Why dont people care about recycling anymore?

Question

Has everyone just given up on the earth? Why dont people care?

Answer 1

I recycle because I care about the environment. I've taught it to my son as well.

Where I live, if you don't recycle, you get fined. The city disposal yard sends around someone to pour throught the recycle bins BEFORE the recycle truck comes around. They will ring your doorbell if you're home & bring you outside to show you what's allowed & what isn't. It's a bit humiliating as I've heard from others that live near me. If you're not home when the recycle people come by, they leave a notice on your door & one arrives by certified mail. If you don't pay it, it gets tacked onto your trash bill after 30 days. They also send out a monthly list reminder of what's recyclable & what isn't. They do this every few weeks or sooner. I have 2 bins in my house, one for trash & one is for recycled items.

I save the toilet paper rolls & paper towel rolls for craft projects. If I end up with too many, I'll call a daycare in my neighborhood & ask if they'd like them for a craft project. Sometimes, I'll have my son's friends over & we'll make binoculars, swords or animals from them. What kid will turn down a sword fight that stings a little bit & is a lot of laughs?! Or binoculars to spy on their siblings, parents or other friends?!

I also make sure that the products I buy are made from recycled materials. Even the lined paper my son uses for school is recycled. Not every product has recycled material labeling. I make sure to buy the ones who do more often.

I save the soda cans too. With gas prices so high, it gives me about $10 towards the end of the month. I have to save them for about 2-3 months but every little bit helps!

Answer 2

I care, it's just that before I moved, the city I lived in didn't have a recycling center... now that I think about it, the county didn't have a recycling center. There was a city within the county that recycled paper, but you had to pay extra for the special garbage truck to come by, and you had to buy this really expensive trash can for the privilege and they would drive the truck to the next county that did have recycling and give it to them. Then I heard, right before I moved, that the service was being discontinued because it took more money for pick up and processing than it made through selling the recycled paper.
Once I moved, my area didn't have recycling bins or a close place to recycle. All they really had was a special day each month to drop off stuff the garbage trucks wouldn't pick up. However, recently they put different "recycling only" dumpsters in the parking lot of my grocery store. The have several of each: plastics, paper, metal, glass. I've seen people using them, so I guess some people do care. I've thought about using them, and I still might, but I haven't yet. I guess that's because I don't have much to recycle. I use my grocery sacks as trash bags, use glass plates, etc, don't usually use canned goods, or stuff in glass bottles. About the only thing I could recycle is the occasional pizza box, and the plastic from meats and bagged veggies. I've opted out of most junk mail and either shred or file the rest of my mail. So really, I guess I reuse, and reduce rather than recycle.

Answer 3

When my company asked, the owning company of the high-rise business complex we do business in, if we could have a bin for recycling they said NO. Since then we have been implementing our own recycling system but it's not enough. If the the company that owns this building (as well as most of the land in this entire city) would provide a way to recycle a lot more people would do it. I think big companies should step it up and help out the planet. A lot of these answers have complained about expenses to recycling. It is true that right now recycling costs money. Just like anything that hasn't entirely caught on yet, it can get cheaper if we get more participation. Recycling companies will find more efficient ways to work but why change the way it is now if nobody is recycling anyway? So, in the mean time I think big companies that have so much money they don't know what to do with it have an obligation to help out the community that makes them filthy rich. The one I spoke of earlier has been running this city for 100 years! It's time they helped out their community.

Answer 4

having just moved to an area that actually has recycle pick up - I think that it's not that people don't care about recycling, the community doesn't have proper funding to make recycling easier. Before, I would haul newspaper to the large bins across town but they would only accept paper. Here, in TX, the honestly care about Mother Earth and send trucks once a week - I see recycle bins all over the place.

Maybe the people you think don't care, know that there is a prisoner trustee or aluminum can guy that makes it their job to recycle all the garbage the public throws away.

