I wouldn't think too much of it. It's reasonable for the likelihood of 'garbage collection' referring to memory management to be higher than collecting trash on HN. Conversely, if you saw it on CNN and thought memory management, then you might have a problem.
I made the mistake of reading the comments on this NYT article. The thread is filled with people who are against recycling at collections points.
This has been one of my pet peeves for a while now. We should be figuring out how stop delegating to end users and figure out the recycling of most things at the aggregation point. It's a huge economic cost to have 9 million people do it vs. centralize it. Not to mention there's a lot of communities in NYC that do a poor job at recycling.
For now I'm going to keep separating my recyclables till they solve it, but doesn't stop be from being angry at the government for punting to me because it's easy. On top of that you self righteous folks who don't want to make it more efficient because they feel good when they sort it themselves.
I'm gonna keep this example in mind next time I end up in a subthread about how centralization sucks and distribution is so awesome and unicorns.
I of course agree with your sentiment here. It scares me how general population has everything exactly backwards when it comes to aggregate effects. Fighting centralized sorting is one example. Fretting over unplugged chargers is another (savings here are minuscule; most people would save orders of magnitude more of energy if they stopped driving their cars so much and used public transport every now and then). It's as if people cared only about gestures and feeling good about themselves, and not about actual effects.
From what I've observed, distribution makes sense if your nodes are homogeneous. Centralization makes sense if your nodes are heterogeneous.
People are typically heterogeneous (various levels of training, apathy, emotions, stress) and getting them to recycle properly is impossible. If everyone were a robot with the exact same version of the exact same recycling firmware with no known bugs, distributed recycling would make absolute sense.
That's because decentralizing this system would make it crazy inefficient, which is why I think it's a good example - the benefits of centralization are somewhat obvious here.
Do you have any recommended reading on this? I know this is a problem that can be heavily mitigated by engineering...it just boggles the mind. Even when the trash is sorted at the disposal point, I've wondered how recycling plants efficiently keep bad/non-plastics out of the recycling process.
Further, I think most recycling is not correctly sorted. There are many people that really don't care but go through the motions, and many others that care too much and put inappropriate materials in the recycling. Getting everyone to sort the same way is really not possible.
(I've had a previous landlord that was very into recycling and he would remind us to take the caps off of bottles before putting bottles in recycling. Either he was wrong, or most people I see recycle bottles wrong. I also went to a very liberal high school that was super into recycling, and had large central sorting bins, but half the large recycling pickups were rejected for being too impure.)
I remember moving to a new office building in a new city a few years ago and puzzling where to find the recycle bins for the complex. I started asking around and I think I ended up calling the city and discovering that the city murfed[0] all its collected trash.
Ever since then I assumed all recycle bins were just a courtesy interface like the close door button on an elevator and that because everyone does such a crappy job sorting their own trash (I know I do), it all went into the same truck and ended up at a MRF.
There are non-functional "close" buttons? I assumed your GP was saying that the buttons do work, just that they don't need to be used because the door will close anyway. At least that's the case in any building I've been in.
Most(almost all) Elevators in the US have to comply with the ADA codes. One of those is that the doors have to be open for a certain amount of time, period. During this time, the "close" button is required to have no effect. After that time, the "close" button can close the doors, but this is usually about the time the doors would start closing anyways. In essence, the "close" button does nothing most of the time you are hitting it.
In Portland, OR the recycling pamphlet provided by the city specifically requests that caps be removed from plastic and glass bottles before recycling.
I still see plenty of caps on plastic bottles in the bins, so at least here it's a case of "doing it wrong".
I live in Portland where curbside recycling is a long-established tradition. A number of years ago the rules changed, instead of the homeowner separating plastic, glass, paper, etc., all of these are put into the same bin. Separating the components became the hauler's responsibility, definitely a more centralized method of handling the task.
