Recycling Our Way to Sustainable Waste Management
Posted by Robert Rapier on September 25, 2010 - 9:17am
While my focus is primarily on energy, I am also interested in other sustainability issues. In this post I'd like to talk about some landfill waste recycling issues, and in particular those affecting the waste of Honolulu, Hawaii. I'd also like to explain how Switzerland is solving the problem, in a way that provides a source of electricity, and leaves no landfills.
Landfill Space Constraints
Regarding waste management, stories often appear in the media about places running out of landfill space. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long, but twenty years ago there were numerous stories in the media about New York barging their garbage, but having trouble finding someone to take it:
The garbage barge wasn’t just redolent with remarkable names. The misbegotten cruise quickly became a media sensation. The economy was hot, and news was slow. Garbage, which is just the effluence of our affluence, was the perfect target. Greenpeace, Phil Donahue and Johnny Carson all used the barge as fodder. Six months after it sailed, the garbage barge’s trash was burned in a Brooklyn incinerator, and the ashes buried back in Long Island. The media didn’t attend the funeral.
The story put landfill space in the spotlight, and there were a number of positive outcomes as a result:
After the circus was over, the barge had a profound impact on solid waste and recycling. Within three years, most states passed laws requiring some kind of municipal recycling. The United States went from about 600 cities with curbside recycling programs to almost 10,000. Our recycling rate is three times higher now than it was in 1987.
Without a doubt, that is a positive outcome. However, twenty years later numerous areas still struggle with the same issue. New York still ships garbage to states like South Carolina and Ohio. A story playing out in Hawaii over the past few years is that the island of Oahu, where Honolulu is located, has been working on a deal to barge their garbage all the way to Washington state. Not surprisingly, some in Washington aren’t enthusiastic about accepting the garbage:
Hawaii Garbage Faces New Obstacle En Route to Washington State Landfill After Yakama Tribe Objects
Over the weekend, Hawaii news outlets were reporting that the first shipment of Honolulu garbage was likely only weeks away from coming to a Washington state landfill near the Columbia River. Hawaiian Waste Systems, the Seattle-based company that has a contract to ship 150,000 tons of waste from Honolulu to the Roosevelt Regional Landfill, told reporters it believed that final approval from the US Department of Agriculture was imminent. But now there appears to be a new holdup in the approval process that has already dragged on for years and sparked controversy across the Pacific.
One of the core issues here is that despite the increase in recycling programs in the U.S., most areas still don’t have them. Over the past 20 years I have lived in nine different cities in the U.S. Of those, only one – Houston – had a curbside recycling program. In other locations you could recycle, as long as you were willing to make the effort to segregate your garbage and then deliver it. Most people don’t bother, and so our landfills fill up with green waste, paper, plastics, and metals — all items that can be composted, recycled, or burned for power.
One of the steps I often take — when faced with a complex problem — is to see how others have responded to similar problems.
The Swiss Model
Over the summer I was in Switzerland, and I spotted a far away smokestack. I asked my host what it was, and he said “That’s a waste to power plant. We don’t really have landfills here in Switzerland.” I was intrigued by this statement, and wondered if there were any lessons to be learned from Switzerland’s waste management programs.
Most of the available information is in German, but Wikipedia does have an article specific to Switzerland’s programs:
Waste management in Switzerland
Switzerland is highly active on the recycling and anti-littering front and the country has one of the highest recycling rates in the world with a mean of 76% of all currently recyclable items being recycled. This has narrowly surpassed the Swiss government’s 75% target, meaning that for the time being there will be no introduction of a recycling tax on glass bottles and jars, nor on clothes and textiles, plastic bottles, home-use batteries, light bulbs or paperware and card.
Of course the caveat is that those results are achieved with mandatory recycling laws that subject citizens to heavy fines for violating them:
In many places in Switzerland, household rubbish disposal and collection is charged for. Household refuse (except dangerous and cumbersome items, batteries, sofas, electrical appliances etc.) in theory, is only to be collected if it is in bags which either have a payment sticker attached, or in official bags with the surcharge paid when the bags are purchased. However in practice, this is difficult to enforce, for hygiene reasons and the like. However it is a financial incentive to recycle as much as possible, for recycling is usually free of charge or cheaper, albeit not always operated through a door-to-door collection.
This is a very different situation than in most of the U.S., but we will ultimately need to have results like Switzerland’s as our landfills continue to fill up. How we should obtain these results will be much debated; mandatory recycling laws probably won’t be warmly embraced by most Americans. We have made progress in dealing with waste after it has been collected; the success of landfill gas and waste to power programs are examples. But if we begin to address the waste further upstream by separating it, we will have a much easier time devoting different waste streams to more appropriate end uses. Plastics, for instance, can be burned for power, but if they are a separate stream they likely have higher value being recycled back into plastics.
Comparing Pineapples to Cheese
The specifics of each local situation will always differ. As my Swiss host pointed out when comparing Hawaii’s situation to that of Switzerland:
- Recycling in Switzerland is tied in with local or nearby facilities which reduces transportation cost
- Burning waste is relatively inefficient (35% or heat content retrieved on average in CHP mode, 11% for electricity only), which might create even bigger challenges for Hawaii than for Switzerland
- Running those waste burning facilities at halfway decent efficiencies needs a constant inflow of waste, which might be a problem for Hawaii (seasonality of tourism), even Switzerland imports waste from Germany to keep plants going
- The remains from burning have a high metal content (about 30% of their weight), which requires after-treatment
Probably the biggest challenge in the U.S. is that there are still lots of locations that we can cheaply bury our waste. That means that for the immediate future this will be a regional issue, in places like New York and Oahu in Hawaii that don’t have local access to landfill space that can take their entire volume of garbage. In these locations mandatory recycling laws could go a long way toward solving their problems, and provide a road map for the rest of the U.S. Their road map, in turn, could be provided by Switzerland.
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I was just in Germany recently and I suspect they are not too far from the Swiss model from what I saw. I think that what will eventually have to happen is a combination of carrot and stick incentives all throughout the supply chain. It makes sense to me to concentrate mostly at the design and manufacturing end of the supply chain and make it so that products are designed for maximum ease and are most cost effective to produce if they can easily be recycled and returned to the manufacturing process with a minimum amount of steps by the end user. Perhaps tax incentives are in order for companies that retool with this concept in mind.
Our local community's recycling is at about 35% by weight. Within national guidelines. We are working on a program to raise that to 65%. Does anybody else even have a clue about their landfill? You are even allowed to look it up.
San Francisco residents recycled at a higher rate than any other large city in the country in 2008, according to figures released Friday by the mayor's office.
The city's environment department said San Francisco's 77 percent landfill diversion rate--which includes recycling, composting and reuse of materials--not only exceeded the city's 75 percent target, but is the highest rate of any major metropolitan city in the United States.
http://sfappeal.com/alley/2010/08/sfs-recycling-rate-leads-to-self-congr...
+20 points. I know San Fran is often at the 'bleeding edge' of such things, but bless them for trying. Someone needs to.
Can anyone point to a comparison of how major cities dispose of solid waste? Does New York really still dump in the ocean? Do other cities do this?
I was just in Germany recently and I suspect they are not too far from the Swiss model from what I saw.
When I moved to Germany in 1999, it was my first experience with serious recycling laws. I went from never having had a curb recycling program to having a hardcore curbside recycling program. It worked well, and I was always hoping that the model could be exported to the U.S.
This problem of recycling is easily solved through the mechanism that creates the waste. Almost all products sold today have a barcode lable on them, this embeds data such as product name, size, mfg date, etc.
This barcode could be amended or appended with either more information or an additional bar code containing information on the materials that comprise the container holding the product. Plastics could tell a bar code reader machine exactly what they are composed of making automated sorting extremely simple and cheap.
Containers holding toxic materials like pesticides could easily be sequestered and removed from the recycling stream. Non-magnetic metals could be easily sorted and recycled. Even common copy paper can have a bar code, since all laser printers automatically embed a small serial number for government tracking purposes, they could amend this to add a code when the paper is made which lists pulp content, rag content, coatings etc.
Recycling is hard because people are lazy and many don't have space to sort items and store them properly until they can be recycled. Barcodes can be the solution to effectively allow machine sorting of mixed trash.
We can even put content barcodes on the barcode readers so that when they break or become obsolete, they too can be recycled.
Here is a tremendous business opportunity as well as a huge corporate marketing tool for the green merchandising movement, were I capitalized and connected I would be selling this idea instead of giving it away to some future millionaire.
Waste to energy plants have many problems not mentioned in your article. They give off fine particles ( less than 10 microns ) that enter the lungs bypassing our normal defenses. Most are run to achieve a constant steam rate rather than the best burn of the trash possible. This leads to products of incomplete combustion with a possibility of producing dioxin in the chimney. Burning plastic provides the chlorine for that mix. The plume from the chimney causes lung problems. The plastic that might well sit sequestered for centuries in a landfill get turned into carbon dioxide. The list continues but you get the idea. On top of all of that you still need a landfill for that 30% ash that is probably a hazardous waste. Since there is no escaping landfills why not just deal with one point source of potential pollution instead of multiple ones.
