Ol argedco luciftias
Well-known member
AgainstAllAuthority said:In my part of the world, a first world country, food is not thrown into garbage. It's banned by law.
It's collected into special containers and turned into compost.
Yes, I live in the 1st first world country. There are some cities that do this, but most places do not. But just because there is another color of garbage can does not mean that anything is actually done.
We have recycling, most people put their recycleable items into the correct cans, and do you know how much actually is recycled? All of the glass and all of the aluminum do get recycled because it is very easy to recycle these things. It is very clean, simple, and has no problems. I think that most of the paper is able to get recycled, but it has more problems and is not always possible. Paper has a very limited number of times that it can be processed before all of the fibers are too short to be used again.
And almost none of the plastic is ever recycled. All of the plastic is sent to China where we actually pay China a lot of money to take it from us and deal with it for us. But the plastic is all different types of plastics mixed together, and with many of them being dirty and having food or other things mixed in. This is worthless, and there will never be a way to sort out every piece to make them usable. The only thing that is able to be made with these mixed up plastics are those boards that look like fake wood grain that are used to make benches, picnic tables, and decks. Nearly 100% of the plastic that gets "recycled" either ends up burned, buried, or put in the ocean. There are factories that burn plastic and other garbage for heat or energy.
How much of the food that gets put in those garbage cans is ever used for anything? I would bet that the majority of those garbage cans are also containing plastic containers and utensils, and all types of other garbage that is not compostable. Does anybody care to sort through all of them? No, there is not an endless supply of money to pay people to individually sort through millions of bags of garbage making sure it is only food and no other garbage. I bet that some of it does get composted, but I also bet that nearly all of it just gets thrown into a fire or buried.