#833 – Crunched

I’m still amazed at the amount of times I see people throwing stuff in the trash rather than recycling it. I think the system I saw that worked the best was back when I lived in Boston. All the recycling was free but you had to buy special garbage bags to put your trash in that cost $1 each.

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23 thoughts on “#833 – Crunched”

  1. Heatherface says:

    Uh, never visit Los Angeles. We really only recycle to save up for pizza money or something.

  2. Fafnir13 says:

    Not that I live anywhere near there, but how big of a Biff comic are we talking about?

  3. MaskedMan says:

    We’ve pretty decent at recyling around here – It’s casual, but people seem to be playing along anyway.

  4. Nilly says:

    In New Cumberland, they’ve got a recycling thing set up at the fire station every Saturday. We save up all our recyclables – we have a list – and our grandparents come to pick up our stuff. They’re the ones who got us on it, anyway. XD We’ve had a lot less garbage to toss.

  5. Chris says:

    @Fafnir13 – They are 20×25 inches. The largest ones I have made so far.

  6. Z2012 Ed says:

    Recycling is much more rampant around here. I can’t say that’s a good thing. If you really look into what goes into the recycling of paper and most plastics, you see just how much worse it is for the environment than creating new product.

    This is not the case with metal recycling, especially aluminum cans. Not only does it take a lot of energy to make new aluminum, it’s cheaper to recycle it than make new metal, which makes it one of the only products recycled that doesn’t need to be subsidized by the government to keep running.

  7. Vaarj says:

    First time posting even though i’ve followed this comic for a while now (probably for more than a year, love it btw)

    I think we’re pretty good at recycling here in Sweden, atleast for all the apartments we’ve got either a recycling room in the basement or a shared one out in the yard.. and personally i save all the cans and flasks(?) and take them to the store to recycle them..

  8. sco3tt says:

    Recycling via aligator, LOL, careful there Biff!

  9. RealUnimportant says:

    I lived in Idaho for a while, near the Oregon border. At that time, Idaho didn’t offer recycling but Oregon did, 5¢ for cans and 10¢ for 2L bottles. Man, the trips we’d make with a car filled with recycling, it’d easily pay for the gas and some more sodas!

    The only time this tactic failed was when I first tried to make a bulk run; in order to fit more into the car, I crushed all the cans and bottles… And they refused to take them at the store, because they got paid by the collection company for bulk rather than weight! Luckily our neighbors had a high-power airhose, so I managed to reconstitute the bottles; the cans were sadly written-off as a learning experience.

  10. faulty logic says:

    I don’t believe in it. If you look at everything involved in recycling (the gas to fill the trucks, the pollution of having a seperate truck for recycling, the amount of energy used to run these recycling plants, the pollution produced by said plants) it does more harm then good. If you want to save trees legalize commercial hemp for paper use, it’s cheaper, easier and quicker to grow.

  11. Silversaraph says:

    We’re pretty good on recycling around here. I think the only reason is that the deposit for bottles is twice the national average here in Michigan.

  12. Silversaraph says:

    Faulty logic? As a comparison, the amount of energy it takes to mine the aluminum, process and ship ONE aluminum can is equivalent to filling it with gasoline and dumping it on the ground. Recycling is thousands of times more efficient than this since it processes millions of said “gasoline cans” daily.

    Though I do agree with you in commericial hemp. Marijuana has been associated with hemp way too much by Bush, and it would be a major victory for paper makers, farmers and rope suppliers not to mention dozens of other uses. It would not, however, be the “miracle plant” solving all of our problems.

  13. Sheherazahde says:

    I just don’t get today’s comic. How is the alligator involved in crushing the cans?

    BTW recycling is not the same as redeeming. Although redeemed cans are recycled. Lots of things that are recycled have not redeeming value. Here in NY we do both.

    @Vaarj “flasks” is a perfectly good word, but the more common choice would be “bottles”.

  14. Radical Edward says:

    Recycling here in Lynnwood, Washington is part of trash day. Once every two weeks, the garbage trucks pick up recycleable trash. As far as I know, we pay the garbage people a fee to pick up our trash and that bill comes in the mail.

  15. Wyrem says:

    We recycle our cans and milk jugs and what not. We have a giant recyling bin but I don’t know what goes in it since our cans get taken to the recycling place directly because we get money for them. I miss living in Michigan though, 10 cents a can was amazing. We used to search for cans the fudgies (tourists) would toss anywhere and take them to the store and pay for our own lunch for the week. It was awesome.

  16. Llucius says:

    It’s a proven fact that almost all forms of recycling are worse for the environment and are more expensive then growing/gathering new materials. The only type that is better for the environment is recycling metals.

  17. Nathan says:

    Chris, I have to disagree with you here… I live near Kansas City, and visit my friends in KC every weekend. Maybe we do it differently around here, but the “pay for extra trash bags” system in KC really, *REALLY* blows if you have more than one or two people living in a house, because you simply cannot fit enough stuff into the recycling bins. People should be encouraged to recycle, not extorted.

  18. Karen says:

    Wait, there are places that DON’T charge for garbage?

    Everywhere I’ve ever lived you have to buy “bag tags”. They cost a couple of dollars apiece and if you don’t put one on every single bag of garbage, the city won’t collect it. Some places give you one bag for free, and then you tag the rest. Some places you have to tag every single bag.

    Must be a Canadian thing.

  19. Karen says:

    We also do “green waste” here — any biodegradable stuff (like food waste) goes into a “green bin” and is collected by the city for composting.

  20. GuyD says:

    In Switzerland we recycle nearly everything: Bottles (glass and plastic), cans, aluminium, paper, batteries and organic waste. Many people have a compost heap in their garden, so they never have to buy top soil in a garden center again.

  21. Tracy says:

    @Karen: I live in Seattle, and while there’s mandatory “stuff” recycling (you know, cans, bottles, paper goods, etc.) there’s not a lot of mandatory “green waste” composting. I would LOVE to do something like that. I live in an apartment and most of our waste ends up being compostable, but I don’t have the space to compost it all and there isn’t any convenient place for me to do so. I wish so badly that there were! We’d only have to take our tiny bits of trash out twice a month!

  22. belenen says:

    Even if recycling takes more energy than creating new product, it also PREVENTS WASTE. If we keep on going with whatever is cheapest and easiest, we’ll have no land in which to plant food. That trash isn’t going to just disappear.

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