Co-mingled Recycling at UWO

Several (many?) years ago, The University of Western Ontario embarked on a massive recycling programme. There were

• Blue boxes for fine paper only
• Blue swing-top cans for glass bottles
• Blue swing-top cans for aluminum cans
• Blue swing-top cans for plastic bottles
• Blue swing-top cans for newspapers, and
• White cans for other waste

That is a lot of receptacles! The hallways in some places seemed completely lined with recycling containers for different types of waste.

Something has changed. Maybe people at the university were not sorting properly, thus making the recycling more expensive (are literacy levels of incoming students deteriorating that badly?); or perhaps the sorting was not very beneficial relative to its costs. At any rate, most of the blue cans now have big, supremely and pretentiously redundant labels:

Co-mingled
Beverage Containers
Glass, Plastic, Tin

Co-mingled? C0-mingled???

Why didn't they omit that unnecessary word and use "aluminum" instead of "tin"?

When is the last time you saw a tin beverage container, even a tin-coated one?

And when was the last time you used the self-redundancy, "co-mingled"?

Here is a piece I wrote about recycling many years ago.