Answer 5

Actually people do still care about recycling and the numbers prove it. It just doesn't seem like they care because there isn't all the hoopla like there was in the beginning. Actually data which you can get from your city or county court house will show this as well as the decrease of waste going into city dumps. Unfortunately many people never have & still don't make use of recycling programs even in cities that have made laws requiring you to recycle.

Answer 6

Most people I know do. Some do it only because household waste is subject to fines. Where I live, if you just dump a bag of trash, the local council will have someone go through it looking for paperwork with the name of the dumper on it & fine them.

It might be a tiny 1% of the trash - the real 99% contributing to pollution comes from industrial waste, but while we are waiting to be poisoned, we'll avoid the fines, OK?

I have a friend who gardens & used to take away the organic waste to a recycling centre. All the centres within this county have now used up their licence for accepting a certain amount a year, already, & she has to tell her customers that she can't afford to provide this service anymore. So they will have to hire some man-with-a-van who will just dump it anywhere. Make any sense to you? Me neither.

Why it makes sense to drive 10 miles or more to dispose of a bag of glass puzzles me. When my mother was young, you could get a few pence in cash for every bottle or jar handed into any store, and you never saw empty bottles lying around, or broken glass. An immediate incentive would be cool with a lot of homeless people who are short of cash. My mother says they even were thanked for bringing in glass containers for reuse. It was seen as a good thing to do. It also reduced street littering.

Why not pay cash up front instead of fining or shaming people, I reckon? People can afford fines, but if they want to throw money away, there are lots who would pick it up!

Answer 7

I don't know what you mean. I am involved with a community recycling program, and the amount of things recycled and the number of people participating has increased every year over the last five years. Maybe the publicity of recycling isn't as intense as it used to be, but my observance is that more people are recycling, and there are more products out there made from recycled materials than ever before.

Answer 8

I live in Germany right now, and over here recycling is mandatory. And they make it easy, next to regular places to dump trash, they have color-coded recycling bins (brown is for compost, blue is for paper, yellow is for plastic, aluminum and styrofoam), and every few blocks they have places where you can throw your glass containers for recycling, once again these are color coded. Americans think they should get rewarded for recycling, in other words, if they don't get paid to do it, they don't think it's worth their time. That's really a sad attitude. I've also noticed that despite the convenience of recycling on our military base, that a lot of the American's just throw trash in the recycling bins, I think that's so thoughless and rude, and many don't bother to even sort, they just throw everything in the garbage. Many of the Europeans look down on us for our attitude about things like this, and while I wish they wouldn't, sometimes I can see their point. Despite improved awareness about the importance of recycling and reducing waste, the majority of people don't care and are too lazy and self-absorbed to take a few extra minutes a week to do their part to better the world.

Answer 9

Because we've been disillusioned. At my company, we used to dilligently seperate glass, paper and cardboard. And then one day, I saw the guy who takes out the recycling and trash. It all went into the same dumpster. Come to think of it, there never was any recycling dumpster around. Not to mention, places like apartment communities don't usually recycle. Mine never did, so when I moved into a house and got recycling bins, I must say I was a bit lost for a while! Though I do recycle my plastics and papers now. Unfortunately, there are too many places that don't make it easy to do, so we just don't.

Answer 10

The popularity of recycling goes up and down. Every few years the environment is made into a big issue, and people take an interest and try to recycle. Then the issue fades into the background, people get busy with their own lives, and they forget about recycling. Then the issue becomes big again, and people start to care about it again.

In other words, recycling goes through cycles!

Answer 11

The bottom line.
Locally the Waste Management System, (garbagemen) , does there own form of recycleing, They pick up my garbage for a mnthly fee and then move it to a facility where it is sorted and sold to corporations as renewable resources. So by paying to have my garbage resold I am recycleing. This is a win win situation.
The metal and stuff I tote to the Recycle Place and they give me shiny coins or pretty paper for it. All the yucky stuff like old cans that had processed foodstuffs or paper bags that had Happy Meals go to the WMS (garbagmen) cause I pay them to recycle it and make a profit.
Follow the money and it will lead to the rabbit hole.