22
The recycling truck driver told me my sorted bins are just theater
Last Tuesday in Portland I watched the recycling truck dump both my blue bin and my neighbor's trash into the same hopper. When I asked the driver about it he just shrugged and said "it all goes to the same place anyway." Can we keep pretending individual sorting matters when the system clearly doesn't care?
4 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In4 Comments
the_harper1d agoProlific Poster
Wait, @keith900 are you just mad your compost game got called out? Sorting bins is basically just a feel-good hobby at this point.
10
michael6691mo ago
Whoa wait, did you say ALL goes to the SAME place? That's insane if true. I mean I've heard rumors about recycling being a sham in some places but I figured Portland of all cities would have their act together on that. I spent like 20 minutes rinsing out a peanut butter jar last week for nothing?
5
michaeltorres1mo ago
Why would you take one guy's word over the whole system we've built? That driver was probably just having a bad day and venting, not giving you the actual policy of the entire waste management system. You saw one truck on one route in one neighborhood - that's not exactly a scientific study of recycling infrastructure nationwide. Portland has commingled recycling in some areas where everything gets sorted at the facility, so what looked like trash might have been recyclables going to the same processing plant anyway. If we all stop sorting because we saw one thing once, then yeah the system fails, but it fails because we gave up on it, not because it was broken from the start.
4