Submitted by RoverTheMonster t3_z56u89 in philadelphia
How much good are we really doing for the planet if our paper bags filled with greasy pizza boxes, discarded mail, and single-use plastic bottles end up spilled all over the street whenever the wind blows — and sanitation often throws recycling into trash trucks anyway?
I feel like more accurately we need to focus on materials actually worth recycling like Aluminum and get recycling bins with lids.
also nobody in city government wants to be the person who ended recycling. political suicide, regardless of whether there's merit to it
This would be a good question for someone who actually knows the subject.
They do this for compost now. The company provides covered 5-gallon plastic buckets for kitchen scraps. I see them on doorsteps in Manayunk often, and have never seen one ripped open or spilled.
We have bins with lids. The workers use them as frisbees, or straight up refuse to collect when people use the lids. I stopped using the lid because I got tired of chasing it. My bin is falling apart because the workers just throw it in the street and it’s been hit by cars more than once.
Thank God for anti biotics
I'm always entertained by the random things people think belong in recycling bins: old work boots, tree branches, small appliances, etc
We use Bennett Compost but I believe there is Circle Compost as well! Have been doing it for two years and never had a problem. Squirrels chewed a bit of the lid once trying to get in and Bennett replaced it for us without even askinf
Oh, do they just dump your compost and leave the empty bucket? I always assumed they would collect the buckets and replace with cleaned ones.
They empty the bucket each week.
Isn't recycling the last rung on the sustainability ladder? We should focus more effort or reducing and reusing.
yea, this is a complex subject.
I read somewhere that even with all the recycling programs worldwide, only about 5% of human waste is actually recycled and reused. Not really making much of a dent. I'm for recycling but it definitely needs to be more efficient.
The trash men pull my trash bags out of the barrel & throw it into the truck. If the bag breaks & crap is all the ground , that’s where it stays. I picked up trash all over the street before & it was at the bottom of my barrel in a bag. That bag was in that barrel for weeks before I put it into another trash bag. Yesterday was trash pick up for a street by me. The trash all over the street was quadrupled AFTER they picked it up. It’s so bad it’s baffling
And paper/cardboard, it's one of the easiest to keep from not dropping down a quality level when recycled. The only problem with paper is slick ads, plastic tape and food contamination. Plastic, like you said, is a joke.
I looked into this and they charged like 30 a month. Idk why it costs so much money to take my food scraps lol
Yes, circlecompost.com has been pedalling away our compostables for (checks notes) going on six years now!
... including yesterday morning, when our bucket was crazy heavy with Thanksgiving produce scraps. Thanks to Dave and Michele for running such a great service!
Dont forget dog poop
Composting is good but I don’t think food scraps are the problem in anyway. It’s all the non biodegradable, single use items that we need to cut down on because they’re not recyclable like we thought.
If you want to reduce waste, start shopping at places that encourage reusable containers and bulk food purchases. Composting food scraps goes a long way in recycling nutrients back into the soil that would otherwise end up in the landfill. The city's recycling program is just a giant weekly greenwashing event - all for show
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Where can I shop that does this?
Glass bottles should be sanitized and returned to the bottling plants. Used to be common in America, is still practiced in many places.
I'm a member at Weaver's Way co-op in Mount Airy! You can get pretty much any dry good there - pastas, rice, flours, seeds, nuts, spices, oils and vinegars too. I know there are other co-ops throughout the city as well.
Recycling is bullshit and has been since the beginning. Metal is the only thing that's working. Think of all the plastic you recycled in the 90s and 2000s. Now imagine some elderly Chinese or Vietnam person wading through your plastic in what was once a verdant river valley or plain. Because that's where it's at. We were fooled and the corpos lied to us.
I only put cans out. Period.
If we had a thorough system for recycling that would work, but what we have now isn't working.
Even the plastic in states with deposits is mostly landfilled
I work in packaging sustainability and people overestimate their knowledge on the subject all the time. People watch one vice documentary and assume they know more than people that work in the recycling industry. There's a lot of moving parts to it and proper recycling infrastructure and education is a critical part that the US is lacking compared to Europe.
Thanks! I'll look into them!
The south philly coop has bulk too.
