trader_4 wrote:
....
And typically you need to use hot water and even soap to get
it clean. Mayonnaise is one of the worst. If it's bad enough,
I'll just toss it in with the garbage instead of wasting time
and energy to clean it. You have to wonder about the economics
and environmental impact of having to clean those hard to clean
things. I know people who clean even a can or jar until it's
spotless. If you go down to the township facility where they
accept stuff you bring in, they have a giant dumpster for the
recyclables and OMG, what a mess. It's obvious a lot of people
aren't cleaning up anything. But even when I tell people what
it looks like there, they still want to run the hot water to
make every bottle and can shiny.

using hot water to clean recycling containers is a
waste of energy. and as water gets tougher for some
areas to come by they will also usually be much better
served by a larger facility doing the cleaning in bulk.

i rinse stuff out with cold water and some soap if
needed to break up the fats.

in a perfect world all containers would be recycled
and all manufactured products would get recycled.
there's only so much metal/petrochemicals to go around
and eventually they'll be gone. we'll probably be
mining old dumps at some point.


songbird