Agree, out sourcing is wasteful in more ways than are readily evident.

I've always wondered how they sort a plastic bottle from a glass bottle? How they sort a piece of cardboard,from a piece of plastic the same shape and size. Our recyling involves our doing all the sorting before putting it out...in different containers.

As far as I know, it's done by hand here. Our recycling center has containers where they desire the contributor to have already cleaned out and sorted the goods into appropriate sacks. In town, one just throws it all into a bin, set it out on their curbs with the rubbish.....and off it goes.

I remember in the last environmental geology class I took, the largest segment of discarded rubbish from a household was paper and paper products. I forget how many pieces it was told an average household contributes in a year, but it strikes me it was unbelievably high, like 13K pieces. For the most part, my paper is run through a shredder, and used for bedding in my chicken coop. It ends up the carbon contribution to my garden compost after the hens have the second crack at it. So essentially it gets recycled several times before returning to the earth.

I even beg and recycle old candle stubs from my family. Those lovely pillar candles are inviting, but wasteful, as the wick burns down leaving enough wax for a dozen tapers. I save the stubs up and about once a year, I melt them down and dip all the candles I'll need for a year at one crack.

Like Lilo I try to avoid buying pre-packaged and I'm lucky enough to have access to two butchers that don't pre-pack. I also get my fish from an off the boat source so that's not pre-packed either.

I think I saw a film clip years ago that showed glass and plastic in a huge vat of water...the plastic floated and the glass sank as I recall.

We separate everything here, including paper from cardboard. No big deal, one gets used to it. Re-cycling is picked up every other week, the other week being yard waste which goes to be composted and then re-sold.

I suppose one way to look at the distances trash is shipped is to think of it as how many miles per household?

Since we have to haul our recycling in, we sort it & dump it into the appropriate containers. And as to shipping the trash off somewhere, I'm guessing that's as green as buying organic produce from China.

The sorting is done by hand, according the the article in which I got the information, cardboard it separated first, then paper, glass is broken ? which would mix the colors, and I thought that the colors would stay separated, so I'm not sure about that.
Our trash haulers are mandated to reduce the material that goes into landfills by a certain percentage, that is why the recycling was initiated.

My county has been recycling for many years. Some areas have county trash service, but all private companies are required to have regular recycling pickups. Not optional, *required* (you can imagine the howls that greeted that regulation). Yard waste is picked up weekly (except for winter), shredded, and turned into free shredded-leaves or coarse chips. Otherwise, we are requested to put all paper -including magazines- newspapers and cardboard into paper bags (or bundled/tied with non-plastic twine) while cans, glassware, and a limited assortment of plastics (types 1 and 2) are picked up weekly. That limited assortment is a bit sad, but apparently there is no manufacturer within a reasonable distance to re-use the other types of plastic. There are centralized stations which take [and recycle] used oil, paints, dead batteries, and so on and on. There are non-government centers for recycling styrofoam and packing materials.

I've attached the county's info link because it has some interesting pictures; it confirms that materials are sorted by hand; glass is sorted according to color; and a population of less than a million [it's an old link] produces more than a half-million tons of recycleable materials per year. Meanwhile, DH & I produce about a grocery sackful of recycleables a month.

Here is a link that might be useful: Recycling

Thee is a woman in China-now a billionaire who imports old newspapers and cardboard from here. They make all kinds of stuff and sell it back to us. What happened to our innovation?