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Sweden is so good at recycling that, for several years, it has imported rubbish from other countries to keep its recycling plants going. Less than 1 per cent of Swedish household waste was sent to landfill last year or any year since 2011.
Well, it's not quite so idyllic as that (it sounds as if they're incinerating), but it's far, far ahead of the competition. As reported in The Independent (from a solidly British perspective, naturally) :
Why are we sending waste to Sweden? Their system is so far ahead because of a culture of looking after the environment. Sweden was one of the first countries to implement a heavy tax on fossil fuels in 1991 and now sources almost half its electricity from renewables.
[...] Over time, Sweden has implemented a cohesive national recycling policy so that even though private companies undertake most of the business of importing and burning waste, the energy goes into a national heating network to heat homes through the freezing Swedish winter. “That's a key reason that we have this district network, so we can make use of the heating from the waste plants. [...]”
So they don't actually recycle, but they barely need landfills, and “In the UK, each local authority has its own system, making it difficult for residents to be confident about what they can recycle and where.” Sounds like the U.S., dunnit?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 10 2016, @07:48PM
Better:
Start by avoiding excess stuff, such as packaging and useless toys. Reuse, repair, and repurpose when possible.
Once it is trash, the priority should be to separate out exotic valuable metals and toxic metals.
After that, the trash incinerator should look tempting. People with unusual trash could separate out unburnables (glass mainly) or compostables, but it isn't important. Considering things like foil-paper-plastic layered materials, metal is best recovered from the ash of an incinerator. It seems harder until you realize that normal metal recovery produces a result that is too contaminated with particles to ever make something like an aircraft.