Yes, bottle caps are supposed to be removed, but if not probably won't be a major calamity. Anyway, some plastic/bottles have aluminum caps, and those I might leave on vs. tossing in the bin detached. I figure it wouldn't matter, aluminum is recyclable too.
> Anyway, some plastic/bottles have aluminum caps, and those I might leave on vs. tossing in the bin detached. I figure it wouldn't matter, aluminum is recyclable too.
Yes, aluminum is recyclable, but not when attached to a plastic bottle.
How do you expect that your 'attached' cap is going to become detached from the bottle so it can be recycled with the rest of the aluminum, and the plastic bottle recycled with the rest of the plastics?
For plants that use separator machinery, the machines can't unscrew caps from bottles. For plants that use humans, it means the human has to unscrew the cap before it is separated.
That's why the pamphlets say separate the caps from the bottles. The bottle and the cap end up in two different streams, and if they are separated at the outset, it is easier to split them up into the two separate streams at the sorting plant.
I work in the industry (my family runs a collection operation and I focus my effort on software for waste haulers) and I’ve seen huge variance throughout the country in how this is handled. As mentioned earlier, some locations operate a dirty MRF (everything is mixed and the recyclables are sorted out) to centralize the process but the issue you run into is how low quality the majority of the materials are once they are separated. Waste generators in this “system” aren’t consciously putting effort into the way recyclable material is handled so you end up of with a high percentage of residual (not recyclable) that gets landfilled.
Here in CA, South Tahoe Refuse (STR) uses a modified process that I think solves a lot of that problem. They give their customers durable semi-transparent blue bags to fill with recyclable materials. This is somewhat ceremonial but does certainly aid in the sorting efficiency. The waste generator then places those bags in with the regular garbage and one truck collects it all. At the STR operated MRF, they mechanically separate the blue bags and break them open. The resulting recycling is then hand sorted. From what I’ve seen at their MRF, the diverted material is of much higher quality than materials I’ve seen at “regular” dirty MRFs.
I’d personally love to see waste collection return to single container/vehicle or some less impactful method. The current regulations in CA essentially require most locations to run 3 vehicles that collect from 3 different containers at each residence/business since you have to hit a certain level of diversion (keeping materials out of the landfill) that is hard to attain at a dirty MRF. Add to that the CA health code requirements for weekly collection and you can’t just “alternate” collection. The additional fuel consumption, road wear, and other resource demands that result from this multiplication of equipment & travel would be super interesting to research and document. Figuring out a good solution that would allow you to centralize sorting and hit high diversion percentages would result in less pollution/resource demands and potentially lower rates for the waste generators.
Also, now everyone else is experiencing my inverse experience to every “garbage collection” article on HN. I’d love to see more innovation, thought, and exploration around the problem of physically collecting garbage and I love when it’s discussed here on HN.
The South Tahoe method looks like a nice compromise between doing everything at the depot, on the one hand, and asking individuals to do everything, on the other. End users shouldn't be burdened with the (increasingly impossible) task of deciding whether a container is made of PS, LDPE, or whatever. All they need to know is that if something is "plasticky", it goes in the blue bag.
Money can also act as a nice incentive for people to pay attention. Here in Korea, regular garbage needs to be put in special bags that cost a fixed amount per volume. (Garbage collection services are subsidized with revenue from these bags.) So you can save a decent amount of money by putting bulky plastic bottles and empty cans in the recycle bin instead. This system also encourages people to compost as much as they can.
Is the food waste collected separately? Locally we alternate landfill and mixed recycling, but we don't have the high temperature of CA so I guess that helps as well as the food waste (or at least a decent proportion of it) getting collected weekly as a separate stream. Maybe the health code just needs updated?
(Relatedly, garbage trucks, like busses, are ideal targets for hybrid-electric drivetrains due to high gas usage, heavy weight, low speed start-stop journeys, and being driven where pollution (including noise) are issues)
They do seasonal yard waste collection separately from the primary waste stream. When I last visited they only did a small amount of food waste collection since their new processing plant (digester) hasn't been built. Food waste adds in health and odor concerns so they need to build the digester before really expanding that program.