"...Since there is no escaping landfills why not just deal with one point source of potential pollution instead of multiple ones."
What are you proposing instead of burning waste?
I interpreted the position is to sequester the waste into landfills until we have a better idea of how to re-process it, vice burning it and creating highly mobile and easily absorbable air pollution plumes.
The idea that we will recover anything from a landfill at some later date is very mistaken. The labor cost, equipment cost and energy cost will prohibit that due to the dilution of materials and the degradation of metals (even aluminum will oxidize after a few years after being buried).
If we can't afford to do this now at the landfill, in no way can a future society with a capital and energy constrained economy do this.
Your comment on aluminium is incorrect. Aluminium-oxide does not flake away like iron-oxide; it forms a oxygen brier that substantial retards further corrosion.
Not always,it can form a loose white layer on the surface while corrosion bites deeper.
NAOM
Reuse, reduce and then recycle. However, it should be understood that there are limits to all of these. It may be transportation costs for collection and redistribution. A well designed landfill is a better alternative to burning. Air pollutants attack our system at a point where there is little defense. Transferring a solid waste to a gaseous waste is not really a success. It may seem like a reduction but it is only a visual one.
You're over-generalizing. A conventional atmospheric boiler may have this problem (esp. if it does not have electrostatic precipitators in the cleanup), but gasifying plants (e.g. oxygen-blown or liquid-metal) will not. Scrubbing particulates out of a small stream of fuel gas is relatively easy and cheap.
A shot of added limestone will convert covalently-bound chlorine to calcium chloride.
An oxygen-blown system can run hot enough to convert most things to slag, which is much less leachable than ash. You also get a number of advantages:
Liquid-metal gasifiers also recover metals as part of their operation, further reducing the stream actually landfilled.
All of the above has been used on industrial scale in Germany at least since 1986.
What is needed is not stiff penalties, but most of all willingness to recycle. I don't think State can force feed much to a ( I am showing my Liberal attitude) assault-rifle bearing Conservative. No offence intended, because Liberals are only marginally better with recycling ;->
Seriously, recycling programs succeed only in places that are "ready" for them. It takes a conscious effort and attitude to recycle. Wash food containers, strip metal rings from glass, sort out some plastics which do not recycle, have five bins in the kitchen ( trash, compost, paper, metal, plastic). It is not much effort, but one must want to do it, not be forced to do it. Then it works.
I never did understand the politics around issues like this. I always thought any thinking person would realize that this is the way to go, recycle things so that your use of the world around you was such that 50,000 years from now, you'd still see the nice parks and places that people today left you. Maybe I am just a forward thinking person and never much played the poli-tick game of making this an issue for sides and such. I figured it was just common sense to want to live in a nice world, where everyone was happy and people weren't out to kill each other over a hunk of dirt with a rock on it, that daddy Tom from 2,000 years ago poured oil on, and called it good.
But then I give everyone a fair shake and close family around me hates when I side with people, giving them the benifit of the doubt all the time, it is rather startling to bump heads with your own family over issues like that. I guess some people would label me to good for their own good. Laughs sadly. Though I am not one to take your gun from you, I do want you to pick up your stray cans and recycle them for the betterment of everyone around you.
What needs to have been happening for a long time now, was a method of making things that could be reused or recycled a lot easier than we have been doing. Thinking about the end of a lifetime of a product while the design process was going on, not just labeling that issue as someone elses problem and going ahead and making NON-recyclable product QRT, or whatever.
What happens to all the car tires after they go flat and get bald? No one thought of that when they made the darn things in the first place. So now you still see piles of them everywhere, and you have fees and costs hidden in the system to deal with them, or laws have to be passed to protect people from said products.
The whole system could of have been made so that the EPA was never needed to protect people, because everyone had thought about it before we got to this point. BUt maybe I am just a throwback to the simple days when everything was made out of wood and leather, and would bio-recycle on its own without people worrying about wht to do with the lead acid batteries after they died.
A totally new design thinking process needs to be in place, don't made a product without also thinking about what to do with it when it breaks or ends it's useful life, where does it go from here.
Can't we pour all the junk into a big furnace and make the elements and non-harmful chemicals stream out the backside of it? Where is our transporter transmutation device of sci-fiction when we need it?
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world with limited waste streams.
OK, lets suppose I am overgeneralizing. Where are there existing waste to energy plants utilizing an oxygen blown system or a liquid system? I could not find any in a very quick search. What are the added costs involved in utilizing oxygen of liquid metal? How much slag remains from such a waste to energy facility to be landfilled. What are the stack gases like from a typical monthly run. How is the excess Carbon dioxide handled? What are the costs of doing this? Open my mind on this.
I don't know of any WTE plants using oxygen, but Ze-Gen has been pursuing a liquid-iron gasification scheme for several years now*. They're doing their initial work using demolition waste, not MSW. The liquid-iron system appears to be able to separate pyrolysis from other steps and allows the production of e.g. hydrogen to be varied according to process requirements.
* They claim that their test unit performs well, but I'm still waiting for them to release technical information. I would like to know things like the purity of CO2 during the phases which produce it as much as you would.
Put the cost/incentive to recycle disposable items upfront. Some states require deposits on bottles and cans. This should have been expanded and made a national policy in the US years ago. Our local waste transfer station has started/stopped glass recycling several times in the last ~20 years due to costs. Consumers and manufacturers need to be responsible for these costs from the beginning.
In the US your rechargable batteries can be recycled here:
http://www.rbrc.org/community/index.html
While I applaud these programs, It's clear that many folks won't lift a finger to do the responsible thing without financial incentive. All disposible batteries, plastic and glass packaging and metal should have a refundable deposit. When I was a kid, I made a good living collecting glass soda bottles for their deposit. I never had to use my allowance to buy chewing gum ;-)
I resent having to help pay for the financial/environmental/societal costs for the disposal of things I never buy and don't use.
In the USA your idea is the only one that would work. The government will have to take the lead in penalizing people and incentivizing people to do the right thing: recycle.
Most (90%) of US citizens will only act in their own self interest, based on my 50+ years of observing behavior. If the containers for food, beverage, and other products that are made from glass, plastic, or metal have a cost built into the consumer price (deposit), then the purchaser has an incentive to get the refund. Or someone else can pick out the recyclable items to get the refund.
In California many homeless folks make money by picking up cans and bottles to collect the deposit. And California has the cleanest roads and streets of any state I have traveled extensively. If Pres. Obama wanted to make an immediate impact on the environment and energy situation he could force the states to have mandatory deposits on containers. But I think his ability to find solutions to the waste problem is restricted by his handlers (financial backers in the election).
I think that penalties for not recycling will only be somewhat effective. Once the costs get too great folks will start illegally dumping.
Incentives, not penalties. If folks could get $.05 back on every beer can or bottle there wouldn't be very many going to the landfill. That's the idea, anyway...
"Consumers and manufacturers need to be responsible for these costs from the beginning."
I like the idea of refundable deposits too. Like you I collected bottles for return as a kid. I used the money to buy model cars, boats and planes.
Can confirm that disposal fees on appliances are attached on purchase in CH. We bought a refrigerator there and sure enough got hit with it. Its not so much the recycling that it promotes, but the disposal charge that you can't get around. A typical recycling center is operator assisted, only open certain hours, and is categorized to a fault. A key is to place the burden on the consumer. The neighborhood waste receptacles are aggregated, which I suppose is becoming more more common, but in the mountains you really have to do this. For every task gravity is a consideration and you mentally calculate m*g*h.
You'd think the Freon value alone would make fridge and window AC units valuable enough to recycle.
Here, we have no curbside recycling, nobody has composting at home, and the voluntary drop-offs are relatively few and have only a few bins (plastic and paper). I don't even know of a place to get rid of used electronics, batteries, or household waste like paint. Car batteries and motor oil are collected by the auto parts shops at least.
Curbside with only a few tiers of recyclables seems to be the only way people here would recycle, and only then if absolutely required. Deposits on cans, all bottles, and any other standard packaging would seem to make sense.
Interestingly, I have learned from experience that if you put out "unusual" trash like old bicycles and decent furniture the night before, they disappear before the trash trucks come the next day.
There is another issue that is not much discussed, and that is design for re-use instead of recycling. We've had perfectly good furniture, such as recliners, which only needed recovering, but the cost to recover exceeds the replacement cost. I talked with an upholstery shot in some depth and they described how they have to pattern each piece of material, and that time is what creates the high cost. If the manufacturer offered "re-upholstery kits" of pre-cut material from the same line they use to make new chairs, any local shop could afford to recover the chairs. But of course the manufacturer would rather charge for a new chair instead of a cloth pack.
Even so, you'd think there are enough Lanes and Lazyboys out there to make it a business....surely this will be a viable business at some point during a broad decline.
If the manufacturers couldn't claim rights to the patterns, that is.
It only takes one person to take a covering apart and measure it, then put the figures on a web site.
House-hold refrigerators and window-shaker ACs' generally have only have six or seven 'oz of refrigerant. Here in Canada we are suppose to use a reclaim unit to remove the gas but the disconnecting of hoses usually results in the loss of one to two 'oz, making the whole process an operation of questionable value. Fortunately R12/R22 is no longer used in domestic equipment and are on their way to being phased out entirely, in favour of less ozone depleting gasses witch have their own set of problems.
