Environment
Illiteracy, Apathy, or Ignorance?
Photo taken and question posed by guest contributor Steven de Sousa.
Sometimes a photo is worth a thousand words, and sometimes a photo very poignantly asks a very direct question. What are your thoughts on the commonly observed yet rarely addressed problem of recycling sorting (not just on the TTC)? Is it a problem of illiteracy, apathy, or ignorance?
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I'd rather they put newspapers into the garbage rather than make more of a mess of our already messy stations.
Those things are a gigantic waste. They are virtually content-free and make a huge mess since a lot of TTC riders don't bother to recycle them. They just leave them lying around everywhere.
You walk up to a this setup with your empty Starbucks takeout cup of tea (the paper cup, the plastic top, the paper collar, and the teabag). What goes where?
Cup: Paper recyclables
Lid: plastic recyclables
Bag: garbage?
One extra thing, my office building does not recycle. It's a huge waste of paper that is going into the garbage. Isn't it required? I'm just wondering because I hate the waste.
Paper, Garbage, Plastic/Glass/Metal are all picked up by different places. Aside from city collection, there really isn't a universal recycler.
Most businesses will opt to just toss their recyclables in the trash due to the expense of having to hire two other trucks to pick up their recycling (Which may not be in high quantity anyways). Some will just recycle paper and cardboard products as if they have enough suitable material, recyclers will often pay THEM to pick it up.
I've always thought the unofficial system of leaving it on your seat was fine, but appearantly thats not kosher by TTC management.
GO trains are nicer for that. If you commute by GO, unless you take the first train you never need to pay for the Star :P
Long before the politically correct government insisted that we recycle... we had CLEANER bus and subway stations. But nooo, there's not enough 'garbage' bins now. They (the government' want us to submit to them and play with garbage
by 'recycling' with fewer bins.
I hate recycling. The hypocrisy of the idea to make me rinse my mustard and ketchup containers for example, all the while BEING TOLD to save on water.
Going back at the TTC - if one bin is full, use the other. They won't recycle, why should you?
Bad design can definitely be blamed, but if you resent taking an extra three seconds to read a sign and find it a barrier to doing what you profess to care about, you are lazy.
1) Any quick survey would easily reveal what the primary need is. (i.e. newspapers). The newspaper bins should be visually dominant and adequately sized. Clearly here they are nice and symmetrical when empty but totally wrongly sized for actual use. At Grand Central in NYC there are massive, huge bins just for discarded papers because that is the most popular item that is thrown away after a train ride. (And hey, if you want to make it so that people can also take papers out of those bins for re-reading, that can be designed)
2) The icons for the bottles vs paper must be, what, 3" high? Giant, clear signage is needed. The text should be changed to LITTER RECYCLE NEWSPAPERS. Be blunt or people without the sense or time to analyze the little pictures will not pay attention.
3) The slots should be shaped to guide use. People are thus given a last reminder of what to do. Slots for newspapers, small circles for bottles and square openings for general litter.
On the whole, it's nice to see the TTC try (as opposed to New York, where the MTA does zero recycling and the PATH system is too paranoid to put garbage cans back in stations at all). They just need to design these better.
Fantastic photo.
If I have a newspaper or plastic bottle in hand, I always find myself having to walk right up to these bins and scrutinize them because it's not intuitive which recycling bin is which.
I don't care what your intentions are, papers should not be left on the seat, as they end up on the floor in the end. In order to share papers, a paper-sharing bin should be installed on subway cars. They can put it right next to the garbage can.
It used to drive me nuts when I would buy a beef patty upstairs, eat it while waiting for the train and either have to run back up stairs to throw out the bag or take it home with me. No wonder there was so much garbage on the tracks.
I probably should have just littered and encouraged others to do the same. It seems to be the only way for the TTC to realize what seems so obvious to everyone else.
Placing a recycling bin inside the subway cars is intriguing, but realistically that takes away from standing room in already overcrowded trains. And inevitably, people will dump other garbage into them and then we have a stinky garbage bin in a crowded subway train. No thanks. It also means paying somebody to clean them out and we all know how much money the TTC doesn't have.
Newspapers do appear to be the biggest contributor and it would be nice if **especially** the freebies thought more about this in the same way that McDonald's added garbage bins outside their restaurants years ago due to public complaints of litter.
Ultimately, however, I think it comes down to human behaviour and so the less complicated the process is, well, the less complicated it will be.
Somebody didn't empty the bins.
As a rider, I feel no guilt.
As a TTC employee, we are aware that all these bags are taken to the same processing centre and sorted there. It doesn't matter which bag you might throw your Starbucks cup into, what does matter is that you throw your Starbucks cup into that bag. Too many delays are brought about by newspapers and paper cups drifting down the tunnels getting caught and drying out becoming fire hazzards which then cause the system to be shut down. It's at this point that several people have to be dispatched to investigate the fire. Track workers, Supervisors & even quite possibly the actual fire dept.
So for all of you that complain and think that you know something about what actually goes on and why they are there, please feel free to think things through once in a while. About the only design flaw in the new system is the thickness of the bags that are used. The thickness should be increased in order to prevent the bags from splitting or tearing due to the weight of your newspaper & Starbucks cups!