Throughout CA and across the US it is very common to offer a separate service for solid waste and organic waste. Certain areas/haulers have been collecting and processing food waste for decades, but the vast majority aren't yet.
I completely agree about the need to update the health code to allow for more efficient resource management. A minor change could dramatically impact the annual resource consumption of the hauling industry.
Also, YES!! hybrid garbage trucks are certainly on the horizon and will have massive positive impact. Waste Management (wm.com) was working on them at one point around 10 years ago. Now there are several companies working on them.
Related to this, I'm working on software that increases the efficiency/density of collection routes as customers subscribe. I feel that the vast majority of waste haulers have allowed their routes to become inefficient and through applying a layer of software/logic at the subscription point we can help them be more profitable and more efficient.
Personally, I believe the opposite. I think we should do more recycling separation in the home. Centralization makes sense when there is an economy of scale, or, more precisely, when the economy of scale outweighs the costs of homogenization. With recycling, I'm not convinced this is the case.
Ultimately, the stuff being recycled does have to be separated in order to be made useful again. Doing this centrally lets you automate some of that, but you'd be surprised/depressed at how much of the separating is done by hand. There's no magic separator robot at the end of the line.
Also, the quality of the result goes down. Bits of broken glass get mixed into the paper. This makes the end product less valuable, which sucks money out of the entire pipeline. If it's cheaper to single-stream recycle, but the recycled product gets sold for half the price, you haven't really gained anything.
In constrast, it takes a lot less effort to separate the bottles from the paper on my kitchen counter where they are already sitting there clean and separated. Single-stream recycling to me seems like letting users add a ton of entropy to the system which then has to be laboriously removed later on. Why not just leave the chaos out to begin with?
What I do think is a real problem with decentralizing and letting everyone participate a bit in the recycling process is that there's no feedback loop. I spend an embarrassing amount of mental anguish on trying to decide if some piece of paper can be recycled or composted. I don't know if I'm doing it right, or how I'm doing compared to my neighbors.
I understand the information tracking would be insanely complex, but I would love some kind of feedback loop so I could do things better. Even if it was aggregated among my whole neighborhood, maybe a little friendly competition between other parts of town to get the best recycling score would help get people to participate.
We should be figuring out how stop delegating to end users
Here's a fair proposal to do the opposite: At collection points throughout a city's inner suburbs have bins equipped with cheap image sensors scan a QR code on the packaging - each code containing information to identify the type of packaging as well as provide a unique code for each item so it can't be scanned multiple times. Depending on the type of packaging, a certain lid on the bin (among several) will open so that sorting is automatic, and a refund for the packaging can be either donated to a chosen charity or aggregated until a certain dollar value is accrued from future recycling deposits and paid in bulk on the spot.
Biggest limitations: getting a country to alter its packaging requirements to include an advanced bar-code system and a schema that is internationally recognized (ISO certified). The hardware side of things would be trivial, and when concentrated in the inner city you have fewer bins capturing a greater number of people's waste.
Maybe I'm overthinking it - with machine learning the bin could determine the type of bottle/can/container, open the appropriate lid, and watch as the item is surely and safely deposited. A mid-tier smart phone could do this - use similar parts including modem to connect to a server to log a credit for the user/donate to charity. Perhaps an international packaging code schema isn't required.
> And then someone prints a billion of those QR codes and drops them in bins.
From my original post: [...] as well as provide a unique code for each item so it can't be scanned multiple times.
> good luck being able to distribute the means of making unique QR codes to every manufacturer under the sun without the method being leaked
A registrar could issue one-time non-linear increment codes to manufacturers in bulk lots. The main issue would be a central point of failure, but few people would benefit from a billion 5 cent refund QR codes that can only be registered via a bin using a manual process. Also, codes considered compromised can just be deregistered by the registrar.
When you say "separating my recyclables" what do you mean? What you have to do varies widely by country (and even within countries down to county levels).
