Recycling is probably the number one thing consumer relates directly to "Green." People are trying to figure out what incentives are required fo rthe mass to adapt recycling. A company called GreenOps has developed a tracking system that can trace products going from the consumer stream to the recycling stream.
Companies that create consumer packaging can participate and put the GreenOps logo on their materials. Consumers buying goods can choose products identified with that logo. When finished, they take it to a GreenOps Tracking Station where they get a receipt showing the number of items they recycled and a code for redeemable cash at a retailer such as Wholefood etc. A 5 cents per bottle.
The concept is to have these tracking stations placed in high traffic areas like shopping malls, sports stadiums and other places where a whole lot of packaged products are tossed in large quantities. When an item is deposited into the machine, it gets scanned and the materials are tracked so companies can see how much of which products are being recycled. There are three questions: 1/I am not sure how often it needs to be cleared particularly high travel area given the size of the box 2/Is the 5 cents an effective motivation for consumers? 3/ The cost of deployment and I am not sure how the economics work.
Not sure we understand the economics of recycling. The bottle needs to be washed, usually in the kitchen sink with running tap water, so water is consumed. The plastic bottle is then taken to a recycle machine that crushes the bottle. Electricity is consumed to power these recycle machines. A special recycle truck picks up your blue (or green) box and then it delivers the recyclable material to a sorting factory. The factories and machines are built to sort the various recyclable materials from each other, paper, plastics, glass etc. These recycled plastic bottles are not made into new ones, they're used for lower grade plastics such s those used to build playgrounds. So we will still need to keep manufacture more new plastic bottles. This is a hardly a solution.
Recycling is great idea at first thought, but we often consume more energy in reprocessing our recyclables than we are gaining. There are simply no cost-effective means of recycling food containers into new food containers. Can Bioplastics be the answer? It's still an open question on whether it is more energy efficient to use biodegradable plastic or just recycle petroleum-based plastic. There are no straight answers. In the meantime, please bring your own bottle.