As for recycling refrigerators; it would probably be simpler to sell the refrigerator used instead of breaking it down. This would require manufacturers making the design more service friendly and not charging an arm and a leg for parts.
I live in a county in wildly conservative Utah. Right across the road from my community is a county recycling station that accepts a wide variety of paper, plastic and metal that can be dropped off. It is a rare day that the very large containers (truck sized) aren't overflowing with material. I wish the county would issue cans that would allow me to segregate my garbage into the classes at my house (not those stupid little trays that most cities give out).
I AM a conservative an find a lot of your comment on TOD quite offensive at time. I agree the era of growth is coming to an end meaning that essentially capitalism as we know it is dead. But, the idea of liberty, democracy, and self determination is lubricant that will see our country through to any kind of tomorrow. Social engineering by the so called elite is nothing more than eugenics revisited. It leads to societies like those lead by Stalin, Mao, and Hitler where people were slaughtered by the millions simply for disagreeing. I will fight you to the death over that kind of thinking so if you really want to achieve negative population growth, keep going with it. It will mean civil war on a global scale.
Just as many liberals have their head in the sand as conservatives these days when it comes to energy and the economy and they all will wake up when it becomes apparent that the oil party is over. Americans have worked together in the past and will again in the future. That is provided there will be anything left to work for.
What percentage of its food does Utah import? Energy? Clothing? Just asking.
BTW, I live in a quite conservative area where there is also a growing "Fear The Liberal" movement. If that's the best someone can do, I stop listening.
"I wish the county would issue cans that would allow me to segregate my garbage into the classes at my house (not those stupid little trays that most cities give out). "
So ... you expect the Govt to provide. Curious.....
Try Alabama. If you believe in evolution and do not take the Bible literally, you are a liberal.
AMEN!, Bruhthuh.
Here in the South, a Conservative is anyone who fears being called a Liberal. A Liberal is anyone who disagrees with a Conservative.
Say "AMEN"!
goodmaj,
Utah is a beautiful state, geography and climate-wise; it looks like a great place to live.
I am curious: Would you be willing to provide some examples of social engineering, which you characterized as nothing more than eugenics revisited, by the so-called elite?
I find your statement to be too vague to even understand.
If you are going to fight to the death over certain ideas and actions, would you first (before you go on a rampage or something) have the courteousy and decency to explain your grievances?
Discussion is a fundamental part of liberty and democracy, do you agree?
Here's hoping for more discussion and less rage...
I have two questions for you:
1) What do you suppose happens to the concept of liberty, democracy, and self determination when the value of individual humans continues to drop due to there being more humans than can be supported by our continual degradation of our ecosytems?
2)Do you really believe that most of the people who come to this site are members of a social elite and are proponents of creating societies based on the completely failed models of those led by the likes of Stalin, Mao and Hitler?
Your comment is populated by strawmen and non-exsistent boogeymen and seems to be typical of what passes for conservative thinking.
My personal opinion is that the vast majority of this site's creators and its readers are people who are realists and base their world views on scientific thinking and analysis of the best data available.
As for being offended by views that do not conform to ones own, that ceases to have meaning if you have a problem with the laws of physics or science and data in general. People here may strongly agree or disagree with each other's positions but at the end of the day I don't think they waste too much time with being offended.
And we are going to achieve negative population growth whether you or anyone else likes it or not, how and when we get there is the big unknown but that it will happen is as certain as the sun coming up tomorrow morning. Yes, I do realize there is a possibility that it won't... but I wouldn't bet on it!
Let me see if I can explain myself a little better by explaining what I see:
1. I see a lot of post on this site that say what freedoms should be taken away from me by point of the government (to me a metaphore for 'the point of the gun' - not much different in my mind) -- Counter to that, I do like the posts that say the salvation will be in small communities. I agree with that. Death will come from and in big cities where the population totally overwhelms the resource base.
2. What I find offensive is the conservative bashing that goes on here. I am a college graduate and a computer science professional as well (as a profession tend to be conservative). I will match my IQ again any of you and not be found lacking. Being a conservative (more precisely, a libertarian) I find the put downs counter productive. The conservatives you deride so freely today have many of the skills you will need during the collapse tomorrow. Will you be so smug when they tell you to kiss their ass? Alienate them now at your peril.
Instead of put downs, maybe you should consider reaching out. Maybe even a area on the site that brings the best of conservative thinking together with what will happen with peak oil. To me, to create any chance of a soft landing we need to have all forms of energy developed. Conventional forms of energy AND everything we can come up with in the alternative realm too. We need these WHILE we start a massive conservation program and change our who consumption paradygm. You won't convince people to change by pissing them off with your rhetoric, now will you? I don't know where you came up with the idea that all the 'smart' people were distributed on your side of the political bell curve, because I can assure you you're wrong.
3. Your main contributors are not necessarily the folks I accuse of being the eugenics types, although there is a good deal of political smugness that is ruining the delivery of their message. A good number of your commenters are your hard core socialist types who do seem to support eugenic thinking based on posts I've read. Their answers to problems are 'force people to do this, force people to do that.' I will give you credit that it is not eugenic in the sense of active social selection as practiced in Nazi Germany, or suggested by the progressives of the early 1900's in the United States, but a more subtle form on who is allow to survive in the coming collapse that is seems to be implied here in various comments. Kind of a 'Go with our way of thinking on this or else.' underlying threat.
3. Democracy, problem solving in general, must move away from the centralized government model and the power base back to the lowest acceptable levels. This means to the States (US) for some and communities for most. Where I disagree with liberal (progressive) thinking is the government is the end all, cure all, to this, that and everything... it will fail like any of the complex systems in the near future. My kid, who is a history buff, sees the United Stated busting up fairly quickly into regional nation states. The East coast into small fiefdoms and western areas (excluding the coastal area) into larger areas. I tend to agree with him. The United States as we know is is doomed.
4. I read one post on one of the threads that the commenter talked about developing his 'community' of peak oil people. It included all kinds of folks that included liberals, conservatives, survivalists, even a racist. The key was that they had a common goal to get through this mess alive. That's what I'm talking about! Cut this elitist BS! Cut the polital jabbing you inserting into your articles and posts and start pulling EVERYONE together, because you aren't going to make it alone.
As you know, Goodmaj, it's a thorny issue, and goes both ways.
You're tossing in a lot of language in there that is also just dry tinder for a firestorm.. and yet your accusation of Conservative Bashing is true as well.
But calling out 'elitist', 'socialist' and 'eugenics' and such broad swipes is just begging for more of it. They have become codewords for this divide, and will trigger the whole mess. We're all frustrated by the tone of the dialog, and as such we're all easily ignited.. it'll take a lot of water to keep it cool..
We all have to be careful not to lay in more Oily Rags, and also to try to not respond to them when they are.. it just goes south.
Take a closer look at Switzerland. To a USA-bred conservative, it may look like a very liberal communal society. To a hippie liberal it may look like a corporately conservative society.
Above all else their views and practices somehow converge and they deal with it. I think many Americans have fundamental problems of "dealing with it". I say this because I can't make any sense of it otherwise.
Read the comment below by Noizette, where she/he uses the phrase "accepted as necessary". Is that a liberal or conservative attitude?
I hear you about CH. "The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.."
My intention was to say that while asking for less abusive conversation from the Left, that Goodmaj might take notice where his own language was also becoming provocative. (EDIT: And I can see from the next batch of responses below that this has had that very effect. )
It's also why I described those terms as codewords.. much like 'Liberal and Conservative' themselves.. they have moved away from their classical definitions, and are shorthand for political planks.. often only effective at starting fights unless one tries to speak in ways that helps avoid unneeded lashings.
GOODMAJ;
You can see discussions regularly with OFM and Paleocon that don't descend into *(much) Left-Right eye-poking. It is possible to do it here.. but you have to just stick to a topic and be very careful about labeling people.. and if you are CALLED something, to figure out how to respond that encourages the topic and disallows the HighSchool behavior. None of us are perfect at it.. but many are trying.
Bob
(East-Coast Progressive)
WebHubble, if I may add another to this pile of comparisons?
Ask the people of Switzerland, or Germany, to take a look at the USA. To them, our myopic pursuit of me-first freedoms (often at the expense of the environment, or the welfare/safety of others, or the stability of our financial system) probably seems like an outbreak of mad human disease.
Thanks for taking the time to elaborate on your views.
In your paragraph#1, you mention that you believe that the government is planning to take away certain of our freedoms, perhaps at gunpoint?
Would you please expand further on this thought and enumerate which freedoms are threatened, and by which proposed ideas/actions/laws?
In you second paragraph under para heading 2, you advocate developing many different sources of energy, and also advocate a massive conservation program.
Would you please provide us with your ideas on how these actions are to take place in a timely manner and over a large scale (most people) to make a difference in our trajectory? What organizations and methods might be effective in communicating our current and projected future energy situation, and in motivating people to develop the spectrum of energy sources and engage in massive conservation?
You admit that your use of Eugenics is awkward and misleading, so perhaps you would consider dropping reference to that usage in your posts, unless you are actually referring to the process of organized, coercive selective breeding for certain traits desired by a fascist authoritarian dictatorship.