I personally don't mind my local four bin system (food/garden-compost/mixed-recycling/landfill) as that seems logical to me and takes basically no thought or effort and 3 of the four bins are the same size and get picked up by the same trucks on different days so they've put some thought into the whole system efficiency.
So there's some seperation there (food versus plastic bottle) but I also get to put different types of plastic and glass bottles in the same bin.
I've seen these in some apartment buildings in Norway. Except a truck would still come by periodically and suck out the garbage from the buildings garbage storage hold.
could have been another article about japan. people rinse before bagging and their in noticeably less smell.
what would be nice is a user pays system for garbage recycling in order to create an incentive to reuse containers and reduce over packaging (unfortunately this would inevitability create a problem of more illegal dumping)
There's been a big push around composting lately, to the point where there will be fines for having too many compostables in the trash. People were up in arms over this, as it meant that the waste collection people would be rooting around in your trash to determine if it was complaint, though apparently they can't open opaque bags to check so it's pretty much a non-issue.
This is already happening in my neighborhood/county at least. We separate our stuff but we've seen other cans get ticketed for contaminated receptacles. (I think it's mostly just warnings now, unless you are a habitual offender.)
Still, this is all a bunch of crap. This is a perfect thing to centralize and no amount of shaming/fining the population is going to actually solve the problem in the long run without causing major headaches and graft for the waste management companies (oh, the stories I could tell about them).
I have found trying to reduce packaging and reuse containers rather difficult. If manufacturers and retailers cooperate to offer bulk product pricing for customers who reuse containers and thus reduce the significant packaging costs of retail quantities/products, I would be one of the (few?) target consumers who take advantage of that. I already try to do so, but I found significant frictional costs in my attempts. A couple examples of those costs.
* Many checkout clerks are not familiar with properly keying in a package tare weight. This is a problem when you bring your own packaging when purchasing bulk. This is compounded when you already have some residual amount in the packaging, and want to convey the tare of the combined weight. The result is you increase the complexity of your at-home handling of packages (you have to set aside temporary space and containers for the residual amounts so your packages are empty at the store), and there is significant time at the check out for clerks looking up/asking others how to set a tare, and/or you go to customer service to correct improperly keyed-in tare values (or no tare values at all), even after politely asking the check out clerks if they would prefer you go to another line/clerk to handle the tare data. This even happens to me at supposedly highly-trained vendors like Whole Foods Market.
* Manufacturers are simply not equipped to handle consumers who want to purchase one single unit of a large quantity of product, over and over, year after year. For example, a 5 gal carboy of Dr. Bronner's soap straight from the manufacturer costs about the same as the equivalent quantity 5, 1 gal jugs from the retail store, after accounting for shipping and handling and sales taxes, respectively. That's fine, except those carboys are not cheap, and there simply isn't an option to purchase refills that ship in heavy duty collapsible plastic bags (shipped in heavy cardboard), not to speak of sending those refills back to the manufacturer. I'd love to get refills like that for my staple items, in highly-generic and reusable containers, instead of always sending containers to the recycling plant. I'm constantly amazed how prolifically we use disposable plastic packaging, when in those applications where it spends most of its lifecycle away from UV exposure, it is an extraordinarily durable material.
From a cultural perspective, I completely understand: I'm a very remote outlier consumer, and there are likely only a few thousand world wide who share my outlook and are are willing to go to some lengths to reduce how much I feed into the recycling and waste streams. My philosophy is that waste is a material expression of our lack of knowledge of how to usefully transform the embodied energy of the waste into something else we want to use, and the less waste and even recycling activity we perform, the more overall efficient we are.
I'm surprised they seem to be moving the trash directly from the chute into the system rather than passing it through a waste shredder first. Then Christmas trees and cardboard boxes wouldn't be an issue...
