Recycling

There are two simple strategies that I'd like to see applied to manufactured goods in America:

1. Charge the manufacturer for the cost of recycling their products.

The State of Washington just put a law in the books that has to do with charging companies the cost of recycling or disposing of their goods once the consumer is done with them. I thought I was the only one who thought this was a no-brainer.

If I choose to make a product with lead in it, I should be prepared to pay the cost of recovering that lead when the product is being trashed. I should also be prepared to deal with the cost of disassembling my nightmare product that is composed of different materials that simply can't be recovered in any other way.

Why do this? So that companies have an incentive to make their products recyclable and/or have no impact on the environment (and us) when they are thrown away. Our scientists will be provided with an incentive to come up with processes and materials that permit products to be vaporized, or that will rot - or that will last for a very long time, reducing the need for so many of them. They will also have an incentive for improving the recycling processes. If a company comes up with a glue, they would also come up with the process for dealing with the recovery of products that contain that glue. Perhaps some substance that renders the glue completely inert.

We're already paying for the cost of the landfills with taxes, and companies produce whatever products they want, and we throw them out willy-nilly with our attitude of a Throwaway Society. Making the producers pay for the ultimate recovery of the products means that there is a complete product lifecycle that must be considered when coming up with a new product.

Ultimately, consider that any company that processes a product is responsible for the cost that their actions will ultimately impose on the final product. A company that welds steel together is likely going to be charged almost nothing. Their steel products can be melted down whether welded together or not. A company that paints steel will be charged considerably more, because that paint is not recoverable while it is still attached to the steel. It needs to be removed. The company that puts the paint on is responsible for paying for its removal. So goes the theory.

2. If it can't be recycled, categorize it and set it aside for the day that it can be.

Each time that I finish preparing food, I might end up with empty cans, or empty bottles, or even empty cardboard containers. These things I can toss into my large recycle bin in the belief that they will be recycled into new products or at least new containers. It galls me no end to find the wrong recycle code on plastic, meaning that my city won't recycle it. So it goes into the trash.

For example, my city recycles type 1 and type 2 plastics. All other types of plastic get tossed into the trash, to be landfilled. Well, if we know the type of plastic in something we're going to throw out, why don't we put it into another bin? Better still, separate type 1 and type 2 right in my home. This helps the recycling effort in my city, and reduces the number of smelly, rotten jobs that people have to hold, picking through all that combined waste at the recycling center.

Give me a glass bin, a metals bin, a paper bin, a type 1 plastics bin, and so on. Give me a dozen bins. I don't care. Just stop telling me to do stuff that leads to more gunk showing up in our landfills when we could be using this stuff to some purpose. Heck, even my organic garbage could go into a landfill dedicated to methane production. Today, it goes into the same vast pile of stuff that contains everything else that can't be recycled today.