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Even with those handy little illustrated tip sheets on how to separate ones recycling from trash, New Yorkers are still confused! Or lazy. Or living in cramped quarters. The Daily News reports that we're throwing recyclables in the regular trash over half the time. Some blame confusion, while others point out there's simply not enough space in cramped NYC living quarters to have a separate container for everything.
To that latter point, the paper points out that "neighborhoods that recycle the most household paper, plastic, glass and metal have more single-family homes. Queens has the best residential recycling record, followed by Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which recycles only 34% of what it could."
With all this confusion and lack of space, apartment building owners would rather risk the $25 fine. And, you know, the survival of our planet.
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The non-official people that scavenge through everyone's trash & recycling are partially to blame for this. You put everything in the right place and homeless dude goes through your shit and takes what they can get money for and leaves everything else all mixed up and messy, lids off and shit in disarray. I'm about to put a lock on my trash area gate, or how about a nice little battery shocker.
yeah. I'm pretty bad at recycling even though I try really hard. so my new solution has been not to get any garbage to recycle in the first place. if you cut down on unnecessary packaging like plastic bags from the grocery store. use a reusable bag. I've cut down on paper and magazines cause i've gone digital and I don't buy bottled water. Now most of my waste is from those damn neighborhood flyers. How can I get those bastards to stop soliciting my ass?
While certain stores are required to accept plastic bags for recycling, individuals aren't required to take back the bags to the store or to separate them for recycling at home.
I'm going to go with laziness. Japan recycles seven-different ways to Sunday and tokyo apartments make NYC seem roomy.
look folks it's not that hard. i loves my beer, but know that the scavengers will go through my recycling to get the bottles. solution: i separate items with a bottle deposit into their own bag. ain't fun but sho' is easy!
Or just give your empties to the homeless when they ask for change. That way, they actually work for their money. I know, it's a novel concept.
i'd love to recycle. i usually keep my recyclables all separate until i have to take my trash down to the buildings trash "area". then it all goes into the exact same place. they don't keep them sorted at all. just re-bag it and toss it to the curb
I recycle my deposit cans to the corner NYSD can. The can collectors come by and pick them up sooner than the regular pickup.
My apartment building doesn't recycle and my office building doesn't either. It's a shame that the city lacks the enforcement that'll make buildings more compliant.
Some things are obviously recyclable. Other things (yogurt containers, take-out plastic) more nebulous. When I doubt I throw it in the trash.
When I lived in Peter Cooper, I was 100% sure that the building did not recycle so I didn't bother to sort my trash. Why go to the effort when they're just going to throw it all in one big bag anyway?
Now that I live in a nicer building we have a trash room which has recycling and since I can see the trash outside, I know that they do keep stuff separate, so I make a genuine effort to sort properly. I'm not always perfect, but hey what can you do.
Why bother to sort recycling? The trash pickers take care of it for you!
New York should embrace single stream recycling. One bag for everything and then stuff is sorted elsewhere. If you want people to participate, you sadly have to make it as simple as possible.
Actually, one of the towns I lived in growing up did this. You just had one "recycling" bin and the guidelines on what could go in it were clear. Glass, cans, plastic bottles, etc, you tossed them all in there, and then the garbage pickup, which was handled by private companies, was responsible for sorting. Basically, recycling got done, people got to be lazy, new jobs were created (for sorting that recycling) and everybody was happy. Especially the garbage truck owners who got to raise their prices like 20% or more to do it.
My hometown also requires that you pay for special trash bags. The bags are like 30 for $25 or something. In theory, it cuts down on the amount of trash people are putting on the curb and increases recycling. In NYC that's probably not realistic... and I don't know if it has worked elsewhere, but it sounds good in theory.
I'd rather see less packaging in products.
Recycling is pretty hard to do if, like me, you get home at 7 at night and then have to worry about which bin to put your garbage in on top of dealing with the stack of health insurance paperwork clogging up your desk -_-
It's a combination of laziness and misinformation. Just last night when I threw out my paper recyclables in the proper bin in my building, there's a PLASTIC bag full of paper recyclables in the bin. I mean, how stupid/lazy can my fellow tenants be?
On the misinformation front, I like to point out the fact that the only plastics that are recyclable are those that are in the shape of a bottle. It explicitly says that on the nyc.gov website, yet those pictorial diagrams we get in the mail are not as obvious when it comes to that.
We need to start compost recycling as well if you ask me, people are lazy and indifferent and that is the only thing preventing us from doing more. What a joke
Gothamist does a great job of recycling tired stories all the time...
only thing new yorkers are really good at is whining about things.
Stop making us do all the work and we'll recycle more.
?? If we didn't mandate any of this, how much you want to bet you wouldn't do a damn thing?
Meticulous recycling is where I allow my OCD to come out. Its not hard, people are just lazy.
PS: in the housing projects (my pet peeve) the people there don't even try. Where else can you see poor people from other countries going through bottles and cans our "poor people" can't even bother to return for $.05 each?
Those tip sheets? I just threw 'em away.
I don't understand the "cramped apartment" excuse. If you had room for trash before, you have room for trash and recycling now. You aren't changing the volume of your garbage, just the way you arrange it.
And for the folks who say they don't have time, I don't get that either. It takes no time at all, you just drop your recyclables into a separate bin. How does that take any time?
I've repeatedly heard that very few commercial buildings with private garbage contractors recycle, and every time I've heard this fingers are pointed at mafia involvement in the carting industry. I guess it isn't surprising when evil people are evil and lazy people are lazy.