A quite small, highly multiplied change in activity - what consequence ?

Crushing would lead to fewer trips to the recycle yard by the pick up vehicle, I regularly crush soda cans because I drink far too much Pepsi between pickups. Since the crushed containers take up far less space the pickup vehicle could carry far more, therefore using less diesel on any given route. The very small act of crushing the containers, at most any average consumer would only have a dozen or so, would have great ramifications when scaled up to the billions nationally. There is also the potential employment created via manufacture of the container crushers, for this concept to be taken up nationally several hundred million crushers would be required.

An interesting aside; I have been thinking about melting the alloy soda cans into blocks and using the alloy for casting, another project I have to get to...

One area to investigate is whether the recycling haulers crush the plastic in the vehicle or just carry the uncrushed plastic bottles.

Another is the recycling plant. How are the plastic bottles pelletized? would a crushed bottle or uncrushed bottle make a difference?

I know that in some rural areas that the recyclers will not take crushed aluminum cans. Too many "smart alecks" added gravel in some of the cans to increase the weight.

Actually, the reason cans are required to be brought back uncrushed is to make it as inconvenient as possible for the consumer. Other parties, the bottlers, or the state government, want those nickel and dime deposits, so they have designed a system that will work poorly at best, lower the rate of returns for deposit. The guise is that each can or bottle's UPC has to be read by the machine to determine (as a matter of accounting) who pays back the nickel. It's a political thing and lobbying at state level about 5-8% pure extra "profit" on billions of $0.30 to $1.50 food items. Even those who hold the money, for a period of time, are watching it carefully, relating to the float. Perhaps,we should raise the deposits, so more contains get returned, or but a reading tag on the non crushable bottom of the container, or have a national "container (return) Bill of Rights". Actually New York State does have a "Bottle (return) Bill of Rights". (And when we raise the bottle deposit, we should raise the gasoline tax also, right ?) hn

The state I live in has no deposit on the cans. I turn my crushed cans in for money about once or twice a year. Weighed on a scale and I get whatever the going rate is for recycled aluminum cans.

My folks can't turn in crushed cans because the recycler won't accept them because of the fear that gravel was added to them. It had happened too often for them to ignore. I think it is a rural vs urban issue.

I don't know about elsewhere, but here they use the same trucks to collect recycled items as for general garbage.

These trucks are set up to crush the garbage so increasing the amount the truck can take before it has to go to the dump.

The usual practice is to park the truck underneath someones window at some unearthly hour of the morning, then rev the guts out of the motor while the crusher is operating.

When the operator is sure he has woken the entire neighbourhood he moves on to another area.

Here at least, crushing the cans or plastic bottles would make no difference.

I don't know how they sort out the crushed mess at the other end to actually recycle the stuff. Must go and ask the local council sometime.

we have a different truck for collecting recyclables that has hoppers on the side that once full uses the same procedure your do. Nothing gets crushed though, just dumped into a larger bin, with the added sound of braking glass and soda cans crashing into each other.

If the end result is a newspaper article, then the really important discussion point is the effect on society of a small minority of people with too much time on their hands and unfulfilling lives who make up for it by inventing their little utopias and demanding legal action to force their visions of perfection on the hoi poloi.

Nothing new here, just the latest variant on a couple old sayings. "The devil makes work for idle hands," or "An idle mind is the devil's workshop."

I shade towards disbelief, but am technically agnostic. Meaning I don't know, don't think we can know, believe that the "evidence" is cooked, and most importantly, am disgusted by the ignorant arrogance of those who proclaim the ability to model global climate trends with sufficient accuracy to make predictions whose affect is to mandate significant changes in how entire societies conduct their lives.

The very simplest physical systems, in order to be modeled, must be significantly simplified; the degree of simplification required to model climate change is exponentially magnified.

I am reminded of the comment by the famed mathematician John von Neumann, who, describing the conformal transformations used in modeling fluid flow, said that "we are in danger of analyzing dry water."

You take that level of simplification, multiply it by infinity, and you have global climate change.