Comment by hoorayimhelping | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hoorayimhelping | Hacker News Reader

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hoorayimhelping

To put in tech terms: This is horrible UX and it's no surprise to me that recycling isn't very effective. Asking your end users to deal with your internal complexity doesn't work in software or in recycling.

I want to help out, really I do, but I have more important things to worry about than which type of plastic goes in which bin. Hell, I'm happy to put the right kind of thing in the right bin if they made it clear which is which and why. But they don't do a very good job of communicating to me why this is important. They just say "recycle properly" then try to make you feel irresponsible and like a bad citizen for not knowing the proper way to do it based on some opaque and arcane process.

If you want people to help out, make it easy for them to feel like they're a part of it. The rules around recycling do the opposite - make you feel like you're harming things if you don't do things exactly right. Not a very empowering feeling at all.

If it's a UX problem, I think the issue is not that garbage disposal chores lack special tingly feeling of empowerement and engagement, but that the negative feedback loop isn't closed. Wiping your ass is pretty low on the happy feelings scale, but neglecting to do so has nearly immediate negative repurcussions. How do we get people to care about things beyond their own rear end? Most people would agree that having children in third world countries sort through toxic electronics waste is a bad thing, but... that's far away, and this new phone has slightly smaller pixels.

What if we couldn't export our waste for someone else to deal with? Maybe then the feeling of personal responsibility would come rushing back.

Much innovation in the last 20 years has been finding ways to get your customers to do work for free that you previously paid employees to do instead.

For example, self-service checkouts in supermarkets, fast food, building a holiday package, etc.

Recycling is the same. They have 'outsourced' much of the job to local government and consumers.

To add: other than cost transfer, it enables better scaling for the companies.

That's not really the case. It's simply a really hard problem and that's easiest to address early on (recycle somewhat right) than to try and filter useful things out of shredded sludge.

It's a really hard problem that big companies show no signs of helping to solve because they have no economic interest in doing so. They use whatever packaging helps their short-term profits without consideration of long-term environmental damage.

It's a typical externalities problem - the full cost of using some types of packaging is not paid by the one doing the packaging.

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