(Youtube "waste shredder" for hours of entertainement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU3LoZZVhEw)
I spent a summer in NY and I took the subway everywhere at all times. One night I was out until ~3am and was waiting for the subway. I saw a train coming down the tracks and it looked funny. As it went by I realized it was actually dumpsters on wheels carrying tons of trash through the subway system. I presumed this was how NYC moved trash across the city and I was really impressed at the resourcefulness.
I have since been unable to find any reference to this system or anyone else who has seen it. Am I insane? Was I drunk? Dreaming?
There are lots of different maintenance trains that the MTA employs to keep the tracks clean and in working order.
They often do carry garbage collected off the tracks, so it's very possible that's what you saw.
Edit: I think you saw an R127 hauling garbage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6VnQzShTZg. I've never seen this before personally, but I guess the MTA does haul garbage ;)
Ah the infamous dumpster train. The light at the end of the tunnel that is actually false hope for hundreds of intoxicated insomniacs every night. Congratulations, you've had one of the less publicized "true New York" experiences. Just learn to say "Houston Street" correctly and we might not even know you're a tourist.
The truth is that the garbage train only collects garbage at the stations. Not the entire city. Think about it, when it comes time to remove the trash in the station dumpsters, why run a truck over ground and lug trash up stairs when you can just run a flat-bed down the tracks.
Other unusual subways include the rare "track inspection vehicle" and the now discontinued "money train".
The inspection vehicles are fucking terrifying. It's like seeing a sunrise coming through a tunnel.
The snow-blower trains on the lines that run outside, however, are awesome. A huge propeller-like turbine thing on the front, roaring along, sweeping the snow off the tracks. Very cool to see.
Back in the token days, they used to collect the toll box fares the same way the collect the station garbage. Hence "money train". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_train
Side note, on a desperate night have you ever found yourself wondering "maybe I can bribe the orange vest dude to let me ride the trash train because waiting here sucks."
> Side note, on a desperate night have you ever found yourself wondering "maybe I can bribe the orange vest dude to let me ride the trash train because waiting here sucks."
Never.
But I've definitely considered just hopping into an empty bin, and seeing how far it'd take me.
Roosevelt Island aside (didn't know it had the fancy system before) New York is stuck in middle-ages with it's trash collection system. I have yet to come to a city where the situation is so dire. Smell, noise and rats. I can't imagine why no other system has ever been devised.
I lived in NYC for well over a decade and I never knew this existed! This is so cool. I wonder why it was limited to Roosevelt Island, the system is so futuristic and clean. Maybe it costs a ton of money? It seems like it should save money in sanitation staff over the long run assuming it's not too hard to interconnect and keep the pressure up for new buildings.
58 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadShows how narrow-minded this line of work has made me, I guess.
I wouldn't think too much of it. It's reasonable for the likelihood of 'garbage collection' referring to memory management to be higher than collecting trash on HN. Conversely, if you saw it on CNN and thought memory management, then you might have a problem.
I would have read that.
This has been one of my pet peeves for a while now. We should be figuring out how stop delegating to end users and figure out the recycling of most things at the aggregation point. It's a huge economic cost to have 9 million people do it vs. centralize it. Not to mention there's a lot of communities in NYC that do a poor job at recycling.
For now I'm going to keep separating my recyclables till they solve it, but doesn't stop be from being angry at the government for punting to me because it's easy. On top of that you self righteous folks who don't want to make it more efficient because they feel good when they sort it themselves.
I of course agree with your sentiment here. It scares me how general population has everything exactly backwards when it comes to aggregate effects. Fighting centralized sorting is one example. Fretting over unplugged chargers is another (savings here are minuscule; most people would save orders of magnitude more of energy if they stopped driving their cars so much and used public transport every now and then). It's as if people cared only about gestures and feeling good about themselves, and not about actual effects.
People are typically heterogeneous (various levels of training, apathy, emotions, stress) and getting them to recycle properly is impossible. If everyone were a robot with the exact same version of the exact same recycling firmware with no known bugs, distributed recycling would make absolute sense.
