Yet another way cars are worse than trains. Though honestly the beers they sell from the trolley are sometimes not very cold but you can't have everything.

Biden deploying the cartel and traffickers to American cities.

Makin' shit up doesn't justify your position. It simply means that you know your position is wrong, but wish to hold it anyway. It would be nice if you told the real underlying truth about your opinions.

a big departure from the trend since the late 80s Batman movies of getting darker and grimmer.

Have you seen 1997's Batman and Robin? If not, I recommend getting many beers and watching it. Many beers.

It then needs to be able to figure out the geometry of that item so that it can reach out and grab it.

Not really. Most of the robots use suction for this kind of waste. Look up Recycle Eye or AMP robotics for example/

Probably you would engineer it so that it uses non-AI methods to sort as much as possible, like magnets to remove ferrous material, filters to remove smaller parts, tanks to separate material by buoyancy and to wash off some of the crap.

They already do. Trommels to remove small bits. Ballistic sorters to remove big carboard. Magnets pick up steel. AC magnets separate aluminium. Optical sorters to separate out quite a lot really. Robots come later, generally towards the end of the line when stuff had got to around 80-90% purity. Buoyancy separation and washing generally happen after the separation, in a different plant.

You cannot imagine having twice the bins at half the size? You are seriously lacking in imagination or you are desperate to prove how recycling doesn't work.

It's the same total amount of rubbish. You do not need more space to put it in.

There is no inconvenience. I either open one of my smaller bins or the other that sits right next to it. some people even have single units with two pedals.

You are simply inventing reasons. They do not match reality.

Major PITA? You sound a bit crazy tbh.

I put waste in one of three bins, general, recyh iscling and compostable. Once a week I wheel out the appropriate bin plus the small food caddy. Dustmen come along the road with the lorry and wheel the bin up to the lorry and it tips in r rubbish. It's very simple for me and it isn't complex for them. They'll notice if you're taking the piss as the waste tips in. Your scheme would not work here because there is on street parking, and the roads are not infinitely wide.

Also you might well run out of space if you refuse to put items in the blue bin. So you have an incentive to not be crazy.

Here's the even crazier thing! You can get an extra general waste bin if you like. But it will cost you more because it will cost the local authority more, which seems fair.

If you give that all too hard than I can only conclude you do actually have something against recycling because there is basically no additional effort involved.

Not sure that would work here. You don't need to clean waste and even with imperfectly clean waste the foxes would have a field day and scatter the rubbish to the four winds. We have wheely bins instead. Your limit is one bin per fortnight of either, but they'll take extra cardboard if you stack it up neatly by the bin.

My local place is a full on MRF, not a transfer station but it's a bit of a pain to get to especially without a car.

I WISH plastics could be recycled more, but in all practicality, they can't, at least not in a commercially desirable form

This is not correct. A good way of checking what is and isn't recyclable is to check the spot price of a bale. No one's going to spend GBP400 per ton of useless waste. It's currently GBP100 per tonne to burn and a bit more to lanfdill.

Plain HDPE is at about 500 and clear PET at about 330 per tonne, so quite valuable. Mixed plastics are at -50 or so, so you can get rid of them for about half the price of burning them, so there's still value in them.

General waste film hovers at around incineration price, i.e. -100.

https://www.letsrecycle.com/pr...

Not paywalled, free registration needed to see the numbers.

These are all for profit companies. There's actually money in recycling. And because we are a well regulated country there is actually inspection etc to prevent rogue operations from dumping illegally.

What is it with America making really hard work of everything? Forcing! Surveillance! Freedumbs!

My municipality "forces" you to recycle by having general waste collected less often, only once per fortnight. So if you don't recycle you will likely run out of space. If you put general waste in your recycling bin and the dustmen notice when it's emptied they will return your full bin with the tag of shame, i.e. a little tag politely informing you about what will and will not be recycled, FYI so you put the correct stuff in the correct bin.

Food waste is collected weekly in a small bin, robust enough to withstand the investigations of rats, foxes and badgers. You don't have to use it, but if you don't your general waste bin might stink, and you also might get a tag o' shame.

There's no surveillance" other than the dustmen noticing when they empty your bin, which will happen regardless because they have eyes.

If you get a chance see if you can visit a material recovery facility (sorting plant). In the UK some are amenable to tours especially for medium sized groups.

Not everyone uses open reach. Community fiber string their own cables.

I think premises are fine for consideration. National infrastructure gets you as far as the building, but in theme of infrastructure building, the government isn't responsible for crappy landlords. That's a different department about renters rights. It's also something that's solved differently with different market forces.

Also I didn't have fttp. Could do, never bothered. It'd be silly counting that as a negative. I'm lazy, happy with my ISP and honestly get by fine at 70mbit

I'm kind of mystified by the absolute visceral hostility of a large number of Americans towards recycling.

A lot of it also appears to come with the assumption that if America can't do it then it can't be done.

The UK too.

From household waste, aluminum, steel, PET bottles, natural HDPE, mixed hard plastics, cardboard and mixed fiber are routinely recycled. Soft plastics are separated but not widely recycled. Almost everything which isn't sold on is incinerated.

There's even some CHP plants, so the locals get the benefit of free heat too.

Did you really think NO ONE IS DOING THAT?

AI driven robots aren't magic. There's already a ton of kit at the plants and several vendors of AI robots. If you think you can do better than a bunch of well funded startups, then maybe you should create your own.

That money is already being spent. There are already a bunch of startups and larger companies trying to use AI in MRFs (material recovery facilities--the places that sperate out different material types from a waste stream to be baled and passed on to the next stage). And if course there's an the exciting tech which works quite well without AI.

But MRFs can only do so much and if you contaminate the waste too badly they don't work as well. You need good MRFs but also for the worst offenders to be stopped. Operators already do this for commercial companies because it's in the connection contact not to contaminate recycling too heavily.