You don't want a clean bucket. Your bucket will develop an efficient microbe population that will keep the bucket from smelling and getting gross.
That definitely makes sense, thanks!
The gas needed to drive the bottles back to the plant costs more than making new bottles. Another problem is sorting nearly identical but slightly different shapes and shades of green or brown glass.
You need a special permit from the state to compost food waste so there are only a limited number of places that take it.
Food waste is the largest single component of household trash and we throw out about 30% of the food we buy (some is scrap like cores and peels but some is food we let go bad or just waste). Buried in a landfill it decomposes without oxygen so it produces methane as a byproduct. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas.
I've literally watched my trash guys take the box off my trash can and put it into recycling. After that I started to tear them in half, top into recycling and bottom folded into trash.
Picture this scenario:
You buy a case of beer. They charge you $15 for the beer, $5 deposit for the bottles. You drink the beer, put the empties back in the case as you drink them. You finish said case and want to purchase another. You take the empties with you to the store and the retailer only charges you $15 for the new case because you are responsible and brought your bottles back instead of breaking them in the parking lot or throwing them in the park or whatever.
You were going to the beer distributor anyway so no wasted energy there.
The beer supplier drops off new cases of beer to the store and picks up the old bottles. He has room on the truck because he unloaded new stock first.
He was going to the beer distributor anyway so no wasted energy there.
I could go on but you get the idea by now hopefully.
This is how it worked for a long time and we need to force businesses to be responsible for the waste their products created. Consumers need to play a small part in the process as well.
Bennett is only $18/month I think. Circle offers every other week pickup for a bit of a discount too.
I'd love to end recycling and have twice per week trash pickup instead.
Yeah, I’ve heard that you want to keep recycling even if they are losing money just to keep people in the habit of doing it. Once you lose the infrastructure it’s expensive to bring it back. There is probably a lot more to the big picture that regular trash producers don’t know. I know I don’t know the big picture.
We are out in the burbs and use Mothers Compost; they line the buckets with compostable bags and just replace the bags.
Yep. But they all charge$$. Many in Philly who would LOVE to participate - myself included - really cannot afford the extra monthly expense. There used to be a separate garbage pickup-you put your scraps, etc...out in a smallish metal can, they came either day before or day after normal trash collection, if I remember correctly. Thing is, it wasn't the city doing it-it was private farms, mostly in Jersey, who came to collect the stuff. They used it for animal feed & fertilizer.
We had smallish metal cans, lids closed pretty tight. (They still sell those things) Critters getting into it was never an issue.
This is largely the result of a decades-long PR campaign from oil companies who wanted us to feel better about consuming single-use plastics.
1/2 the time, they just toss our recycling in w/the trash, dep on weather & how far behind they are. & I'm not convinced the stuff doesn't all get unloaded in the same place at the dump either. It sucks. We should be recycling damn near everything ffs...
Our recycling wasn’t touched for three weeks because we were using a big blue bin with a lid with “RECYCLING” written in white all over it….. 🙃
Or we should educate people and set better standards and do something about how horrible the sanitation is
somewhat off topic, but the other day i saw a women pull her car over and one of her very young daughters got out of the car, threw away a shit tom of trash into the sewer, got back into the car, and drove away. i was disgusted yet also not surprised at the same time.
Check out local-based Rabbit Recycling. Otherwise, you’ll become very mindful of all the single-use plastics you go through in your life.
What about junk mail, newspapers, etc
As best as I can determine, the processing plants assumed the grease would fuck things up, so they wouldn’t take them. But after Dominos pizza kept getting shit for producing so much trash, they paid someone to test it, and it turned out it didn’t cause many problems, and the industry has since come around to the belief that it’s ok, and the majority of plants currently accept them.
That being said, I think it’s still Philly’s official stance that soiled cardboard should not be recycled.
If you live in South Philly, the community garden at South Philly high accepts compost items for free. You can place it in the bin over the fence on the Jackson street side. They have a sign listing what they accept.
I’m sure other community gardens do this as well.
Ugh I see people toss their dog poop bags into the sewer every day in my neighborhood
Do you know anything about the TerraCycle recycling programs? Are they actually recycling what they claim to?