It's not really a good example - the system is centralized either way, moving the separation task to one side or the other doesn't really change that.
(I've had a previous landlord that was very into recycling and he would remind us to take the caps off of bottles before putting bottles in recycling. Either he was wrong, or most people I see recycle bottles wrong. I also went to a very liberal high school that was super into recycling, and had large central sorting bins, but half the large recycling pickups were rejected for being too impure.)
Ever since then I assumed all recycle bins were just a courtesy interface like the close door button on an elevator and that because everyone does such a crappy job sorting their own trash (I know I do), it all went into the same truck and ended up at a MRF.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_recovery_facility
For anyone else reading this, here's a decent summary of the ADA requirements: http://sterlingelevatorcons.com/white-papers/elevators-and-t...
I still see plenty of caps on plastic bottles in the bins, so at least here it's a case of "doing it wrong".
Yes, bottle caps are supposed to be removed, but if not probably won't be a major calamity. Anyway, some plastic/bottles have aluminum caps, and those I might leave on vs. tossing in the bin detached. I figure it wouldn't matter, aluminum is recyclable too.
Yes, aluminum is recyclable, but not when attached to a plastic bottle.
How do you expect that your 'attached' cap is going to become detached from the bottle so it can be recycled with the rest of the aluminum, and the plastic bottle recycled with the rest of the plastics?
For plants that use separator machinery, the machines can't unscrew caps from bottles. For plants that use humans, it means the human has to unscrew the cap before it is separated.
That's why the pamphlets say separate the caps from the bottles. The bottle and the cap end up in two different streams, and if they are separated at the outset, it is easier to split them up into the two separate streams at the sorting plant.
Here in CA, South Tahoe Refuse (STR) uses a modified process that I think solves a lot of that problem. They give their customers durable semi-transparent blue bags to fill with recyclable materials. This is somewhat ceremonial but does certainly aid in the sorting efficiency. The waste generator then places those bags in with the regular garbage and one truck collects it all. At the STR operated MRF, they mechanically separate the blue bags and break them open. The resulting recycling is then hand sorted. From what I’ve seen at their MRF, the diverted material is of much higher quality than materials I’ve seen at “regular” dirty MRFs.
I’d personally love to see waste collection return to single container/vehicle or some less impactful method. The current regulations in CA essentially require most locations to run 3 vehicles that collect from 3 different containers at each residence/business since you have to hit a certain level of diversion (keeping materials out of the landfill) that is hard to attain at a dirty MRF. Add to that the CA health code requirements for weekly collection and you can’t just “alternate” collection. The additional fuel consumption, road wear, and other resource demands that result from this multiplication of equipment & travel would be super interesting to research and document. Figuring out a good solution that would allow you to centralize sorting and hit high diversion percentages would result in less pollution/resource demands and potentially lower rates for the waste generators.
Also, now everyone else is experiencing my inverse experience to every “garbage collection” article on HN. I’d love to see more innovation, thought, and exploration around the problem of physically collecting garbage and I love when it’s discussed here on HN.
Money can also act as a nice incentive for people to pay attention. Here in Korea, regular garbage needs to be put in special bags that cost a fixed amount per volume. (Garbage collection services are subsidized with revenue from these bags.) So you can save a decent amount of money by putting bulky plastic bottles and empty cans in the recycle bin instead. This system also encourages people to compost as much as they can.
(Relatedly, garbage trucks, like busses, are ideal targets for hybrid-electric drivetrains due to high gas usage, heavy weight, low speed start-stop journeys, and being driven where pollution (including noise) are issues)
Throughout CA and across the US it is very common to offer a separate service for solid waste and organic waste. Certain areas/haulers have been collecting and processing food waste for decades, but the vast majority aren't yet.
I completely agree about the need to update the health code to allow for more efficient resource management. A minor change could dramatically impact the annual resource consumption of the hauling industry.
