How should we control recycling?

Given that we have low city recycling, how should we improve it?

There are two approaches:

1. Distribution: The individual does it.

2. Centralised: One mad factory robot takes care of it all.

What should we do? Invest more in education of people, or big robotic plants? We need to recycle more, but what balance achieves this?

During visits to Germany and Israel, I noticed there were various bins in lots of places where people could walk to drop off recyclables. I would like to see this approach in the U.S. Education is a must for people to recycle I think. As for me, I don't like the idea of driving 10 miles to a recycling center when it's just as easy for me to walk out to my trash bin and put everything in the trash. There was a plan here that didn't work out too well. The city decided that people could drive their recyclables to the collection point, have it weighed and be given a reduction on their garbage fees. It did not work. To get the credit on the bill one needed to have an enormous amount of recyclables to receive credit. People just didn't want to keep such large amounts of trash around their houses, waiting to have enough to receive the credit. Eventually other people who recycled regularly decided the price of gas was too high for the credit to mean anything. Then the city decided to give small bins to everyone where they could separate their recyclables and put the bins out on garbage day. But the cost to operate the program was more than what the city took in by recycling. Then the city decided to charge the citizens for recycling if they participated. This was a dismal failure, too. Oh, well.

There was a recent article in Popular Mechanics about recycling. Recycling of aluminium was the ONLY profitable rescourse according to their investigation. I'm not saying that it's not a nice thing to do, but the article was rather cut and dry with it's findings. Sent me for a loop. Cos I was definatly all for it, now....

Cool!!! Here's the article...

www.popularmechanics.com...