As for paragraph #4, we are all already a community of 'peak oil people' including liberals, conservatives, racists, etc. Most of us just don't know about the peak oil part yet.
First, I do want to apologize to folks for losing my temper getting off on a rant yesterday. I was off on the European flavor of TOD and there was a post that was very much sounding like Eugenics and totalitarianism . I'm sorry I don't have the time nor the energy to go dig it up for you, but it really set me off and I'm sorry I took it out on you folks. I have been reading TOD for over 3 years now and I routinely see slights against Republicans and or conservatives on TOD. For the most part don't pay much attention to it, but it does start to rub after awhile and like I said, the European counterparts set me off. I really don't see the Democrats doing much either to help with PO other than argue with each other and the Repo's. They are really good at wasting trillions of dollars though. BTW: I am a registered libertarian not a Republican.
You asked, "Would you please provide us with your ideas on how these actions..."
I think if Obama got with George W. (or someone who can speak for the repo's) and they spelled out together to the country what we were facing with peak oil and we funneled some of the trillions we are spending on healthcare, defense, entitlements, etc... and started up a WWII like program that developed all forms of alternative and conventional energies in conjunction with a massive conservation program (yes learning to live on less, much less), we might pull this plane up before we crash into the ground killing everyone on board. If not, I wouldn't want to live anywhere near the east or west coasts. People are going to be spilling out the mega cities like locusts and they are going to be heading right for those nice little farms everyone describes here.
"I think if Obama got with George W. (or someone who can speak for the repo's) and they spelled out together to the country what we were facing with peak oil and we funneled some of the trillions we are spending on healthcare, defense, entitlements, etc" ...
While this may be welcomed by those of us who have accepted the realities of what you have described, I'm sure that Obama, et al, have been told by their handlers that this reality check would be much to disruptive, and politically risky (understatement). There have been several discussions here about "the speech that Obama should have given".
Comparisons to WWII may not be useful. Different generation, different social grasp on reality, and this time the enemy is us. Folks generally don't respond well to being told that they are their own worst enemy. They need to blame someone/something else.
Now, if the people were convinced that OPEC has been lying about their reserves................
However TPTB deal with this, it likely won't end well for most folks :-(
Circle your wagons fellow travellers.
"First, I do want to apologize to folks for losing my temper getting off on a rant yesterday. I was off on the European flavor of TOD and there was a post that was very much sounding like Eugenics and totalitarianism ."
This is bit confusing to me. As a European. What exactly is wrong with a European flavor? In the European country I live in there's not much totalitarianism yet though mr Wilders tries to change that. Haven't seen any eugenics though he might try once he's in power. The recycling scheme you are describing in Utah is almost exactly the same as the one operating in my own neighbourhood (Amsterdam-Noord). Except that the curbside waste goes to a not-very-efficient incinerator as in a country build on reclaimed (= expensive) swampland landfill space is always an issue. Like Switzerland The Netherlands is space limited in every way.
Looking forward to reading your comments.
Yes I clearly remember that comment though I don't remember who made it. I also seem to recall that most of the commenters, including myself, agreed that that was what we all needed to do.
So I'm still unclear as to who these elitist BSers that you refer to are.
As for political jabbing here's my personal take: Depulicans and Remocrats are opposite sides of the same coin, their politicians are demagogues who both suck up to the real elites who hold the reigns and control the wealth in this country. Elephant sh!t and donkey sh!t smell pretty much the same to me at this point.
Most of the people I've actually spoken to who are members of supposedly independent groups a la the Tea Party come across as being profoundly ignorant and arrogant and seem to have no clue about reality. They rant and rave about their rights while not being willing to take responsibility for building the necessary consensus which must be the foundation of those very communities that you yourself claim we are going to need in order to survive.
Forgive me for still being very skeptical about your sincerity with regards to being willing to reach out and work with people who don't conform or agree with your world view. I myself am not a conservative according to the accepted definition of that word but I'm quite sure I could find a way to work with people like OFM, precisely because he seems to have arrived at an understanding of reality which you yourself don't seem to have quite grasped as of yet. Perhaps you are making an attempt to do so now, so I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Mine is not a bash. It is a recount of a commercial that I saw on TV in the last primary. I can probably find the youtube if you wish. It was PAC funded, but don't kid yourself. My statement is FACTUAL. Evolution and the Bible are viewed differently by the majority in Alabama, else why the commercials? Why the state textbook wars? There is no such thing as a conservative or a liberal person. That is the problem. There is no black or white either. Just shades of gray and degrees politics. I claim the middle. Try boxing me on that one, either side. The boxing, labeling, and calling out of folks because of how they vote or who they support is wrong and ALL of it needs to stop IMHO.
BTW-You can always move here. How do you view evolution and the Bible? Please do not answer that last one, it is just a rhetorical thing. It is not a fair enough question to expect an answer.
and
Sorry, but I see a lot of hypocrisy here...
Or as I like to say: "Being easily offended is not a virtue"
Offense (much like disgust) can be powerful defense mechanism that humans use to resist change.
Offense and faith (in the Mark Twain sense of the word) are quite closely linked. The faithful get offended by stuff a lot, because if they had to address the issues point by point, they would lose.
When people get over being offended, we can discuss things and move forward.
That fact that I'm here means I'm listening. That fact that my views get insulted on a regular basis mean I get offended.
goodmaj,
Please enumerate which of your views have been and are being insulted on TOD.
Mentioning 'my views' is hardly enlightening.
Conservatives, liberals, etc. are broad labels which do very little to describe an individual's palette of ideas and stances and beliefs.
Without specificity, a productive conversation is not possible.
Without specificity, a productive conversation is not possible.
Yes, we would be
uncertain.Ha!
I would at least like to hear the specific assertions before I reserve my right to be uncertain about what I heard...
wrt goodmaj, I can ascertain his likely direction, but not his position...
The "running out of landfill" space is primarily a NIMBY political issue. If you calculate the number of square miles needed per year to landfill the US waste stream it is a very small fraction of US total land area.
OTOH, recycling is good because it provides the raw material for the largest export by tonnage from many of the US' seaports. We need something to fill those outgoing containers.
If we're importing high value electronics and exporting trash, we're doing it wrong.
"If"? Yes, we are.
Maybe the tourists visiting Hawaii should have to take their garbage home with them.
Or maybe they should pay another tourist tax to pay for the disposal of their garbage.
Then again, Hawaiian residents should realize that is is seldom possible to have your cake and eat it too.
Maybe you use a wooden bowl for your poi. Goods cost much and have to brought in anyhow. I have no problem with Hawaii banning plastic milk jugs or plastic bags for example. I wish they had enough biodiesel available to practically ban the real stuff. Maybe such projects are losers but who says they can't work on trying to make it better. IMHO Hawaii makes a great lab because those folks have a higher degree of 'green' thinking. Tourist areas need to have a 'green' image to survive. Gulf Shores is the proof.
Here on oahu there is curbside recycling, though I have generally assumed that the incredibly incompetent state government is screwing it up somehow.
For instance, blue bins were delivered maybe 5 years ago, but it was not clear what they were to used for, and for an extended time (3 years?) they just sat in driveways doing nothing. Then larger green bins were delivered.
So at this point on oahu we have a 3-bin color-coded system; grey bins are "trash & garbage", green bins are "green waste" (that is, yard clippings), and blue bins are "recyling". Currently trash is picked up once a week and recycling/green waste every 2 weeks.
Perhaps someone can help lift me out of my skepticism. The blue bins take aluminum, glass, plastic, cardboard, paper, and several other things all mixed together. Inasmuch as the level of administrative incompetence here is staggering, I have generally assumed that they don't bother to sort it out and that it's just piling up somewhere. I reckon they could burn it, but if so why include the aluminum and glass? Seeing the odd agglomeration of stuff my wife throws into the blue bins, and recognizing that the people in charge of public services in Hawaii are generally dumb as a sack o' hammers, I keep the aluminum separate and give it to local kids or the down & out to sell back to the aluminum recyclers. (Why not do it myself? Because you have to shove the sharp-edged dripping empty cans one at a time into a machine after standing in line for a half-hour, and life is short).
(Oh, and I think they're talking about shutting all the curbside stuff down due to budget shortfalls. As the cheap air fares cause tourism to drop, curbside pickup here will go to a "pay only" service and probably dwindle as it faces its own receding horizons. But my wife has taken to using the green bins for water catchment - now there's recycling.)
My general assumption is that peak everything will make this "extra trash" problem go away, or at least recede into invisibility.
Just a spot check from Oahu from a person not paying that much attention. Thanks for the keypost, interesting.
My general assumption is that peak everything will make this "extra trash" problem go away, or at least recede into invisibility.
My concern is more that "peak everything" will mean trash piling up everywhere.
That is already happening in some cities that do not have recycling and impose fees on collecting the trash (recylables). St. Louis has a huge problem with illegal dumping and a serious problem with littering. One day I attemped to count the cans and bottles strewn along streets on an 8 mile bicycle ride, it was over 500.
To make people act in a responsible manner the government must charge a fee on the items (can, bottle, newspaper, cardboard box, sofa, lube oil, etc.) bought by the consumer, then distribute that money to companies that handle recovery of the those used and unwanted items through recycling or trash collection.
