I listened to this episode of Planet Money today about what a mess recycling has become in the U.S.,

I listened to this episode of Planet Money today about what a mess recycling has become in the U.S., largely due to a diminished demand for our waste abroad and our incapacity to prep our waste for sale.

It made me wonder if design couldn't be really useful in making recycling more efficient. One of the bottlenecks is cleaning out plastic containers. What if they were standardized in such a way though that the recycling sorting process could also clean them out.

I'm not even an engineer and I can envision an rudimentary design that would make this doable. Imagine a standard bottle designed to be easy for a machine to grab and hold for cleaning, a high pressure water system to shoot into each one and blast out whatever's inside and a giant pool of water used to rinse out the bottles that had a centrifuge attached such that the water could be used again and again, making it more water efficient than home rinsing.

In fact, if we could just get the caps to be the same plastic as the bottles (this must be a solvable problem) so that the caps don't have to be removed, that would be a great step. I imagine that the best way to clean these things would be to lop off the bottom anyway, right?

It would take times to get enough products to move to a uniform enough design that machines could easily manipulate them in the thousands to clean them out, but that brings us to the second part of the design: policy design.

Companies that put stuff in containers should be taxed on the containers in such a way that encourages them to generate fewer containers. All of those funds should go to subsidizing recyclers incorporating these new technologies for improving their stream of product.

Making product containers more uniform would undermine companies' ability to market and position their brand as unique, of course, but I think we'd all persevere in a socialist dystopia where he had to make due with fewer kinds of dish soap. God help us all, but I think we could get by.