Separate garbage collection: how do civilized people sort waste before returning it for recycling?

The statistics are disappointing - on average, one resident of the Russian Federation emits 450 kg of various wastes per year, some of which (about 6%) are burned in factories, and the second part remains in a landfill or gets into water and soil, polluting them. Under current conditions, the only way to avoid an environmental disaster is to sort the garbage and send it for recycling.

Why is garbage sorted at home?

All waste falling into an ordinary trash can is taken away by a garbage truck and taken to a specially designated place - to a landfill, which is usually located outside the city and is a truly terrible sight. There garbage is mixed - cardboard boxes and plastic bags, cans, old clothes, rotting food debris and other rubbish for years or even decades lying around in the open. Its organic components decompose, due to which a fetid odor floats over the landfill.

It is impossible to sort the entire amount of waste daily discharged by residents of even a small city. Firstly, there is too much garbage, and secondly, if manual labor is involved, huge amounts of money will be needed to pay salaries. Therefore, in the entire civilized world, the model of home sorting is used, when each person himself arranges the items intended for release into different containers. In this case, the organization involved in the removal of garbage can, without unnecessary time and labor, send each type of waste to a recycling plant or for disposal.

As an alternative to separate waste collection, it is sometimes suggested that all waste be burned. However, this is not possible for several reasons:

• During combustion, about 250 types of toxic substances are released. The most famous of them - dioxin - is a carcinogen. Thus, the burning of waste will cause an even greater blow to the environment than storage in landfills.
• When combustion is complete, ash and various slags must be removed from the furnace. Since they are also harmless, you simply cannot take and pour them out in the forest or field - burial at a special landfill is necessary. And these are additional expenses and huge areas of “dead” lands that cannot be used for farming or construction.

Garbage sorting rules

It would seem that it could be simpler than dividing all the waste into five main types - glass, plastic, paper, metal and food residues? However, for all these things to be recycled, they need to be properly prepared.

Glass

The first thing to remember is that not all types of glass are recyclable: reinforced, refractory and unbreakable products, crystal, mirrors contain impurities that make it impossible to use them as recyclables. Such items must be thrown into the household waste bin.

But glass bottles from under mineral water, alcoholic drinks, medicines, cans and window glass may well get a second life. It does not matter if they are whole or broken. The second option is even preferable, since the fragments take up less space (but on the other hand, their collection and transportation must be carried out in compliance with all safety standards).

Before throwing glass bottles and jars, the following manipulations should be performed:

1. Remove any remaining contents from them.
2. Wash off grease, wax, paraffin.
3. Remove labels if they are made of any material other than paper.
4. Screw on the metal caps, remove the plastic plugs.

Glass containers, from which foreign objects cannot be removed, are unsuitable for processing. For this reason, perfume bottles, inside which there is a spray tube fixed with a metal holder, must be thrown into the tank with household (non-recyclable) waste.

Metal

You can throw away aluminum cans from canned goods and drinks, as well as metal alloy products used to store food, including canned lids. All other items must be taken to specialized scrap metal collection points.

Pretreatment of metal objects is as follows:

• Removing labels
• throwing away residues that are inside;
• rinsing off residual fat;
• flattening to reduce volume.

Items that are only partially composed of metal are collected separately. Particularly important is the disposal of batteries, accumulators, radioactive metals and energy-saving lamps. All of them contain dangerous components that pose a threat to human life and health. For this reason, they must be taken to specialized collection points (often containers for batteries and lamps can be found in supermarkets).

Plastic

How to sort plastic correctly, it is worth checking with the organization that is involved in the acceptance or removal of garbage. The fact is that there are many varieties of this material, and each of them requires separate processing.

You can find out what type a particular product belongs to from the marking - it looks like a triangle, consisting of three arrows, with a number from 1 to 6:

• 1 - This is polyethylene phthalate. Often they make bottles for drinks, containers for food products and sometimes - packaging for electronics. The lion's share of all the plastic that gets into the trash is PET.
• 2 - high density polyethylene. It can be different - both solid and in the form of a film. From it are made “rustling” packages, bottle caps and the bottles themselves (most often opaque) from household chemicals and various drinks, basins and cans.
• 4 - low density polyethylene. This is cling film, soft bags, packaging from household appliances.
• 5 - polypropylene. In most cases, it goes to the manufacture of bags for cereals, dairy products, bread.
• 6 - polystyrene. This foam plastic makes foam, disposable tableware, substrates for fruits and vegetables.

Plastics marked 3 and 7 (PVC and rare varieties) are almost not recycled, so they have to be thrown into a common container. Toothbrushes, drinking tubes, candy wrappers should go there. Do the same with those products on which there is no marking.

Before packing plastic, you should:

1. Remove labels from bottles.
2. Screw on the covers, even if they are also plastic.
3. Sort all items by type according to marking.
4. Rinse the packaging from under greasy products (sour cream, milk, fermented baked milk, kefir, meat, fish preserves and others).
5. Cut paper stickers from film.
6. Divide the packages into simply transparent and colored or with a pattern.
7. Separate and dispose of all dispensers and other parts of the bottles containing metal in a common trash bin.
8. Compress everything to reduce volume.

You can not mix different types of plastic, for example, to shove plastic bags into shampoo bottles.

Paper

The correct paper sorting is as follows:

1. First, everything that is dirty with fat, jam and other liquids is rejected. Such things are not suitable for processing.
2. Then lay checks, paper with a self-adhesive layer, tickets, toilet paper, egg trays, laminated sheets aside. All this needs to be thrown into a container for non-recyclable waste.
3. Blank white paper, notebooks and books, printed press, paper packaging (including kraft bags), school notebooks and albums, cardboard boxes are for recycling.

Special attention is given to the packaging of Tetra Pak and Pure Pak. Unknowingly, it is often referred to as paper, but it is not. It is processed using a separate technology, so you cannot mix such bags with waste paper.

Questions and answers

Due to the fact that garbage sorting is not very common in the CIS countries, people have a lot of questions. We will give an answer to the most common of them.

• What will happen if you do not sort the garbage, but throw it away, as you did before?

In the coming years, nothing tangibly terrible will happen. But if you make a forecast for a longer time period, then the planet will simply wallow in waste. For example, glass decomposes in 800–1000 years, plastic in 300–500 years. If we take into account the growth rates of industry and consumption, we can imagine how much garbage will be consumed per capita in some 10–20 years.

In addition, we risk killing many species of birds, animals and aquatic creatures. They often take plastic for food and eventually die, because the body is not able to "digest" synthetic materials.

• What if I want to sort the garbage, but in my city there are no tanks for separate waste collection?

Each city has collection points for glass containers, scrap metal, and waste paper. If you are lucky, you can find places where they take rags. Unfortunately, no one will hand over two or three bottles, one tin can and several newspapers, so you have to save garbage. And this does not cause inconvenience only if there is some kind of utility room, separated from the residential (for example, a barn or garage).

Also, although not everywhere, there are organizations involved in the collection of recyclable materials. You can find out about their existence from the local press, social advertising, and search engines.

• Where does the non-recyclable waste go?

Everywhere is different. In some cities they are burned, in others they are left to decompose in landfills. While there is no technology that would allow to dispose of such garbage without harm to nature.

According to Russian laws, it is not necessary to sort garbage at home, and anyone who decides to act for the good of the planet does this on a voluntary basis, faced with many difficulties. However, the contribution of these people to ecology is invaluable - it is thanks to their efforts that there is a chance, albeit scanty, to not turn the Earth from a green paradise into a garbage hell.