Down here we have an effective metal recycling system. There are many places that accept metals and pay for them then send them up to the next link in the chain. You often see people wheeling along wheelbarrows of scrap to take to get some money. My old, rusty chicken wire fence easily paid to get my garrafon refilled. It means that many people see cans on the street and pick them up to take to the recycler to get a bit of money. Result, cans don't stay on the street very long. They have recently started a scheme for plastic bottles. For a weight of plastic you get a bag of beans, rice etc. This has expanded and now wire baskets are springing up out side houses and shops for people to leave plastics in (I must check with my local shop if they take supermarket bags). Again this means that people pick up and plastic bottles so the streets stay cleaner. Now, I wish they could get the glass scheme expanded, the only bins I know are not at all handy.
NAOM
My concern is more that "peak everything" will mean trash piling up everywhere.
Oh, I don't disagree. I just think it will be the least of our problems.
Well look at it this way. Archaeologists learn from trash piles anyhow. Give it a million years and we are just adding to the planetary record for the next folks to come along. That is about the only positive I see there. The trick is making containers that are easily separated and processed. I have read a 95% reduction is possible if we just use our heads. Remember pull tabs?
http://www.childrenofthedump.org/
NAOM
"....Inasmuch as the level of administrative incompetence here is staggering, I have generally assumed that they don't bother to sort it out and that it's just piling up somewhere...."
Many large cities that have curbside pickup have companies hired to process the waste. Here in St. Louis Smrfit-Stone, www.smurfit.com , has equipment that sorts the materials and segragates the plastic from the metal and from the glass and from the paper/cardboard. They have additional machines that sort the metals (steel or non ferrous) and plastics by type so that these materials can bring a higher resale price.
The best way to recycle with using the least amount of energy is to have the consumer do the basic sorting of glass, plastic, metal, paper and cardboard. This also allows the recycling company to get a higher price for the materials and reduces their processing cost. If money is not made as some point in the recycling stream, then the ability to have a closed loop for materials is diminished.
I checked the site but didn't easily find a description of the machines. Maybe they use something like that here - doesn't sound very efficient, and I remain a bit skeptical. I mean, I took a walk and saw the open blue bins out the other day and they were soggy cardboard and glossy magazines, shards of broken glass, and various shapes of plastics, all clumped together with shoes and other stuff. There is no great understanding among people what is supposed to go in them. I'd be astonished if they're separating the stuff out in any useful way, or even using the glass for anything. My wife has worked in state government here, and it's remarkable that anything gets done at all, ever. So my assumption has been that the blue bins are in service of the "recycling meme" but are probably energetically and practically useless.
RE: waste recycling on Oahu. Good grief, they posted rules on what goes into the blue bins. They take cardboard and newspapers. We add paper food bags. They take all glass, supposedly well rinsed and no caps on or corks in them. The sorters are especially sensitive to un-rinsed plastic milk cartons (in the tropics! Yes, they take plastics, but are very picky as to plastic type: types 1 and 2 only), but if you want to leave a sip or two of whisky, I'm sure they don't mind. They take aluminum anything, and we try to recycle the steel cans, but I'm not sure if they really want those.
The green bins for yard waste only, but I still see idiots putting regular trash in them. One only hopes those receiving these wastes have the patience and wisdom of Jesus or the Buddha. Our lot generates much green waste, and many in our neighborhood have multiple green bins. I'm thinking a good chipper could keep this recycling on the lot, and save on buying organic fertilizers.
The gray bins are for everything else except "bulky items" which are a special pickup. It is practically impossible to add springy steel, like chicken wire, to the waste stream here. They will refuse to take it if detected.
I hope they will try to improve this recycling effort, and not allow budget problems to derail it.
D3PO, are you suggesting that the people of the USA should have their freedumbs so curtailed that they must sort their trash before pickup, or face some kind of municipal fine? From there it's just a short hop, skip and jump to where we're not allowed to continue rinsing off our driveways daily with fresh tap water, or allowed to continue buying the most egregiously large SUVs and leave them idling 24/7 if we so choose, or continue ignoring the externalized costs of our industrial-type activities.
You commie, you! Why, the next thing you know we'll all be forced ** to ride bicycles.
** In the eyes of our Yosemite Sam contingent, however, it's somehow magically OK if the Invisible Hand forces it.
Yeah, like those commie Canadians
http://www.banff.ca/locals-residents/streets-parking/bus-regulations.htm
FMagyar, that's exactly the sort of creeping communism that the poster “goodmaj” (above) refers to. The next thing you know, we'll all be wearing monochrome jumpsuits, achieving 99% voter turnouts for one-party elections, and seeing posters of our Maximum Leader everywhere.
How those Canadians put up with this massive assault on their personal and environmental liberties, one can't even begin to imagine. Canadians must be fleeing that despotic place in record numbers just to get out from under the unwashed thumbs of their eco-fascist leaders, who'll surely have them up to their eyeballs in spotted owls in no time flat.
Yes, fast chicken, err speeding pullet, one can only hope that more Americans will grow up and lose their Cowboy Consumerism Life Style. I mean, we all try to obey certain traffic laws, like stopping on red, for obvious, common sense reasons. However, just to illustrate how us primates can have unequally developed brains, our neighbor across the street is an anesthesiologist. I can barely spell the word. He has gone to school longer than most Ph.D.s and literally deals in life-and-death circumstances daily at work. So, we can acknowledge some degree of intelligence resides in his brain. The family always warms up their car engines, sometimes starting them (n=2) and going back inside the house for awhile. I can assume, perhaps, that this is an old habit they developed while living on the colder USA East Coast, which they have not considered dropping after moving to the tropics, where it is totally unnecessary and a waste of gas. They also rarely produce their blue and green recycle bins, but will often have an overflowing gray bin on their curb. They produce bulky items, but if the special trucks are late, they will begin to ram those into their gray bin, to reduce their unsightly presence in front, I suppose. What to do with them? I suppose we'll have to do more than simply display a good example.
D3PO, I'm not going to hold my breath over the possibility of moron Americans getting over their Cowboy Consumer lifestyles. Or if they do, it will be for reasons other than it being a good idea. Winston Churchill famously said of us that Americans will do the right thing once all other possibilities have been exhausted. There are two ways it'll happen: Mr Market will force them to clue up, via the mechanism of vastly increased costs for FF energy and goods produced/shipped using FF energy, or Mr Government will roll out the rationing cards and start pushing Victory Gardens or their modern equivalent.
I've got some neighbors like yours, minus the fancy degrees. They live directly across the street. Even during the summer, they waddle out to start up the minivan and waddle back inside to let the thing idle for perhaps 10+ minutes before driving it away. Where do they drive? To the school that's not even half a block from here. Needless to say, everyone in that household shows signs of obesity.
Another neighbor down the nearest side street drives a V-10 powered pickup truck to the corner store every morning to get a coffee and the newspaper. ISNY, it's so close that I can walk there and back in <20 minutes. What does he think? That his neighbors will sneer at him for being a “greenie” if he walks instead of driving that gas-guzzling monstrosity?
http://www.theaudiophiles.net/blog/images/bikelane.jpg
FF energy hasn't been good to America or Americans. Mercifully, the end of the bumpy plateau seems to be approaching. No need to bother with bike lanes, the existing road space will be just fine once gasoline goes above $15/gallon and car traffic thins out.
D3PO wrote: “I hope they will try to improve this recycling effort, and not allow budget problems to derail it.”
This is a gem of a comment if you don't mind me saying so. Was having a conversation with another doom-aware friend recently and she pointed out how telling it is that certain things get cut rather quickly/easily in times of hard budgets (things like public transportation, community policing, anti-drug programs, youth crime prevention, recycling projects, etc) while other things (corporate welfare, subsidies to the military-industrial-congressional complex, etc) are maintained and even sometimes increased.
It seems doubtful that even a wholesale replacement of our elected representatives, officers and bureaucrats would effect much change. There is little evidence than any majority of crooked pols are inherently evil, while there's plenty of evidence that Big Business is willing to spend anything and everything to get what it wants, usually by buying out all possible candidates for a given election.
It may well be that the only way the recycling program survives is on a grassroots, semi-volunteer basis. So many of the social safety nets will probably have to be run that way, since our big money goes into “bringing democracy” to Pakistan (via remote drone fire on civilians) and keeping Lloyd Blankfien rolling in bonus money.
The entire concept that you can only recycle, burn or dump waste is totally flawed and is driven by business, economics and the GDP mantra. Who would have thought we could re-use something?
Governments everywhere since mass production first appeared have refused to accept the need to standardise. Not suprising since they are despots, lawyers and other such deity. After 300 years we cannot agree on a xhead or the pitch of a screw, space missions fail because of unit conversions. Nothing should be legally sold that cannot be seperated into standard parts, everything including jam jars. The loss of revenue to big business would be catastrophic. Any car wheel fits? Refill that standard container? Any charger=any phone? Instead we allow anarchy by corporations where progress is only made when defacto standards accidentally appear. The IT industry being the most visible case history of this ridiculous chaos.
