Brambles about recycling

I live in Singapore. For some reason unknown to myself.. recycling isn't really a cash incentivized system here.

After having read a few of the other doublers out there doing their bid to help clean the environment and earn some coin for their effort it just dawned on me that well... Singapore doesn't have a place where u can just return bottles or cans for a few cents... all of the recycling bins are just placed out there for people to "have a conscience" and be eco-friendly.

And to be honest i have seen those bins being dumped into regular trash collectors with ordinary junk.. so the fundamental question here is if those bins are just a conscience reliever for our souls? Or are they really meant to save our planet?

I firmly believe in capitalism and it seems that if there was a place for ordinary citizens to gather their recyclables and head to, in exchange for some money. I'm pretty sure that there will be alot more people recycling than dumping stuff. I get it that there might not be as many people who will be bothered to do so but it will certainly give rise to another industry where professional recyclers go from house to house to collect the recyclables and give u a small sum of money for them.

For those living in Singapore: Yes.. i know there are karang-guni men out there, but i'm talking about a standardised market where a certain commodity commands a certain value. I mean right now how likely are you to throw away your newspapers rather than save them for recycling because the old foot high pile of newspapers you were thinking of selling to the karang-guni man was just being quoted as worth $0.50, and so deters your future effort to gather and store them? Or how about plastic and glass bottles? Have you ever tried selling them to your local karang-guni?

If other first world countries can have a thriving industry from recycling, I just don't see why not here too? Especially when there are now ways to turn plastics back into oil, those empty PET bottles have just become a huge portable oil field for the world!

M$Penguin