Nihilism is badass
We don’t even really try in the US. At least not within the Action News viewing area map. I teach English to a non-native English speaking adult from Warsaw and he tells me he’s amazed at how little we give a shit about recycling here. Apparently in many parts of Europe folks are required to separate out all of their various types of recycling trash into cans — like 5 or 6. And people take it seriously. It never really caught on in the states. I grew up in an era where early-adherent environmentalists were criticized as dipshits or unamerican thanks to Reagan and other associated anti-regulation wingnuts. And that mindset has largely carried into modern society which is why we can’t have nice things.
Ehhh it's hard to say, I've worked in a few waste transfer stations in philly, all your wastes gets sorted here and what's ever profitable they sell. Most of the time recyclables are just sent to waste to energy plants
The trash in this city is my number one complaint as a resident here. It's horrible here and frankly, embarrassing. You cannot find a trashcan ever, even in center city. So people resort to littering, which in turn emboldens others to litter, "if it's already trashy out here, whats the difference?" There is no civic pride. And yes, lately I've RARELY seen an actual recycling truck, I agree, they usually throw the recycling in the trash. Go to any other city and you can see, it's not too hard to figure out. I visit my family in British Columbia twice a year, and it is PRISTINE up there. The province provides separate receptacles for trash, recycling AND compost, and the guidelines are easy to find and figure out. Even in public there are three trashcans that are clearly labeled. Philly is so stuck in its ways and shuns change, we can't make any progress.
if we stop trying, they say "see, nobody wants us to bother with recycling."
if we continually bother with it and constantly make it known that our infrastructure and resources are lacking, they say "okay they want recycling so we should address that"
a city like Philly almost certainly can't enforce it alone and would require a massive urban renewal program on a state or hopefully federal level, but there needs to be funding set aside for aggressive resource management. a good start would be subsidies or tax relief for households and businesses that install some kind of well designed recycling bin that any dickhead passing by can't just toss their trash into.
reducing is definitely the main concern, but it's hard when convenience is a major purchasing factor for working parents who just need to make sure they have the shit they need for their families as easily as they can. as long as people are thoughtlessly making babies (and abortion/contraception isn't easily accessible), reducing will be difficult.
reusing is very difficult when just about everything you buy, recyclable or otherwise, comes with cheap single use packaging or is itself cheap and made for limited use. this was easier when glass, metal, and wood were more common packaging material, but now it's all paper and plastic that can be reused, optimistically, a few times for limited applications.
so either we learn to get really good at recycling really fast, or we force companies to make shit that is actually durably, reliably reusable. or we convince people to be more judicious about where they nut
How long do you guys think until the rich commit genocide on the poor in a last ditch effort to save the planet, it's so poetic.
Nowhere cheap, which is half the problem
Yeah, I do every other week for $12/month. Amusingly, they take away tons of garden waste in big paper bags as well, as long as I let them know in advance, so it's more of a "per pickup" than "by volume" kind of pricing system.
There is a pilot project at Carpenter Green Park as well--it's free.
Bulk buying is the cheapest way to shop.
Organic waste going into landfills is a huge problem because it has a climate impact.
If your banana peels decompose in a compost heap, they give off carbon dioxide, which balanced by the carbon dioxide absorbed by the plant to photosynthesize and make the banana in the first place.
If your banana peels decompose in the sealed environment of a landfill, they will decompose via a different microbial process, called anaerobic decomposition (meaning no oxygen). This is a slower process and it it chemically different - it produces methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Landfills have to vent the methane that's produced by this decomposition or else they get a bit splody.
Bloody hell, I finally figured out where stuff goes!♻️🤯😐
The Streets Department swears they are no longer throwing recycling en masse onto their garbage trucks.
Now, I don't trust them any more than you do. They said they stopped doing this already several years ago (right after the Inquirer ran an expose about it). Fine. And then the pandemic happened, and there have been so many ups and downs with short staffing and recycling only being picked up every other week, and then they get behind after big storms and the like, so they still did it now and then. Fine. They have supposedly staffed up now and are not as critically short-handed.
If you see them throwing recycling onto a trash truck today, in November 2022, that's something you should document and report (i.e., take a photo so there is a record of the time and date.) Otherwise, you're just recycling (ha) old news to help keep cynicism and apathy alive.