Definitely right. I am in the automotive business myself, and can say from experience that the proliferation of proprietary parts has spiraled upwards into chaos. Three decades ago there were maybe four common wheel sizes and five or six common tire sizes that covered most applications; now there are literally no common wheel sizes, and ten or twelve new tire sizes are added per year. Warehousing is a costly nightmare.
I've always thought that if one country came forward with standardized production, it could bury the rest of the wasteful industry...but so far nothing is on the horizon. One problem is that most of the costs come in maintenance and longevity, which are secondary considerations to the consumer and irrelevant to the manufacturer.
I don't blame you for fuming, but suggesting mass standardization and then worrying about Government Despotism points to a key pair of opposing challenges in this problem.
"Nothing should be legally sold that cannot be separated into standard parts, everything including jam jars."
My attention usually turns towards the Industrial Psalm of 'Planned Obsolescence' and the unbelievable prices we pay for repair parts and 'essential' things like a dizzying variety of just Printer Cartridges. Remember typewriter ribbons, and ubiquitous standards like the old #2 Pencil that used to be the flexible and affordable way to put marks onto paper?
As it stands, we do have some choices, but they usually (always?) involve a compromise or a cost, which is played as anathema in many a public debate, there is an almost unspoken belief in Industrial Society that the cheapest bid should win, that paying more makes you a rube.. and compromise is for suckers. Look at the PV discussion.. it's ALL about the cost of the KWH, not the value of independent generation, non-polluting electricity, whatever other values you find in the purchase. It's usually a completely short-sighted conversation.. a guaranteed loser for a long-term investment.
I think you really have to chew on this Despot question, however. That's what such standardization would immediately be called. How about a pact among a consumers group to only purchase items which offer certain minimal qualities? It becomes a 'different' political struggle.. but ultimately, it's a political problem, so that's where the solutions should likely be sought.
I agree the elite would make sure that it was reported as 'orange jump suits for everyone'
Standardising does not raise costs [unless the standards organisations become a political elite themselves, which currently happens because of the technical black hole in gov's].
I withdraw the word despot if it makes my statement clearer. My basic premise is that our leaders don't even appear to know what the problems are, let alone search for solutions. They are too busy in their marketing universe.
For apartment building owners it typically costs $10 to $20 per month per apartment to haul away tenants' garbage, which, as waste collection is usually a competitive industry, reflects the economic costs of garbage collection. Presumably these costs will go up as fuel prices increase, but it doesn't seem like fuel cost increases will be the game changer.
I wonder instead, what is the value of the waste. It would be interesting to hear from someone who knows the economics of recycling and the value of that which can be extracted from the waste stream. Future fossil fuel price increases might have more impact on the the price of "new materials" brought from afar which, in turn, would increase the relative value of the waste stream.
On another note, I was at a meeting once (of what I think were knowledgeable people) and someone made a statement that all bottle "deposit" laws in the U.S. were passed by "ballot initiatives" rather than legislative acts. It seems that the lobbyists for the bottlers and grocers are always stronger than the environmentalist on issues of this sort.
One should not forget that the plants that burn garbage for district heating and sometimes electricity in Switzerland burn what remains when almost everything else has been ‘recycled’.
That is, stuff that really is detritus or waste, that one can’t do anything else with. Burn it, bury it, export it somehow - what is best?
As for the mandatory laws, I think one should not over-emphasize them. Recycling is 100% accepted as necessary and really quite well adopted - over 95% for glass, for example; while targets for paper are harder to achieve, but mount steadily (70% where I live.) Most official propositions are formed as ‘guide lines‘ or ‘targets.’ I have never heard of anyone being fined, ever, except for a chap that abandoned a car in a leafy dell.
Recycling is all very well and good, but one has to study what is recycled how, to produce what.
When thorough recycling is carried out a whole new economic circuit is created, which involves, of course, a LOT of trucking, many treatment plants, and some administration. Switzerland both imports (and charges to take it) and sells waste or garbage, and the whole system is fairly opaque, but it is a brisk business. Tax payer contributions, gvmt. incentives, complicate the picture. The decisionary powers rest for the largest part with district heads (commune, municipality) and these may not be well versed in enviro matters, though garbage is not a dirty or demeaning topic around here.
I am an ordinary, not hyper-vigilant, sometimes sloppy, re-cycler. My list:
Electric and electronic machines, taxed, most municipalities will pick them up in your home for free - covered by the recycling tax. Phones are hand-sorted, repaired, and given away (Africa) or sold, or dismantled and recycled. Textiles are hand sorted as well, from cat. 1 (vintage dresses, pristine tuxedos, sold), to cat x (pulped). All this provides some employment .... I, and many ppl I know wash or dry clean their old clothes and give them to charity provided they are second-life type. Shoes and bags etc. are hand sorted. Furniture is treated in a variety of ways (too complicated.)
Then:
glass in 2 colors / paper - cardboard, NO staples, NO plastic / aluminum drink cans / other cans, these have to be washed first / other aluminum, e.g. foil / iron / ‘other metals or large objects of metal’ such as steel pots; tools etc. / batteries / machine oil (some places do kitchen oils as well, to prevent them being sent down the toilet) / nespresso capsules / pharmaceuticals (returned to a pharmacy) / PET plastic bottles, at present at 81% (other plastics > burnt; 2 supermarkets take back washed plastic yoghurt pots, I don’t bother) / books / lightbulbs / textiles / together: anything that can be burnt in a wood + garden-detritus plant (which provides me with heat and hot water) / together: all the rest, practically entirely plastic and kitchen waste, goes to another plant to heat ppl 10 kms. away. My commune, semi-rural, does not make bio-gas, or do compost. Compost was at one point problematic in GE, there was too much of it, and it could not be given away or sold, collecting it was expensive/terribly wasteful.
The diligence required on the part of the waste producer is evident. A cultural matter, say.
Now, I don’t use syringes, never have a dead animal on hand, don’t have waste which contains lead, etc. For these and other situations, your local dignitaries, or the intertubes, will inform.
A commune where I lived previously now collects household garbage *everyday*, by bicycle. This part of a return-to-employment program. They also collect left-over yet still edible food, from restaurants, bakers, supermarkets, etc. by bike as well, but this is naturally very tricky, as there are legal issues, etc. I have no idea how it is going. I think they must be the first to try this, so I shall find out.
Previous efforts in this direction skirted various laws: collecting informally, opening up a shop where the goods are sold at 25 to 50% of retail price to a certain set of ‘carded’ individuals, such as those on social assistance. (Hygiene controls? VAT? Refrigeration? Tax? Free contract, how can you limit your customers in this way? etc.) Swiss ‘social aid’ and charities, tend to not just simply give food (food basket and so on, sounds communistic, pretty horrible, right?) but to give money or provide cooked meals.
The link gives the official classification of detritus, scrap, industrial waste, mineral waste, garbage, etc. PDF. In French. If one has the ambition to actually handle waste overall, categorization would seem necessary as a very first step. You know, Linnaeus looking at moon rocks, or some such!
http://www.dechets.ch/Informationen_Merkblaetter/pdf/EWW_f.pdf
I don't see how recycling can work very well without a huge amount of hand labor in the process of separating the waste streams. I look at a bin full of glass and it also contains paper or plastic labels, plastic pouring tops, metal rings around bottle necks and so on. The plastic is even more heterogeneous with some having the little recycle symbol, some not, some mixed.
I have heard that much of the glass is ground up for asphalt aggregate, and much of the plastic is simply ground up for manufacturing things like curbstones etc. All this amounts to 'downcycling' instead of re-cycling.
Seems to me there needs to be more regulation on the manufacturing end to make recycling easier. But I suppose the Koch brothers would 'defend to the death' their right to pollute the air we all breathe and the water we all drink.
We in the U.S. do have an employment problem.
If folks are willing to pay some taxes to pay other folks to perform this manual labor, then the manual labor would be available to do this work.
People are not going to do that, or any, work for free, outside of small-scale part time volunteering...people need to pay their rent and utilities.
If it isn't important enough to pay for, then we should shelve the idea and move along.
Some places (see next post re: Canada and Germany) apparently value recycling more than most places in the U.S.
Our waste management company in Sonoma County, CA uses exactly this type of labor to sort out recyclables for their various destinations. I've gone on a tour at the plant a couple of times and seen the process with me own eyes!
Since the county instituted single-stream recycling about 8 years ago, they have seen something like a doubling (IIRC) in the amount of recycling. The big issue the last time I took a tour there was the downturn in the market for recyclables.
I think Extended Producer Responsibility needs to be a mainstay as we wend our way toward Zero Waste.
JudithN,
Thank you for posting this Sonoma County success story.
As I was once told in a very stressful training environment, it is the little victories that keep us going.
I would like to think that enough small victories can add up to goodness on a larger scale.
Tops are separated from the bottles by the binner, then these can be ‘shaken’ out. Labels burn. In CH 1/3 of glass is used as gravel in public works. The rest is re-cycled into new containers. The end result will be, I suppose, only 2 colors, not quite clear vs. colored. The distinction between brown and green has already been eliminated at the bins. This is already a problem, think, wine producers are not happy to sell wine in brownish muddy bottles. All our imports come in proper colored glass - Samuel Adams Beer, Aussie wine, etc.
