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Comment by bell-cot

4 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishcycling

Some accounts I've seen emphasized the "don't check it, don't think about it, don't look bad, don't feel bad" performative and self-delusion aspects.

I only recently learned that term, but I used to do "wishcycling" myself years ago. I figured if I wasn't sure it could be recycled, they'd know for sure at the recycling plant and sort it out there.

I partly blame an old Discovery Channel episode I watched as a teenager (probably Dirty Jobs?), which highlighted a line of men standing in front of a conveyer belt at some kind of recycling or garbage plant, manually sorting things out of the waste by hand before the bulk of it got dumped into a huge vat of treatment water. The impression it left on me was that there's always a bunch of dudes at the conveyer belt who were going to check and make sure nothing unrecyclable went into the recycling process.