Public Recycling Receptacles outside of Union Square Park in Manhattan
How do I know it’s working? Like a true Recycling Geek, I looked inside the cans and observed that they contained the proper items.
This flies in the face of predictions from some Department of Sanitation skeptics (including one who spoke at the Building Recycling Initiative workshop I attended last year) that public recycling would be a failure in New York City because of noncompliance.
flies in the face? pun intended?
Goes to show that if you trust people, you may get the right behavior sometimes.
Incidentally, when posting comments, if you “fail the challenge” you lose your comment…I think it should keep it so you can correct your answer.
i’ve tweaked the “challenge” settings a bit… now they should be easy enough for any human but still enough to block the robots. thanks for pointing it out!
i think that public recycling is working partly because of the trust, but also i think people are ready for this now. apparently they actually did try it out a few years ago with disappointing results, including near-fistfights with the guy assigned to help people figure out which containers to use for what!
So nice to see these. ’bout time we started catching up with the West Coast.