You gotta wonder, what about washing the containers instead? I have read that some of these containers are too ‘fragile’ for re-use, but looking at my bottles and jars, that seems questionable. As you can see, the state lays claim to one third of this free glass, replacing gravel - positive overall one judges.
The re-cycling is paid: 1) by the buyer of the bottle, about 2.5 to 6 CH cents per container. Part of that tax is returned to communes, as they do the collecting and some transporting, but it does not cover their costs, so 2) the communal tax payer pays the remainder, about 100.- CHF for one ton of glass. (Say, dollar = CHF.)
Second, wine or fancy carrot-guava juice, for ex. can perfectly well be sold in plastic bins or plastified cardboard containers (other problems with that for sure), and at one point, about 7 years ago, this was much encouraged, as it was supposedly cheaper and more eco-friendly than glass (depends of course on what happens to these containers subsequently.) But consumers consider glass traditional and high-end, so only a very few very cheap alcoholic or prestigious juice drinks manufacturers packaged their beverages in ‘cardboard’, for only a very few ‘low end’ brands. Glass spells solidity, ancestral customs, respectability, etc.
Note, too, that only 1/3 is recycled in CH, the rest is trucked to France (mostly, afaik.)
Anyway, all I am sayin‘ is that the devil is in the details, and I am no expert.
We in Canada may have the most expensive recycling program. We have a blue box for all plastics, glass, and cans, a black box for paper, a large green can for yard waste, kitchen stuff, cat litter, etc., everything that can be composted. Finally, one has the old garbage can for the rest. Astonishingly, there is not much left for the latter and we need 2-3 weeks to fill it. Sorting the blue and black boxes is costly.
Then everyone got a booklet with addresses where to deliver TV, computers, construction material, paint, hazardous material, etc. The batteries one can dispose at libraries. All bottles from the liquor stores can be returned for refund. Same for all aluminium cans but only in Quebec. Hence, the parks, beaches, and streets are not littered as in the US.
My ant in Germany is required to sort things herself. White, green, and brown glass, plastic, paper go in separate containers at convenient locations in the city, or if you live in a high-rise these containers are in the yard. Do not put those items in your garbage can because there are random inspections and then you get a fine if you can be traced.
"My ant in Germany..." ngass,I know (well am pretty sure) it was a typo but thanks for the laugh the visual image that provoked gave me.
As for what we do in Canada I'm pretty sure that waste management and recycling is a municipal affair so you can't really say, "We in Canada blah blah...."
Lee County Florida makes electricity from incinerating trash.
Recycling seems to need some help in my community.
This is a program that can be done in three ways: Voluntary, mandatory, or incentivized. I prefer the incentivized approach which I see today only in the collection of cans and bottles that have a recoverable deposit. I would like to see the society support more of this kind of effort, and less of the mandatory (we are outlawing plastic bags or Styrofoam). Why go to incentives? Because it works, we can and have wiped out species by placing a bounty on them. Should a bounty be placed on goods that we would like to see recycled, we would see them recycled far more easily than government or good deeds can compel.
As an example of how this could work, in my apartment complex the garbage is bagged by the tenant and picked up from a dumpster. There are a few recycle cans for specific stuff, they are quickly filled and picked up at the same time by a second recycling truck. Once the recycle cans are filled, everyone has no choice but to hold the recycling stuff and try next week or bag it and throw it in the dumpster. Suppose we all had different color garbage bags and could separate garbage into groups and throw it all in the dumpster. A machine (or hand sorting) could separate them at the dump/recycle site by bag color and the need for secondary cans and pickups eliminated. How much better for all if we received a drop in our rent based on our sorting percentage?
BTW, this is a solution that goodmaj might approve of, as it reduces government oversight and pushes this process to the community level.
Almost invariably, trash/recycling laws/mandates/advocacy/guidelines/suggestions/etc. would be crafted, publicized, enacted (the specification and maybe provision of the colored bags) by the local (city/township/municipality) government.
That is about as local and community as it gets.
If the folks in the community don't like the local government, they can elect other folks the next election or run for local office themselves.
Local officials don't live inside the beltway in D.C. (Unless they are D.C. officials), they have a local office in your town.
What is the plan if folks do not use the bags or spitefully put stuff in the wrong color bag?
Since humans are not ants and they don't release pheromones to tell each other what the colony needs to do to proposer or survive, then that is what government is for. Government is nothing more than people elected from the community who try to create organization, rules, and practices and capabilities (police, fire protection) to serve the communitt's interests.
The issue I see in the U.S. is that there are a significant number of people who sing the praises of liberty and freedom but who do not accept that they have any community or social responsibilities, except as they and they alone define. 'My way or the highway', and I have guns!
What is the plan if folks do not use the bags or spitefully put stuff in the wrong color bag?
Well, nothing is perfect. I had kids in the classroom that simply refused to let themselves be educated, but most of the kids saw a benefit and most of the users of a recycling program that actually paid the people back for taking the effort to be responsible would make the effort to do it correctly. Most likely this action (miss-bagging) would occur, not out of spite, but out of laziness. This is why the incentive would be based on the percentage of people who got it right.
Now as to people changing their government – One of my pet peeves is that it is actually more difficult than you make it sound to replace our elected officials. Government people get to spend money in ways that encourage their re-election. (You might expect that government would try to benefit their constituents but actually they try to benefit their supporters and in general do not care what their opponents want.) They also collect money from these supporters and in general terms support legislation that benefits these supporters many times over. So while I agree that elected officials can be removed from office, it is not so straightforward. Oh, and this comment is without bias, as elected officials of both parties do this.
Finally, I agree with you that there are too many people who do have decided that they do not have any responsibility for what is happening. They choose not to participate in elections, (recycling programs), education, or in a lot of cases pay the costs of government. If I did decide to run for office, one of my issues would be to have everyone have a stake in the government and the community. I would do this with incentives rather than the point of a gun but I would have everyone take the responsibility of paying taxes (not the current tax program, BTW).
I don't know how many have read the book "Cradle to Cradle". The underlying premise is that what passes for recycling is actually down cycling - the recycled product is of an inferior quality to the original.
The authors argue that while that process can help stretch resources it ultimately is a losing strategy. What they argue for is products that can be reused in their original format e.g.plastic paper that can be repeatedly printed on after being subject to high temperature water cleaning. Brad Pitt is trying to do that with the homes he is building in New Orleans. e.g. the metal roofs are so designed that when the home is torn down the metal can be remelted and used again for making roofs.
With enough available energy everything could be recycled; reduced to its constituent atoms and put back together into fresh new things.
But if we had that much available energy would could mine sea water.
Available energy is an issue.
Plastics are especially hard to re-use.
If the government mandated that there will be no more plastic or paper bags, then cloth/burlap/etc. bags would be the new norm out of necessity.
But folks do not see where their bags go and the damage they cause, nor what environmental damage was incurred to make them, so such a mandate would be seen as an attack on liberty by elitist autocrats and would be opposed to the death by the defenders of liberty.
I see a big problem right there. Why do homes need to be torn down?! I just visited my sister in Germany she lives in a relatively new house in her village its only about 200 years old and it is constantly being refurbished and upgraded, it now has an evacuated solar hot water system. The oldest house in her town was built in 1462 and is still lived in. We have a completely insane system in this country. It has to stop somewhere. The mantra of economic growth and trillions of dollars in debt can't continue.
An important distinction must be made between material recycling in the industrial sector and the recycling of municipal solid waste. They are two entirely different animals.
In most cases industrial recycling involves a small number of well-defined waste streams of relatively uniform composition. The impetus for industrial waste recycling is largely economic: if the waste has value and if there is net value left over after the expense of recycling is incurred, then such recycling will usually take place. Increasing disposal costs provide additional incentives. That is why recycling is often built into the fundamental manufacturing process. As an example, that is why a very high fraction of the steel content of a automobile winds up being recycled: there is an economic incentive. In general, if it makes money, recycling will occur, regardless of environmental benefits.
On the other hand, municipal solid waste by its very nature is a most heterogeneous mixture of hundreds or even thousands of different materials. Though it can be highly variable, given a large enough collection area and a large enough quantity of waste, this inherent variability tends to average out over time. (However, this is not that helpful for a waste incinerator that has a typical detention time of a few seconds and which can be adversely affected by spikes in composition.)
In terms of material handling, muni solid waste can be described as a large-volume, low-value material whose heterogeneous nature can create all sorts of technical and economic problems. Basically, there is a lot of the stuff, it isn't worth much, and it can be difficult and expensive to handle. Unlike a lot of industrial recycling, if there weren't environmental considerations to contend with, little if any muni solid waste would be recycled. It's usually an economic loser.
The main components of any value in muni solid waste are non-ferrous metals, ferrous metals, glass, and (some) plastics. The value of what remains is mainly it's energy content, which isn't even all that high in terms of BTU/lb. So, while it does make sense to recover energy from the combustible organic fraction of muni solid waste, it is more of an exercise in attempting to defray landfill disposal costs rather than something providing a positive net economic gain. This is far more important in urban areas than in outlying areas where there isn't such a shortage of landfill space.
