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Comment by armSixtyFour | Hacker News Reader

The blame is always shifted to the consumers, the logic being that consumers would make more sustainable decisions if they really cared about it, totally ignoring that it's either prohibitively expensive for many or almost impossible to judge the sustainability for many products.

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> The blame is always shifted to the consumers, the logic being that consumers would make more sustainable decisions if they really cared about it

There is something funny in this common corporatist argument trying to get rid of responsibility by saying that "we just produce and sell what our customers demand". Namely, for some reason any proposal that would somehow increase the requirements for the corporations to disclose what, exactly, they are selling and how, exactly, that is produced, is vehemently opposed by the very same corporations.

To me, either you give full an unbiased disclosure about your products so that the customers can make their minds properly, or the ethics of your supply chain is your problem, not your customers. You just can't cherrypick here.

(sorry, no sources, just anecdotal impressions from public discussions during last decades.)

If consumers were compensated for recycling materials they would be much more inclined to sort properly. Recycling centers that take materials that cost too much to recycle likely have a government contract to "take care of it". They dont have a lot of incentive to be efficient. They get paid to make it disappear.

I don't know about where you live, but in California, we have a "bottle deposit" on both glass bottles and aluminum cans (~$0.10 per item), which gets returned to you if you bring it to a recycling center. The only people I see actually bothering to sort and return these are very low income people and homeless people that go through public trash cans.

That seems win/win, doesn't it?

In Denmark its 1-3kr, or 15-50¢, depending on the size and material of the container.

Plenty of cans are collected by homeless / lowest income people, but it's also just about enough that average people will collect them too.

If I have a huge bag after a party, I return them. When I normally only have 0-2 bottles in a typical week, I take them outside and put them on the little shelf on the bin for someone to collect without needing to rummage: https://www.magasinetkbh.dk/sites/default/files/public/style...

New food packaging can only use recycled material collected in this way. The general household recycling is considered too dirty.

This mirrors my experience in Germany. We would often save up a dozen or so bottles and bring them all to the grocery store where they could be returned. If we had a beer on the way to the bars we would typically just set the empty next to a garbage bin for someone to collect and return.

Any benefits of this are effectively negated by emissions from VMT's driving to the recycling center.

NYC is the same, but the way refuse is handled makes it more convenient for people to “harvest” it. I lived on the Upper East Side for a while, and building managers would bag up recycling in clear bags. Then you’d see people out collecting the bottles and cans out of the bag but also making sure to tidy up afterwards. The collection crews would have gigantic bags, carts, etc. that they’d take to larger grocery stores to turn in for the deposit.

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