This is Tiburon, California.
— MatrixMysteries (@MatrixMysteries) February 2, 2026
Residents can be fined up to $500 for not separating their trash.
Then the city comes to collect it… and everything is dumped into one bin and sent to the landfill.
Compliance is mandatory. Logic is optional. pic.twitter.com/eNsGpqKVi5
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Ethics Alarms 
I’ve been out of the game for a while, so my info is likely out of date, but back in 2018 or so, China enacted a new policy around accepting recyclables from the US (China processed something like 80+% of our plastics and other recycling, because it never makes financial sense to do it in the US). They essentially stopped accepting materials from the US. Enacted extremely restrictive requirements about contaminated materials (anything on or in your recycling that isn’t plastic) and otherwise rejected almost all of the millions of tons we used to send there. This is setting aside the fact that we were burning millions of gallons of fossil fuels to gather, separate, and ship these materials across the ocean for China to process it in not-EPA-friendly ways.
The US doesn’t have the facilities to handle it, and like I said before, it never makes financial sense to recycle it. In one particular major US city, it cost about $5 per ton to bury trash in the ground and upwards of $90 to recycle that same ton, and you’d be lucky to get any kind of rebate for the resale of that material. This was with a new, state-of-the-art recycling facility. I’m sure that economies of scale could help, and better technology could reduce that delta, but recycling is and always has been a scam from every angle.
Recycle your cardboard (if it’s clean) and your metal. Everything else is probably worse for the environment than throwing it in the trash can.
I’m going to try to rationalize it… Any chemical process needs a reliable source of raw materials. And people are slow to change their habits. So, maybe if we all just pretend that recycling “works”, there will be enough success at developing the front end of the process (collection) to justify starting to operate the back end (where the recycling actually happens). In my Maryland neighborhood, all of the recyclables go into one bin, and are picked up by one truck, while the non-recyclables go into a different truck.
They’ve started food scrap composting, too, and I cannot imagine a household that wastes enough food to justify the fuel for the vehicle that collects it.
In this world, though, you have dishonest people who wreck noble plans. For example, aluminum can recycling has been plagued by people inserting cheap, heavy items into the cans before flattening them, to get paid aluminum prices for gravel. Or people who strip the copper out of expensive equipment (like HVAC coils) just to sell for a fraction of the scrap price. Or people who steal catalytic converters. The get pennies; the rest of us have to pay hundreds to repair the damage. It’s part of the cost of the corrosion of public ethics.
“They’ve started food scrap composting, too, and I cannot imagine a household that wastes enough food to justify the fuel for the vehicle that collects it.”
Agreed; I think some folks get a real Gosh I’m Nice/Look At Me/I’m Dialed In endorphin surge knowing that that five (5) gallon bucket sitting out by the curb will be seen by any-n-all.
When we began composting in earnest many years ago, we cut our trash literally in half, not to mention the resulting wicked good compost.
One problem; our four (4) bins (all picked up free from the curbs of households who apparently gave up) are hidden in our back yard and visible to only two (2) neighbors.
Perhaps they might let others know…or we could post a “In This House…WE_COMPOST!” sign out front…
PWS
Berkeley, CA, once (maybe they still do) had a program of separating recyclables from the trash– they had a list of things to recycle. They also had designated city employees hired to go around and inspect trash cans on pick-up days to see if anyone was putting recyclable materials in the trash. No fines that I know of, but if your trash passed inspection you got some kind of reward.
That was decades ago, I don’t live where I would have heard anything about it anymore, so it may or may not still be happening. And you have to be aware: “It’s Berkeley”.
I think most of the recycling stuff is a scam invented by burned-out 60s hippies.
I would claim that we have an ethical obligation to be good stewards of our environment, and that extends to wasting as little as we can. Keeping our surroundings clean of our trash and ensuring that we’re not unreasonably throwing things away provides more and better for future generations.
That being said, prudence is also an ethical virtue. While recycling sounds very virtuous and inline with our duty to care for the environment, if recycling requires greater resources to accomplish than it returns, then that should be a red flag. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recycle. There may be instances where one should utilize some resources and absorb some cost in order to achieve an environmental goal.
In a refinery, for example, a great deal of additional cost is added to the process in order to remove sulfur from diesel and treat the sulfur to ensure it doesn’t end up, one way or another, as sulfur oxide compounds in the atmosphere. There’s no net-positive for sulfur recovery; while it can be sold off to various businesses that will use elemental sulfur in its processes, the selling price is a fraction of the cost of running a sulfur recovery unit. Even the fines from environmental agencies do not outweigh the cost of running sulfur recovery units. Ultimately, we want our air to be clean, and we have to accept the higher cost of doing business to ensure clean air.