But you're also telling on yourself here:
>our paper bags filled with greasy pizza boxes, discarded mail, and single-use plastic bottles end up spilled all over the street whenever the wind blows
You're not supposed to put out your recycling in paper bags. If you're doing this, you're not holding up your end.
I absolutely think the city makes it ridiculously hard to get recycling bins, and I have to say I don't think I've ever seen one of the lidded bins they supposedly started giving out some time ago. The city is really not holding up their end by making inadequate provision of recycling bins.
But OTOH, most of us can afford to obtain some kind of plastic bin for our recycling. There's no excuse for using paper bags except laziness and/or willful ignorance.
Paper - yes - don't know why it keeps being forgotten about.
We should go back to glass instead of plastic bottles. A lot less energy intensive to recycle glass, and can be reused. Food companies have deemed too costly. On the topic of plastic bags we 100% eliminated their use in our household over a decade ago. We bought tough canvas bags and they are great (similar to the tough canvas material that beach bags are). The stupid bags sold at stores made out of recycle plastic bottles fall apart and end up in the landfill.
the only thing you mentioned that's actual recycling are plastic bottles
Way ahead of you
Vasectomy is the greenest behavior.
You are right that it would work at the consumer level. I can even see businesses set up to handle all the returns instead of the individual retailers. I was referring to doing it at the recycling company level - they aren't equipped to separate all the different products.
The recycling isn't even being recycled. Fuck it
Mountains of dog poop ossifying, wrapped in thin plastic bags. All being smushed up with newspapers, cardboard, cans, etc.
Mom’s organic has locations in center city and bryn mawr and they have a variety of bulk options like dry goods, honey, soaps, and nut butters🌱
You can drop off compost for free at MOM's in Center City
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outside of metal and glass, recycling doesn't really exist in Philadelphia. we do it to make ourselves feel better but it all goes in the same dump.
Yep. Learned that on my first trash day in our new house. No lids.
I'm still waiting on Mr. Fusion. stares in the direction that I arbitrarily determined to be where Robert Zemeckis is.
Glass should also be recycled
I have been using Circle Compost for about as long and they're great! Dave and Michele really do run a great service.
Composting is good for the environment but it's also just so much more convenient to put produce scraps in a separate bucket versus having them in the trash.
Sort of related: one of the reasons I dislike the soda tax is it incentivizes the city to allow its citizens to purchase single-use plastic bottles — which inevitably become litter — and de-incentivizes any future ban that might help in the War Against Litter
I am in S.Philly! I did not know this!! Thank you!!!
Sweet!!
The weight and volume of the trash in trucks and landfills matters a lot. More trucks on the road, more space devoted to landfill.
Diverting organic waste to compost provides fertilizer for plants. I use Circle Compost and they pick up with bike trailers.
Really? I know they have the bins up front, but I didn't realize they take kitchen type compost as well!
It’s not that we should give up on recycling, it’s we need to stop just throwing stuff on the ground because it’s not our neighborhood. I live on an angle and when the wind blows, it blows all the trash onto my doorstep. It’s mainly snacks, junk, and fast food waste. It’s a walkway for people to catch the bus. Doesn’t excuse throwing it on the ground. There was an episode of it’s always sunny where Mac and Charlie buy baseball cards and throw the wrappers on the ground. I thought, wow that is truly Philly.
People seem to forget that the saying is “REDUCE, reuse, recycle”.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in the 90s, but I remember this plastered everywhere. Recycling comes LAST, because as you pointed out, in many scenarios it sucks (people don’t do it correctly, which slows down the recycling process at the plants and even sometimes clogs them; in many places only certain materials are recyclable and others have to be thrown away, etc).
