On a related note, my school (Washington University in St. Louis) has recently changed the labels on all trash cans from "Trash" to "Landfill." It's amazing how much that little switch makes you think carefully about everything you're throwing away. If you can get people to truly understand the consequences of what they're doing, the majority of them will change their ways.

> On a related note, my school (Washington University in St. Louis) has recently changed the labels on all trash cans from "Trash" to "Landfill." It's amazing how much that little switch makes you think carefully about everything you're throwing away.

And what do people do differently?

BTW - the above seems to assume that the US has a landfill shortage. It does, but only by choice.

The US tries to recycle some things that don't make economic sense to recycle today. It would be better to simply collect and store these things until it does make sense to reclaim them. Landfills are ideally suited to this purpose.

Yes, it's dumb to recycle when it doesn't make economic sense. Subsidies are waste. You'd think that folks who claim to care about waste would understand that and actually walk their talk.

What am I thinking? People do things because of how it makes them feel.

This change was accompanied by a switch to single-stream recycling - that is, all recyclable materials can be deposited in one bin and sorted later. From what I've seen, this change has significantly increased recycling.

Could you give some examples of goods that don't make sense to recycle currently? I certainly believe that could be true, I just haven't read anything solid about it.

> This change was accompanied by a switch to single-stream recycling - that is, all recyclable materials can be deposited in one bin and sorted later. From what I've seen, this change has significantly increased recycling.

If the two changes (signage and single bin) happened at the same time, why the claim that signage was significant (and the omission of the single bin omission)?

> Could you give some examples of goods that don't make sense to recycle currently?

Sorry - I stopped tracking these things when I figured out that folks didn't care about the economics. I'm reasonably sure that they still exist because people are still people.

Have they also put alongside them recycling cans? Changed their suppliers to ones that use reuse, recycle and manufacture with recyclable materials?

Great idea, I'm all for it. You seriously ought to contact the right people and try to make this a reality, I think it would prove to be very effective and actually bring about some positive change.

I would sponsor this out of pocket in a heart beat:

a) Get a bunch of those posters printed up.

b) Put together a candid http://www.thefuntheory.com/ type experiment documented on video showing how behavior changes with an in-your-face message like this.

c) Let the YouTubes do the rest - drive people back to the CC licensed poster, have pushed out in local communities.

I already emailed the artist to see if we can get at least one photo under creative commons (if they aren't already).

Hope we can make a "Do not litter" poster with that which anyone can use.