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Yea. I can't stand how in New York you get fined now for each thing that's not allowed in your garbage can. It's ridiculous.
Welcome to "The Peoples Republic of New Yawk" Jared.
I hope Jared understands the joke.
I think it would be less intrusive if manufacturers would make their containers out of biodegradable material, that way we could have controlled landfills that produced methane gas that could be made into methanol additives for our fuel.
Just an idea.
Even if one supports government promotion of recycling the passive means to consumers (like the can / bottle deposit) are the way to go. Otherwise you'd have to focus on enforcement, and there's no way you could dig through everyone's garbage to see if they were recycling properly.
My understanding is that the largest sources of recyclable waste produced are paper, yard work, and discarded food. Most of these can be handled, as Andrew suggests, passively, or at "worst", with local programmes. Such as a community compost heap that collected waste can be gathered in and used by local small farms or gardeners or landscaping projects.
The reason NYC might be considering measures has to do with space constraints of storing perfectly useful or reusable objects discarded. It would be smarter however to publicize and offer disposal units for recyclable waste at places like local restaurants and office buildings and to promote/create a social and cultural more of executing this painless process on the consumer end than to attempt to enforce laws and police trash disposal. This is basically what Japan does and cultural pressures to conform to this more are intense. (Japan does have recycling laws which also significantly increase environmental disposal of electronics and cars, but I doubt most Americans consider "recycling" a car or TV at the end of its useful life).
Another option would be to increase collection fees of garbage relative to recycled goods (ie tax garbage but not recycled trash)