Reducing consumer waste is first because it’s so important. Here are some ways you can reduce your waste:
There’s an entire bulk shop in south Philly (east passyunk ave) called Good Buy Supply
Places to shop bulk in Philly:
Good Buy Supply (an entire store dedicated to bulk and limited or no packaging) https://goodbuysupply.co
MOM’s organic market (grains, legumes, oats, 1 brand of laundry detergent, hand soap, etc) https://momsorganicmarket.com/center-city/
Riverwards Produce (I’ve only been to the one in old city, but they have really great prices on bulk grains, legumes, nutritional yeast, etc) https://www.riverwardsproduce.com
Not true. More places need to offer bulk, but for those that do, it’s often way cheaper. Go to a store that offers bulk and pick an item, like white rice or lentils. See what they charge per pound in bulk, then go find the same item on the shelf that is packaged. Almost always, it’s cheaper per pound when it’s bulk. And, you can adjust the quantity. If you’re never going to use a 5 pound bag of lentils and if it will just go to waste, it’s better to just purchase the amount you need from the bulk section. Which creates less waste. Good Buy Supply sells laundry detergent, hand soap, etc by the ounce and it’s on par with what an average name brand detergent would be.
Would be nice if there was more than the 2 BJs in the city too
I think you’re misunderstanding the use of “bulk” here. Bulk can mean one of two things- buying in bulk, such as large quantities (think Costco) OR buying by the pound, which is what we’re talking about here.
I live alone in a small 1 bedroom apartment. I don’t do the mass quantity bulk buying, because I don’t have room for the stuff and it would take much longer to go through it. I DO shop the bulk bins at stores like MOM’s, whole foods, Riverwards, Good Buy Supply, etc. Which is great for a single person or couple, because you can buy items in as little or large a quantity as you want, which means less waste. And since the items aren’t packaged, that often reduces their price per pound.
Start composting. Circles and Bennett compost do weekly pickups for about $20 a month. Doesn't help with plastic though...
Riverwards in fishtown has a dry bulk section and Rays Reusables in Northern liberties has bulk cleaning supplies and personal care items (shampoo, soap, etc.) along with a lot of other cool sustainable items!
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I'm enjoying your downvotes - it's an incredibly viable criticism.
Oh no, the economy needs more bodies! Someone, make more meat for the machine!
It's not a "thoughlessly making babies" problem. People need more time during the day/week. There is literally no reason anyone needs to be working more than 40 hrs a week, much less 20 hrs a week.
I've been using a refill service for household goods, called "The Rounds". It's supposed to reduce packagjng for common stuff and you can return jars, bottles, and bags for them to reuse. It's pretty good! I don't use it for everything, but I haven't bought toilet paper, oil, cleaners, etc from a store in over a year.
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I won’t lie, I never recycle because I heard most of the recycling goes to the general trash anyway
I want to plug Bottle Underground for their diversion of glass from the Philly recycling system and all of its problems already mentioned by others in the thread. They have several partners like Rays Reusables and Good Buy Supply for drop off if the main location at Bok is inconvenient. Focusing on Reducing and Reusing before Recycling is definitely the best way to work, but if you get to the last R and have glass, it’d be great for you all to utilize this.
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Do you realize how much baking soda a pound is? You picked a very obscure item to price match. And you’re right, online prices often don’t reflect the price in the store, especially if you’re looking at the price through a service like instacart (they increase prices at many stores on their app).
Many people buy those little orange boxes, which are a pound, and if you’re using it for cooking (in vegan baking it’s sometimes used, that’s the only reason I have a box) you never use the whole box. It sits in your cabinet for a year. If you’re using it for cleaning, sure, buy a big pack off the shelf. The point is for most uses you only need a small amount, and buying from the bulk section means you can measure out a small amount, that doesn’t cost $6. And regardless, baking soda often comes in a paper box that can be recycled.
Where bulk bins are especially helpful are for dried foods, like rice, beans, legumes, oats, spices, nuts, seeds, etc. Many stores sell bags of rice that are 3-5 pounds, and the bulk price per pound is almost always if not always cheaper. I buy a lot of dry beans, which are significantly cheaper than canned. And when you buy them from the bulk bin, they’re cheaper than the pre-bagged dry beans.
Last, out of the places I listed, Whole Foods and Riverwards have the cheapest bulk bins that I’ve seen. I listed Mom’s because it’s an option, but I don’t shop there often because the items I can’t buy in bulk are overpriced there. It’s more expensive than Whole Foods.
