Energy Digital, our recycling rate is 31.5% Switzerland is at 52% and Austria is 49.7%. How is our recycling system different from Switzerland? One of the differences is that our recycling system doesn’t sort our plastic products by resin numbers. Switzerland does.Photo courtesy of myself
What’s a resin number? As shown in the above picture, the resin number is the number at the bottom of plastic products. The reason why sorting by resin number is beneficial is because the resin number essentially dictates how hard the plastic is. The harder the plastic, the more difficult it is to break down. Plastic water bottles like, Nestle Pure Life, normaly have the resin number 1; therefore, these plastic bottles are more supple and easier to manipulate and break down. Keep in mind that plastic can never actually be broken down into nothing; instead it is broken down until they are microscopic parts. By sorting the plastic products according to resin number, companies can easily break down the plastic and create an efficient system for each resin number.
BBC News reports that, Switzerland supermarkets collect batteries and have bottle banks with separate slots for the different types of glass. The towns have free paper collections once a month. Any trimmings coming from gardens can be, neatly, put onto the street which will then be collected. Local depots take aluminum and tin cans.
There are several challenges preventing a better recycling system from being established. Of course it isn’t realistic to demand that we change the recycling system at this very moment in time. It is expensive to create recycling systems, much less an attempt to completely modernize our recycling infrastructure. According to The Economist, an attempt to modernize the infrastructure would cost about $1.25 billion. However, it is not impossible for different cities to try to implement some changes into their recycling systems. For example, according to Popular Mechanics, San Francisco’s Recycle Center facility actually sorts all the recyclables with the new technology they have, “magnets for steel, eddy currents that repel aluminum, spinning disks and vacuum tubes that suspend gravity for plastics.” Another challenge is trying to find an incentive for all the companies and consumers that would be affected by recycling or that could help improve and encourage a better recycling system. Sometimes people get apathetic towards the whole recycling situation and decide to stop. In result, the bue recycle bins have combinations of plastics and garbage. According to The Economist article, recycling companies now have to deal with trash like dirty diapers and dead animals, like a six-foot shark.
America is not the worst of the worst in terms of recycling. But we certainly haven’t been encouraging for a more productive system. Don’t lose hope though! Recycling can be easy once you commit to it. NBC News interviewed Sam Klein, who started his own recycling business 5 years ago at the age of 12. Or read about Vanis Buckholz, who at 7 years old also created his own recycling business and after 3 years, started to donate to Project Hope Alliance, in his interview for Tree Hugger.