The municipality in my city Linköping, Sweden has actually made a really impressive business model out of this. I pay them to pick up my garbage twice every month, and then I pay them to heat my house by burning that same garbage. And they have me put organic waste in special green bags that are separated from the other garbage using computer vision, making bio gas that I pay for to drive my car on.
In my home town of Trollhättan, the entire public transportation network was driven on biogas from the organic trash of the people. While sorting the garbage into organic/inorganic was a bit of a pain, the result was really impressive.
Wait, isn't it better to actually recycle this stuff, rather than just burn it? By burning it aren't we forever losing access to that physical matter by just turning it into heat radiation? What if we need it later?<p>EDIT: It sounds like the Swedes mainly burn the organic waste, and recycle what can be recycled. If that is the case, fair enough. Would have liked to see discussion about this in the article, seems fairly key.
Same discussion from 10 days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706196" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4706196</a>