I’ve read some details of recycling that indicate it consumes a great deal of water to accomplish, something that maybe is acceptable in areas with plentiful water resources, but not in water-strapped states. So maybe it makes sense to ship recyclables to states with better resources rather than landfilling them. But that incurs additional costs, and all that has to be weighed. In the overall analysis, if recycling consumes more resources and leaves the environment dirtier in the process, then it shouldn’t be done, and it would be unethical even to promote it.
But the other ethical factor to consider is trust. There may be a great deal of confusion as to whether recycling really is effective, or for which recyclables it is effective and for which it is not. It used to be we trusted experts who promoted recycling as a net positive effort, but trust in experts has waned. But to insist that people separate garbage from recyclables or risk fines, only to landfill everything together, definitively breaks trust. It doesn’t matter if authorities are just trying to keep the populace conditioned to separate garbage from recyclables for a future time when they might actually recycle the recyclables. That trust has been broken, which means people won’t trust authorities when they do actually return to recycling.
The ethical path forward would be to lay out the long term plan for a return to recycling, educate the populace on that plan, make a polite request that people keep separating garbage from recyclables, and remove the fine for mixing garbage and recyclables together. Then maybe there could be a referendum on whether the city could impose a modest cost on the populace to landfill the recyclables in a separate location from the rest of the garbage, so it theoretically could be unearthed and sent to recycling when recycling does become more cost-effective.
In principal, I don’t disagree with your comments, Ryan. We have an ethical obligation to take care of the environment. We also have a right to expect that local, state, and federal government programs such as recycling trash are not simple do-good/feel-good actions with no benefit to anyone. In my subdivision, we have three trash days: Monday and Thursday are standard issue trash days; Wednesdays are recycling. Yet, those recycling trucks don’t go to the city or private recycling centers. They go to the very same landfills where standard issue trash is deposited. They charge the subdivision for all three trash days. Is that ethical? Is that right? Is that serious? Is it responsible? I think not.
jvb
The approach you recommend seems sounds excellent to me. It represents the constructive principles of investment, preparation, challenge, and ethics. This is the sort of policy approach that we the people are responsible for defining and demanding from to see from political leadership.
Growing up, recycling was not in my vocabulary, but my grandparents in particular never had much trash. Of course, plastics generally were not used as much but every jar, margarine tub and coffee can was saved. Sheets were turned into tea towels, old worn clothes were turned into quilts and baby blankets. Newspaper was used to wash windows. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” I asked my grandmother once what her large crochet hook was for. She said they used to make floor mats with bread bags. My mother would put water into milk jugs and make ice for coolers. Everything was composted. In the pursuit of saving the environment I believe we can learn a lot from the generation that went through the depression and then moved onto a war where we didn’t have the luxury of being wasteful.
” ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.’ “
My Dear late Depression Era raised Parents had that very adage as a framed crochet piece in our house forever; its lack of a “store bought” appearance left little doubt it had been assembled with recycled materials.
PWS
I always am impressed with people who can make artistic item out of scraps. There’s a school near me who has a ship (mascot Pirates) made completely out of scrap metal.
Call me cynical here. I am afraid that this trash separation policy is simply a taxation by citation scheme, with as primary purpose collecting revenue.
The result of this policy is that the general public becomes cynical about trash separation, and learns to see the entire policy as a fraud. The policy will erode the ethical instincts of the public on all environmental issues, and make the public unreceptive to carefully crafted education programs on the environment.
Reduce, Reuse then Recycle. In the wondrously socialist city of Toronto, sanitation pick up is once per week but only Green bin compost pick up is every week (same day for your street). Green + Trash or Green + Recycling, repeat.
We cook a lot at home and I routinely make stock from bones and veggie cuttings etc. for my soups, stews and stocks. That’s reuse and recycle for composting. It is not practical for me to personally compost where I am situated.
We have also long had a ban (somewhat eased) on plastic grocery bags and are moving to restrict other consumer packaging. Costs of over packaging are pushed down to consumers in the form of trash costs, but often with no choice options. Holding corps more accountable to produce product packaging that is more friendly would shift that cost and make them more accountable. There would be competition for better and lower cost packaging that was also friendly. But, that may be far off and will be driven by larger markets/jurisdictions first.