Who said $3-5 per pound for pasta? I buy a lot of red lentils. I just looked up packages of red lentils online, and am finding most average $3-3.50 per pound (on Amazon). I just checked Whole Foods Fresh and the cheapest I saw was $3.49 for 16 oz (1.5 pounds), which comes to $2.79 per pound. From the bulk bin at Whole Foods, organic red lentils are always less than $1.20 per pound. A 32 oz (2 pound) bag of Indian basmati rice (not organic) at Whole Foods is $4.69, which is $2.34 per pound. Again, they sell basmati rice and many other rices in the bulk bins that are always less than $1.50 per pound.
and theres one public trash can every 3 miles
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Convenient, and sanitary if you're putting trash out in bags, no bins, as so many households seem to do. (But !remindme after our 🐀🐀 develop the paw strength to pry open the lids on our 5-gallon buckets!)
I didn't grow up with garbage disposals in kitchen sinks, but understand that they receive a fair amount of our compostables ... along with non-compostable refuse that actually clogs up our in-sink-erators and pipes 🤔
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No, it’s not, as I previously stated. Have a good night.
i agree. but which is more likely? a massive federal minimum wage hike attached to one of the biggest labor rights advances in the last century, or someone realizing that they shouldn't be dropping kids when their life is already expensive enough?
Philadelphia has a law that mandates garbage disposals for this reason, to try and divert organic waste:
https://www.waste360.com/food-waste/philadelphia-aims-food-waste-sink-disposal-law
In a city with very old infrastructure, ancient sewer pipes, and the associated roaches, I would rather see them invest in curbside compost pickup, but I appreciate the effort.
I'm quite familiar with their work. For what it's worth they do actually collect and send hard to recycle materials to get repurposed but there are limits to what they can do, because even though they partner with many large brands, they're quite a small company. There was actually a lawsuit last year that got settled because they didn't have the capacity to collect as much material as advertised.
yeah i bought my own cool collapisble recycling bin and they just threw it in the back of the truck
How does the soda tax incentivize any particular type of packaging? It's applied equally to glass bottles and aluminum cans. The only format that is plastic-only is the 2-litre bottle.
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Recycling is a literal hoax. Broke my fuckin heart when I found out. They literally just send everything on a barge to get picked over by Filipino children.
Aspirational recycling is a problem indeed
Yes but not in single stream. It just gets smashed up and pressed into the paper and plastic and fucks everything up. Only 40% of single stream glass is actually recoverable.
List of things that aren’t recyclable but that my downstairs neighbors continue to throw in our recycling bins despite my previous attempts to explain: pizza boxes (greasy), plastic bags, fast food containers, plastic from any product packaging, glossy magazines, your recycling thrown into garbage bags, old brooms, old vacuums, etc. If you throw any of those things into your recycling bin the assortment center just diverts all that into the garbage. Anyone know how many factories in the US take used plastic and turn it into new products on a mass scale? 1 factory does that here and they only process used water bottles. Clean metal, clean cardboard, and plastic water bottles are recycled, if they even make it to a facility, and everything else is just some 3rd world country’s trash.
We force them to be more sustainable by not buying it. Let’s be real, humans don’t need that much garbage.
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Dominos always seems to be on the cutting edge of stuff...they were the OG Doordash when you could monitor your food being made in the website.
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we do when we expect the comforts of modernity. even if we overhaul all commerce to avoid waste, food and medicine still need to be kept clean, and reusing the packaging on that stuff or using degradable packaging is just unsafe
Guess what moderately enjoyable activity poor people can afford to do
That's a good point
even cheaper
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Here is a link to an awesome image you can print and hang as a reminder.
https://www.thegreencities.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Philly-Recycling-Guide-IFG_800px.jpg
Greasy pizza does not get recycled.
Hey, 'nature' is working on it for us! https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/z5nhdp/sperm_counts_drop_by_62_worldwide/
I made a guy take his dog shit out of my bin once.
I'm waiting to catch one still. Lol
Don’t let their AirPods deter you. Remember they can hear you, and anyone who stands up for themselves is frightening to them.
KSMO t1_ixueiw1 wrote
Many cities across the country have discontinued municipal recycling due the economics of it and reasons you’ve cited, BUT it makes people feel good so it persists.