Question by Candis: Why do I have to waste my time recycling doesn’t the regular trash men do it for me?
My boyfriend has started recycling, I have no idea why. Doesn’t the trash men do it when we give them our trash?
Best answer:
Answer by Brad
yes they sort through all of it du-b-ss
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
Because of the expense going in to paying trash men (which comes from our tax dollars – already spread thin), no, they do not do it for you.
Currently in the UK most councils are required to give their residents the opportunity to recycle their rubbish as opposed to directly throw it out. One reason for this is because we are very quickly running out of space to put landfills as we as a society are throwing out so very much. Due to this and several other factors the government is quickly increasing the tax councils pay for throwing waste in a landfill (£42 or so per ton right now). So to decrease their bills, Councils across the UK are providing their residents the facilites to recycle, whether that be a bin or small sites near homes where you can recycle materials(called Mini recycling centres) . Currently it is easier and much less expensive to ask residents to seperate their recycling from their rubbish themselves instead of using the extremely expensive systems that could do it for the councils. I will admit such systems do exist, but I don’t know of any councils currently using such a system- it is just wayyyyyy tooo expensive from what I know. Plus any recycling that was taken out of a rubbish bin would be dirty from food, nappies, liquid, etc, and therefore if you have loads of dirty recycling, no one will want to take them off of the council to be recycled- ( the recycling has to go somewhere after it has been collected.) So that is the technical part.
Why should you recycle?? When you throw something out, you are losing that items, and its components, forever to a hole in the ground. We are extrodinarily limited on our rnatural resources, whether it be trees or oils. Unfortunately, humans are currently using up these limited resouces very quickly. One day they will run out of raw materials that make up the very things we use everyday unless we start reducing how many resources we are using. Recycling allows us to take an item that we have finished with, break it down (whether by melting, cutting, or whatever) and use the basic material (plastic, metal, glass, paper etc ) to make a new product. So glass is melted down and recycled into new glass. Cardboard boxes are broken down and made into notebooks. This process allows us to use materials we already have to make new things, so we are not using up our resources as quickly. Plus it takes a lot less energy to make something from recycled material than raw material, so that is another benefit. That is why we recycle, to use up resourses less quickly and save lots of energy (that we would otherwise get from burning coal, or creating nuclear reactions). I
ts a long, but pretty complete answer as to why to do it, and why you need to do the seperating of these items themselves. There are many websites about this subject, such as recyclenow.com and your councils should also be able to give you more info. Hope this was helpful.
It’s perfectly possible that the trash men could do it, but if you do it yourself it gives you the feeling that you’re helping to “save the planet”.
If we get loads of people faffing around with separating out their diffferent types of trash then that stops them from thinking too much about anything that might cause the governments any grief. It also saves paying the trash men too much when they take away all of the pre-sorted waste for recycling and tip it into a landfill site anyway because there’s not enough demand for recycling raw materials.
In other words “it gives the sheep something to do”.
BAAAAAA
you must be a dumb blond! please take the time from your oh so busy and oh so important schedule and observe trash men and women, how they do their jobs.
kudos to your boy friend – but why is he with a dummy like you?
No it has to go to two different places.
ummmm no. That’s why they have usually have separate trashes for recyclables and for non recyclables. Do you really think it’s sanitary or safe for a trash man to go through your trash which could contain old food, pads, tampons, band aids, needles, broken glass, etc to get the recycled goods out? no. And it is not a waste of time. We are going to kill our planet if we continue going on the way many do.
Hofstra University, on Long Island, claims that their trash is sorted by a company called Jamaica Ash and that this is why they have no recycling containers on campus. Whether this is true or not, the majority of municipal waste management services do not sort your trash for you.
While I suppose it is POSSIBLE that there is a place on earth where the “trash men do it for you,” the fact remains that if there is a recycling program for your boyfriend to get involved in, that program is probably there for a reason – you have to do it yourself.
Besides, it’s not that difficult and would probably take you less time than posting your question on yahoo took.
No, they don’t sort it. They collect all of the trash, move it and dump it into a big landfill where it will be for hundreds or thousands of years.
um no. its not so hard to put it in the blue or green bin instead of the brown one. you can do it… we believe in you 😀
No, if the “trash men” did it, trash collection would be more labor intensive, thereby costing more, and in the case of city trash collection, this would cause taxes to increase.
No, not at all.
That would take them a long long time. But if you were sort through recyclables at home, it wouldn’t take to long.
The trash men just take your trash and well, throw it away into dumps and landfills. Were as recycling, they actually re-use the items.
No they do not. It’s fantastic that your bf has started recycling. If you hadn’t noticed as said before- there are 2 different trucks- a recycling truck and garbage truck. They don’t sort through it they merely toss it all into a garbage truck to be compacted into a garbage cube.
If they were going to sort it for you they wouldn’t drive around in a garbage truck AND and recycling truck. Didn’t you notice you have a garbage can AND and recycling bin?