A trashbin that teaches recycling

If you walk around Lausanne, Switzerland, right in the middle of the commercial zone around Place Bel-Air you will find this peculiar installation:

It's called Ecopoint and is a trashbin. As you can see, it has seven holes of different shapes and sizes, which can receive aluminum, PET, glass, batteries and paper, and allow to throw separately the common waste and cigarettes butts. Furthermore, it also has a dispenser of bags to collect dropping of dogs.

Indeed, it's an experiment, launched jointly by the City of Lausanne and the Summit Foundation. They installed it on December 8, and for the first 119 days (until early April) they have carefully weighted what  people trashed. Precisely: 1240 kg of glass, 354 kg of PET, 179 kg of aluminum, 193 kg of batteries and 378 kg of paper. No figures are available for cigarettes butts, but that leaves about 205 kg of common waste (which probably includes also the dog poop bags). Yes, I know, you will say that collecting such statistics is very Swiss, but the implication is that out of 2549 kg of waste, less than 10 per cent (205 kg) needs to be incinerated or disposed in landfills: all the rest can be recycled. The Ecopoint is an exercise in better understanding the nature of urban waste, as well as an attempt at raising awareness about the potential for recycling it. Another one is being installed in the middle of the touristic area, on the Lausanne lakeside.

Comments

[tikilgs]

Well, who can provide economic numbers for recycling ?

It is costly to act to separate correctly between 7 or even 3 different trash bins,
and in your house it takes more room, which in a town, is expensive.

What do we win ?

What is scarce is human time. Economic progress is about making more in the same time.

Who will compute how the time and expenses of recycling are sound spending ?
Currently it works in the old un economic system of forced and unpaid labor ! and with many people paid by taxes.

What would say the free market ?