Admittedly, recycling in 麻豆社国产can be a hassle.
Realistically, the curbside bins can pretty much only take packaging and printed paper. Meaning, residents need to carve out time to drop off flexible plastics and glass on their own.
Old, useless electronics need to be recycled at the landfill or bottle depot. And, actual garbage needs to actually get to the garbage instead of the recycling.
These extra steps are an inconvenience, of course, yet they help both our environment and our collection staff from doing our dirty work.
When garbage and glass get mixed into the curbside recycling, the staff does its best to sort it out and get it to the right stream. Yet, it’s impossible for the staff to perfectly sort the recycling of some 20,000 residents and, therefore, items that could have been recycled are ending up in our landfill.
And our landfill will near its full capacity between 2025 and 2027, according to the District.
While the landfill will be expanded again before it reaches capacity, it bears repeating that recycling still shouldn’t end up there as these items may take many, many years to degrade.
But beyond the environment, the collection staff needs our help.
If you ever have an opportunity to visit the recycling centre for a tour, as The Chief recently did, you will first notice the sheer amount of garbage. Then, you will notice that the floor is peppered with what feels like an infinite amount of broken glass.
It is easy to cast this aside as an unfortunate side effect of working in recycling, but it is just as easy to argue that it is a side effect of our laziness.
Undoubtedly, there are other culprits that contribute to this mess too — such as the decision-makers behind food packaging.
But we can choose to buy food and support packaging that has more convenient recycling if we want to take fewer trips to the depot throughout the week or month. And, we can find packaging that we can reuse more easily — the first and most important step in recycling — or packaging that is compostable.
Ultimately, getting our recycling right helps keep the local collection staff safer and allows them to be more efficient, which in turn, immensely helps keep our environment from deteriorating by deterring unnecessary fillers at the landfill.
For a community where many pride themselves on being environmentally friendly — pro-electric cars and anti-fossil fuel, for example — we need to do a better job at putting our recycling where it goes.
