> The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there.
In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we divide work into chunks, and have t different workers specialize in different work. This increases efficiency tremendously.
However, since most of recycling is based on positive emotions, shaming, and wishful thinking, and not sound economic principles, it shouldn’t be surprising that instead of centralizing sorting work to make it more efficient, we demand that society wastes a lot of collective time, to offload the cost sorting onto regular people (with great inefficiency), and to shame them into getting a feeling of stake in the whole process.
Imagine what would the rest of the economy look like if it used similar model. You’d go to grocery store and waste time picking through produce to find fresh, undamaged fruits and vegetables, because the store can’t bothered to pre-sort it. You would manually add additives after filling up your car, because the gas stations only sell regular gas and can’t be bothered to premix and offer the premium. You’d go to a restaurant, and your waiter would tell you what ingredients you need to bring to get the meal cooked (by the waiter himself).
People shouldn’t need to sort recyclables by category,
If specialization were always better then we’d hire a different specialist to press each key on the keyboard. Specialization is only efficient when the specialist can do a better job, and by enough to outweigh overhead. Rough sorting is extremely basic and requires no “training”, so specialization is less efficient, and serves only to shift work to people whose time is valued less.
> Rough sorting is extremely basic and requires no “training”,
This is obviously false from the start. the entire problem is that it does require training and people don’t perform the task very effectively as a result.
I agree in principle with specialization, but I don’t think it applies well to this case. Before you throw stuff in the bin, it’s already mostly separated. After it’s in the bin, everything is getting crushed and squashed together before it can reach a plant where it can be picked apart and separated.
I mean your analysis isn’t taking into account the high cost of reducing entropy.
Picking damaged fruit from undamaged fruit or mixing a low-entropy fuel with a low-entropy additive to make a high entropy product is cheap.
Sorting through trash is much more expensive because the entropy in a trash stream is massive, and it only gets worse downstream in the chain. You’ve got all sorts of different types of things mixed together, some possibly dangerous.
And we already offload a lot of this sorting to third-world countries and this is not exactly an ethical solution.
In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we divide work into chunks, and have t different workers specialize in different work. This increases efficiency tremendously.
However, since most of recycling is based on positive emotions, shaming, and wishful thinking, and not sound economic principles, it shouldn’t be surprising that instead of centralizing sorting work to make it more efficient, we demand that society wastes a lot of collective time, to offload the cost sorting onto regular people (with great inefficiency), and to shame them into getting a feeling of stake in the whole process.
Imagine what would the rest of the economy look like if it used similar model. You’d go to grocery store and waste time picking through produce to find fresh, undamaged fruits and vegetables, because the store can’t bothered to pre-sort it. You would manually add additives after filling up your car, because the gas stations only sell regular gas and can’t be bothered to premix and offer the premium. You’d go to a restaurant, and your waiter would tell you what ingredients you need to bring to get the meal cooked (by the waiter himself).
People shouldn’t need to sort recyclables by category,