Also, YES!! hybrid garbage trucks are certainly on the horizon and will have massive positive impact. Waste Management (wm.com) was working on them at one point around 10 years ago. Now there are several companies working on them.
Related to this, I'm working on software that increases the efficiency/density of collection routes as customers subscribe. I feel that the vast majority of waste haulers have allowed their routes to become inefficient and through applying a layer of software/logic at the subscription point we can help them be more profitable and more efficient.
Ultimately, the stuff being recycled does have to be separated in order to be made useful again. Doing this centrally lets you automate some of that, but you'd be surprised/depressed at how much of the separating is done by hand. There's no magic separator robot at the end of the line.
Also, the quality of the result goes down. Bits of broken glass get mixed into the paper. This makes the end product less valuable, which sucks money out of the entire pipeline. If it's cheaper to single-stream recycle, but the recycled product gets sold for half the price, you haven't really gained anything.
Some more details: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/single...
In constrast, it takes a lot less effort to separate the bottles from the paper on my kitchen counter where they are already sitting there clean and separated. Single-stream recycling to me seems like letting users add a ton of entropy to the system which then has to be laboriously removed later on. Why not just leave the chaos out to begin with?
What I do think is a real problem with decentralizing and letting everyone participate a bit in the recycling process is that there's no feedback loop. I spend an embarrassing amount of mental anguish on trying to decide if some piece of paper can be recycled or composted. I don't know if I'm doing it right, or how I'm doing compared to my neighbors.
I understand the information tracking would be insanely complex, but I would love some kind of feedback loop so I could do things better. Even if it was aggregated among my whole neighborhood, maybe a little friendly competition between other parts of town to get the best recycling score would help get people to participate.
Here's a fair proposal to do the opposite: At collection points throughout a city's inner suburbs have bins equipped with cheap image sensors scan a QR code on the packaging - each code containing information to identify the type of packaging as well as provide a unique code for each item so it can't be scanned multiple times. Depending on the type of packaging, a certain lid on the bin (among several) will open so that sorting is automatic, and a refund for the packaging can be either donated to a chosen charity or aggregated until a certain dollar value is accrued from future recycling deposits and paid in bulk on the spot.
Biggest limitations: getting a country to alter its packaging requirements to include an advanced bar-code system and a schema that is internationally recognized (ISO certified). The hardware side of things would be trivial, and when concentrated in the inner city you have fewer bins capturing a greater number of people's waste.
Maybe I'm overthinking it - with machine learning the bin could determine the type of bottle/can/container, open the appropriate lid, and watch as the item is surely and safely deposited. A mid-tier smart phone could do this - use similar parts including modem to connect to a server to log a credit for the user/donate to charity. Perhaps an international packaging code schema isn't required.
(As good luck being able to distribute the means of making unique QR codes to every manufacturer under the sun without the method being leaked...)
From my original post: [...] as well as provide a unique code for each item so it can't be scanned multiple times.
> good luck being able to distribute the means of making unique QR codes to every manufacturer under the sun without the method being leaked
A registrar could issue one-time non-linear increment codes to manufacturers in bulk lots. The main issue would be a central point of failure, but few people would benefit from a billion 5 cent refund QR codes that can only be registered via a bin using a manual process. Also, codes considered compromised can just be deregistered by the registrar.
I personally don't mind my local four bin system (food/garden-compost/mixed-recycling/landfill) as that seems logical to me and takes basically no thought or effort and 3 of the four bins are the same size and get picked up by the same trucks on different days so they've put some thought into the whole system efficiency.
So there's some seperation there (food versus plastic bottle) but I also get to put different types of plastic and glass bottles in the same bin.
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-61-a-series-of...
See also: NYC's Pneumatic Tube Mail Network
http://untappedcities.com/2013/03/15/nycs-pneumatic-tube-mai...
http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/pneumatic-tu...
what would be nice is a user pays system for garbage recycling in order to create an incentive to reuse containers and reduce over packaging (unfortunately this would inevitability create a problem of more illegal dumping)
There's been a big push around composting lately, to the point where there will be fines for having too many compostables in the trash. People were up in arms over this, as it meant that the waste collection people would be rooting around in your trash to determine if it was complaint, though apparently they can't open opaque bags to check so it's pretty much a non-issue.
