I am losing hours of my life these days, standing perplexed in front of rows of recycling bins, trying to figure out where to put the component parts of my garbage.
To make it more confusing, every place I go to seems to have a slightly different system. Just dumped off a bunch of papers at Langara College, where I teach, and which has a bin for ALL mixed paper, newspapers and regular paper. Just seems wrong to me, since I separate them at home, so I spend extra time studying the sign to make sure I have understood correctly. When I go to UBC, where I also teach, another system. When I go to a public festival or market, another system. (Fortunately, the Vancouver Folk Festival stations one or two volunteers at every row of recycling bins to help out with proper throwing away.)
All of that prompted me to start asking if anyone is trying to standardize the system or make it more coherent. And, to my amazement (my story ideas don’t always pan out like this), it turns out that very smart people are trying to figure this all out.
My story here in the Globe is all about how Metro Vancouver, Multi Material BC, and researchers/designers at UBC and Emily Carr are all trying to figure out how the best way to help people figure out, in split seconds, where to put there garbage. Pilots are coming to three communities — Penticton, Richmond, City of North Van — in the summer.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Tiktaalik // Jan 6, 2015 at 1:13 pm
A coffee cup should go in containers? Oh boy I wouldn’t have guessed that one. There’s clearly a further need for education.
A major problem is the discrepancy between distinct local systems and general package branding. For example the City of Vancouver food scraps website says that coffee cups are an “unaccepted item” but I regularly see coffee cups with “compostable” labelled on the lids. Another example would be that compostable plastic bags are sold throughout Metro Vancouver in the garbage bag section of the supermarket explicitly for use in food scraps containers, but they’re not an accepted item in Vancouver’s food scraps recycling system and thus shouldn’t be used. Maybe Vancouver should be calling up Safeway and co and telling them to stop stocking these?
I’m curious about to what degree are “unaccepted items” truly not allowed because they somehow break the Vancouver recycling system or is the city just trying to direct people to the better recycling choice. For example paper is not allowed in food scraps, but “soiled paper” is, so doesn’t that mean that I could probably put some paper in food scraps and it wouldn’t be that big of a deal?
2 Salvaich // Jan 6, 2015 at 2:12 pm
We have serried ranks of engineers an planners at the provincial, regional and municipal and they cannot figure out where to place a coffee cup.
Is this dysfunctional or what.
So set a strategy, read the behavioural economics literature and start some transparency accountability.
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3 boohoo // Jan 6, 2015 at 2:53 pm
Yeah, the ‘compostable but not really’ bags at the store are dumb. The City didn’t take my garbage and left a note cause I had those in once.
4 Jeff Leigh // Jan 6, 2015 at 3:13 pm
We just got the food scrap recycling program in our condo. We are using the paper bags to collect scraps, not the compostable plastic.
I think this is just normal growing pains for a new process. We are confident we can figure it out, but I am not so sure about some of the other residents of our complex, who can’t seem to figure out the difference between bottles with deposits and those without.
5 Warren12 // Jan 6, 2015 at 3:20 pm
Coffee cups and pizza boxes are among the most confusing items when trying to recycle.
Starbucks has done a good job with splitting containers and putting pictures of their products on each one.
Of course, that doesn’t stop people from ignoring the pictures and putting things wherever they feel like.
6 Nancy Albright // Jan 6, 2015 at 10:35 pm
The best system I saw was one where they had clear plastic chutes above the recyling bins. In those chutes were real life coffee cups, lids, straws, napkins, yoghurt lids etc…each above the bin where you were supposed to put the stuff. SO much easier than obscure drawings (is that a napkin or a tray liner?) or lists.
7 Lysenko's Nemesis // Jan 7, 2015 at 10:57 pm
MMBC is a subsidiary of a Toronto based private organization run by executives from Coca-Cola, Walmart, Unilever, Metro (Quebec, although Quebec opted out), Procter and Gamble, etc. These are some of the largest companies in the world and now we’re all working for them, sorting our trash so they can process and sell it and we are paying them to do it.
How did this happen?