into my own regular trash because of lack of time or energy; it takes work to haul everything out to the curb, and I can understand my black-trash bag neighbor's method. Recycling is WORK, even in a recycling-friendly town such as the one I live in. And harder work for many seniors and disabled. I have an excellent household recylables receptacle system in my kitchen; this is what it takes to recycle, but I doubt if most people have the kind of time or help in getting an organized system rolling!

We tried the curbside recycling years ago but they kept raising the rates then they moved it to a different day and time than the solid waste collection time and they did this twice within a few months. Sometimes they wouldn't pickup for any apparent reason so it was back to the house for another week. We'd also miss/forget half of the time after the change and it really just became more of a pain than it was worth for the convenience. Solid waste collection is part of property taxes and there's no incentive to put less material into the stream.

On the reuse side solid waste is also used as a combustion source to generate steam supplying the downtown area. I believe it is also part of code that all new construction must have garbage disposals installed - while that an be a bit slippery with the diversion of waste from one stream to (literally) another I suppose it might position the city to one day convert their sewage treatment to biogas generation.

Beyond curbside we can still recycle at free drop off locations (28 locations city wide). The problem there is that they often use the super high sided compartmentalized dumpsters so the elderly would have more difficult time, if you recycle a lot you'd have to throw each item in 1 at a time or lift up your container over your head to dump it, and half the time the unit is full to overflowing so I have to come back in a couple days.

A new source for recycling paper that is popping up locally are a number of fund raising boxes from Abitibi - this has at least expanded opportunities for more locations (25 within 3.5 miles of my house) to do all forms of paper recycling beyond just newspapers plus you get to support your favorite organization.

I can't see a big change inside the city until an there's either a greater incentive to recycle in a per bag/container fee or private enterprise enters the picture like the Abitibi boxes have done in paper.

Nevertheless, everybody can not stop learning and attempting. His work also gave a big surprise to Marc Jacobs who greatly admires his passion toward
Galliera GM.It announces that all handbags are made individually at its secret workshop- it balks at the term factory- in Aseni?res-sur-SeineLouis Vuitton Galliera GM, northwestParis. This is also where its laboratory does its testing Multiple Wallet. A mechanical arm lifts a handbag loaded with a3.5 kgweight then drops it on the floor Louis Vuitton Multiple Wallet to test its durability.