Still, this is all a bunch of crap. This is a perfect thing to centralize and no amount of shaming/fining the population is going to actually solve the problem in the long run without causing major headaches and graft for the waste management companies (oh, the stories I could tell about them).
* Many checkout clerks are not familiar with properly keying in a package tare weight. This is a problem when you bring your own packaging when purchasing bulk. This is compounded when you already have some residual amount in the packaging, and want to convey the tare of the combined weight. The result is you increase the complexity of your at-home handling of packages (you have to set aside temporary space and containers for the residual amounts so your packages are empty at the store), and there is significant time at the check out for clerks looking up/asking others how to set a tare, and/or you go to customer service to correct improperly keyed-in tare values (or no tare values at all), even after politely asking the check out clerks if they would prefer you go to another line/clerk to handle the tare data. This even happens to me at supposedly highly-trained vendors like Whole Foods Market.
* Manufacturers are simply not equipped to handle consumers who want to purchase one single unit of a large quantity of product, over and over, year after year. For example, a 5 gal carboy of Dr. Bronner's soap straight from the manufacturer costs about the same as the equivalent quantity 5, 1 gal jugs from the retail store, after accounting for shipping and handling and sales taxes, respectively. That's fine, except those carboys are not cheap, and there simply isn't an option to purchase refills that ship in heavy duty collapsible plastic bags (shipped in heavy cardboard), not to speak of sending those refills back to the manufacturer. I'd love to get refills like that for my staple items, in highly-generic and reusable containers, instead of always sending containers to the recycling plant. I'm constantly amazed how prolifically we use disposable plastic packaging, when in those applications where it spends most of its lifecycle away from UV exposure, it is an extraordinarily durable material.
From a cultural perspective, I completely understand: I'm a very remote outlier consumer, and there are likely only a few thousand world wide who share my outlook and are are willing to go to some lengths to reduce how much I feed into the recycling and waste streams. My philosophy is that waste is a material expression of our lack of knowledge of how to usefully transform the embodied energy of the waste into something else we want to use, and the less waste and even recycling activity we perform, the more overall efficient we are.
I spent a summer in NY and I took the subway everywhere at all times. One night I was out until ~3am and was waiting for the subway. I saw a train coming down the tracks and it looked funny. As it went by I realized it was actually dumpsters on wheels carrying tons of trash through the subway system. I presumed this was how NYC moved trash across the city and I was really impressed at the resourcefulness.
I have since been unable to find any reference to this system or anyone else who has seen it. Am I insane? Was I drunk? Dreaming?
The VakTrak doesn't look like dumpsters on wheels, but it's one of the models the MTA uses for track cleaning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBSfb84z4QI
Edit: I think you saw an R127 hauling garbage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6VnQzShTZg. I've never seen this before personally, but I guess the MTA does haul garbage ;)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/nyregion/mta-tries-to-redu...
The truth is that the garbage train only collects garbage at the stations. Not the entire city. Think about it, when it comes time to remove the trash in the station dumpsters, why run a truck over ground and lug trash up stairs when you can just run a flat-bed down the tracks.
Other unusual subways include the rare "track inspection vehicle" and the now discontinued "money train".
The inspection vehicles are fucking terrifying. It's like seeing a sunrise coming through a tunnel.
The snow-blower trains on the lines that run outside, however, are awesome. A huge propeller-like turbine thing on the front, roaring along, sweeping the snow off the tracks. Very cool to see.
Side note, on a desperate night have you ever found yourself wondering "maybe I can bribe the orange vest dude to let me ride the trash train because waiting here sucks."
Never.
But I've definitely considered just hopping into an empty bin, and seeing how far it'd take me.