Currently, cities and companies in charge of collecting trash and recycling often do not have trash sorting services. It is up to the citizen to sort their trash if their city even has that option. This just won’t do. Different items are recycled differently and some items are not recycled at all. Cities often do not have the resources or oversight to sort through waste. This is something that some private companies do better. However, companies have even less oversight than cities do, making it harder to verify whether or not they are sorting properly. By providing federal funding to states and cities for the express purpose of sorting recycling or at the very least, providing the options for citizens to sort recycling, we can dramatically reduce and reuse resources that would have otherwise been thrown in a landfill or burned.
This is a change that must happen at the legislative level. A way to get people to participate in trash sorting can be offering tax incentives for those citizens who sort through their recycling. Currently, only 32% of our total waste output in the United States is being recycled. That number can be as high as 70%. It may be expensive, and it may be time consuming, but it can save our lives.
Private Companies Sorting Recycling
