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Washing the peanut butter jar. I oscillate between refusing to participate in such madness and deciding that keeping the wife happy is worth it.

Why does anyone think it's worth it? It's not the minimum wage we're giving up, it's a small amount of leisure time: 30 minutes per week of sitting on the sofa instead of at the kitchen sink. People think "being lazy" is a sin, so they value the good feelings from recycling more highly than some extra lazy time. Or at least the ones fooled into thinking that recycling glass does any good do.

The good feelings are real, though, even if it's all a lie. That's what really bothers me about this.

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The market solution would then be, I guess, the sorting costs for volume/weight of stuff in the single bin are passed on to the user of the bin. As there are no sorting costs for the stuff sorted into 17 different bins, no such costs passed on, so it's cheaper for the user to dispose via these. Then the user chooses.

Actually we do something like this in Germany, where yellow, green, etc bins are collected for nothing but fees apply to your "general" waste bin. We can leave aside that the contents of the general waste bin (and, scurrilous rumours have it, on occasion the "sorted" bins) are generally tipped, unsorted, into a CHP incinerator. Which might well be a more economical use of that waste than sorting and recycling it, especially with current eye-watering German energy prices.

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I usually say that I don't in fact mind what the solution is - but I do care, possibly excessively, that we use the right method to find out what that right solution is.....

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