In the US the history of waste-to-energy projects has not be a particularly happy one. There are many reasons for this, and they include poor design, higher than anticipated operating costs, operational and maintenance problems, and just plain old trouble. Again, it's the old problem of trying to do something useful with a large-volume, low-value material stream. Not easy.
One aspect that is often overlooked in the general discussion on muni waste recycling is that unlike a true business, the supply of muni solid waste is fixed, whereas the demand for recycle materials is not fixed and can bounce around all over the place. Margins are typically very small. So what happens is that one can easily find oneself going from small profits to big losses. As an example, in our area there used to be scrap paper drives sponsored by high schools and other community groups. But as the price of scrap paper went lower and lower, it became a lost cause to continue doing this.
My bottom line: don't expect the recycling of muni solid waste to have a significant impact on the overall net energy situation. One should not expect too much from this area of endeavor.
"My bottom line: don't expect the recycling of muni solid waste to have a significant impact on the overall net energy situation. One should not expect too much from this area of endeavor."
WHY NOT?
I am not sure how you make this conclusion, as your post gives no details of energy value of garbage that might be burned, no annual amounts of aluminum that is thrown away (and the embodied energy with it), no reference to the value of paper per ton (which lately has increased over a year or two so now many companies recycle office paper for a profit), and no value put on the energy content of the plastic that is in the waste stream.
For your information the aluminum recycler's association (don't have the link but will try to find it) now claim that 56% of all aluminum beverage containers are now recycled and that saves 95% of the energy compared to making the cans from bauxite, which is what was done prior to recycling. Unfortunately less than ten percent of plastic containers of all types are recycled, thus throwing away embedded energy besides causing pollution problems as these containers find their way into lakes, streams, rivers, oceans.
I have a friend that manages a recycle center that is a private company partly subsidized by the city. When oil prices were over $100 per barrel they made money on the plastic containers which were sold to a company which sorted them by type and then processed the chopped material for making new containers. They also made money on the steel, aluminum, and white office paper, but rarely made much money on the glass and cardboard after accounting for labor.
I am sure that less energy was consumed in transporting the waste and handling the recycled material at this recycle center (near center of the city), compared to trucking the waste to a landfill 10 or 20 miles away in the country (trucking miles would be 20 to 40 miles as trucks run empty one way). And at the land fill I have witnessed numerous bulldozers and loaders bringing in dirt fill and spreading the waste around, thus adding to the energy cost of burying the waste.
In the UK we are getting better at recycling but the onus is almost entirely on the consumer, and the consumer is assumed to be an idiot. Thus I can recycle plastic bottles (even though most are PET, some are PE and a few are PS) but not other containers that I know to be PET. Much more needs to be asked of manufacturers so packaging can be easily recycled: anything that can't be recycled should be taxed according to the cost of dealing with the waste at the end.
In Germany, since sometime about the mid 1990s all producers of packaged materials have to provide for the recycling of their packaging. I worked for a European microelectronics company, and we had to teke back the packaging after delivering product to our customers, or pay a 3rd party to take care of it.
In Switzerland, the largest supermarket chain (Migros)composts all of their surplus produce and captures the methane generated. They sell the compost and run their local delivery trucks on the methane, thus generating another profit stream rather than filling a landfill.
Just a political question for our conservative contributor who is often angered - How do you define Liberty? do you think the Swiss or Germans feel that their liberty is somehow curtailed? Liberty without social responsibility is not liberty, it is license.
Germany has got is waste policy badly wrong. It built a very large number of waste incinerators based on an assumed growth in waste that did not happen. Instead they had a growth in recycling. The result is that they have to import waste to burn form italy and are how arranging for waste in the UK to be dryed and ship to germany to be burned.
The incinerator have a net effecency of around 21%. This is far less than conventional power stations and they emit over twice the level of CO2 per unit of electric produced. Most of the CO2 is from the plastic content of the waste.
The future lies in getting as close to zero waste as possible - not burning expensive waste burners. You save many times as much carbon by recycling and reuse.
See details of UK campaign a www.ukwin.org.uk
My community has had curbside recycling for fifteen years.
There used to be separate tubs for plastic, paper, and metal. Now there's a 60 gallon container for all recyclables.
My sis lives in a tiny community in the Sierra Nevada that had no trash collection for years, people would take their refuse to a transfer station where you would deposit trash and be paid for plastic, glass and aluminum. People depended on these few dollars per month for a little extra income. Now there is weekly trash pick-up but people still recycle.
South California is going to export their garbage to a once pristine desert area: an abandoned open pit gold mine. Attracting predators like coyotes and crows to prey on endangered tortoises, the dump will affect the fragile desert ecology.
http://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/Archive/IWMBPR/1997/mar/NR031.HTM
http://ivpressonline.com/articles/2008/08/15/local_news/news01.txt
33.052686
-114.985714
In Baldwin County, Alabama you could burn your trash until the '80's. Then the county mandated pickup and banned burning of household waste. Of course it is now universally viewed as a positive move, but at the time some folks were talking succession from the Union or County and an underground trash movement. Even Bama has to change too, we are just slow about it sometimes.
I remember well the heated debate surrounding the seat-belt laws that, I believe, all US states now have. People ranted about the fascist government taking their freedoms. Now people take it for granted that 'buckling up' is a sensible thing to do, and thousands of lives have been saved as a result. In an ideal world, sensible laws have a positive effect on people's attitudes.
The local cops here ignore that one. Just do not drink and drive or text and drive. Tourist town.
Something that should have been a part of the original post is that Oahu already burns much of its waste to produce power. The only reason the "garbage barge" issue has come up is because the (I thoroughly agree on this one) inept bureaucracy has failed to build a third boiler that has been in the works for years.
The stats are that the two boilers currently in place provide about 7% of Oahu's power. The garbage is reduced to 10% of its original volume (not 30%), and it still has to go in the landfill (yes, Switzerland DOES have landfills, or they are dumping it with some poor neighbor.)
In a lusciously ironic side note; what is now the only landfill on Oahu was originally located on one of the poorest parts of the island, as far as possible from the well-to-do. Then, knowing that it was slated to be closed, they started building expensive resorts on the coastline beneath it. But things changed, and now it can't be closed; and it can't go anywhere else; and it will be right across the street from the entrance to Disney's new Aulani resort. Garbage trucks will turn right, and tourists will turn left.
We used to burn our trash in a 55 gallon drum with holes. We got about 90%+ reduction. I do not know how that scales. We just buried ashes in the armadillo holes.
We have a proposal in the local community to build an anaerobic digester, that would process organic wastes, food scraps and sewage sludge.
The result would be electricity (via methane generated by the process), as well as compost.
Proponents say that the plant would save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Although such plants are rare in the US, apparently they are not unusual in Germany and Europe. Signatures are now being gathered to put the issue on the ballot.
http://transitionpaloalto.org/2010/09/12/coming-hot-issue-anerobic-compo...
Bart Anderson
Transition Palo Alto
yesterday I mentioned the neighbor that washed off his driveway almost everyday using city tap water to do so, well he also doesn't recycle anything either, at least not out of his home garbage cans. In North Little Rock you can package cardboard, paper, bottles, cans, pop cans, and plastic and they will come around and take that.
We recycle almost everything we can, though we could be better at it, by also thinking how we buy things and their packaging as well. Plastic bags are those banes tht don't fit into any one nitch and then find their way into the local landfill, which started out as a plain and is now a mountian you can see for miles around, I figure it is getting near its max use point in the near future.
Just driving down a road yesterday while taking someone to a food bank we saw several yards that were local dumping grounds from the decades gone by, old cars, trailers, junk piles dense and long forgotten, it was kinda odd seeing that way out in the county, where the deer and rabbits are more common than people. Though I also know where a local Geo-desic dome house is now.
It is sad to say that most people I know, can't figure out how to recycle, but about 10% of their trash, most of them don't bother as it is just too much work. In some of my short fiction and long fiction, it was a national habit, and everyone was doing a total recycling program as a matter of course.
Glad to see someplace in the world that has taken the time to make it a habit albeit forced in some cases to recycle. Wasn't there talk of forcing recycling on California citizens a while back?
In general Earth recycles everything as a matter of course, land sinks melts and then is reformed elsewhere. Stars die and explode and recycle that way, but on the time scale of a human, we are pretty bad at doing what we can to limit our waste products, or for that matter making things that can be recycled to begin with. How many new things that we create can't be turned back into their base elements once we make them? 100's of thousands of things I'd bet, just thinking about all the waste in the oceans is going to be our bane sent down the time line to the future people of the world.
Just a few thoughts to get the mind clear on a late saturday afternoon.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs where things are built with recycling in mind or waste out of the picture.
I have an idea for your neighbor. Christmas is coming up right? $35 with shipping. I bet if you hunted at a Big Lots or such, you can find one for $20.
http://www.hardwareandtools.com/Husqvarna-952711366-Poulan-Weed-Eater-7-...
Thank you Robert, for reminding us not only to think about supply and demand, but on the other side of the equation, where valuable energy used to extract metals/etc is not lost in the trash, but recaptured by inclusion into the sourcing stream.
I have been working on what I call a materials handling system, off and on since 1995, when I was really into sorting out everything. I lived on Nantucket Island for many years and we voted for an elaborate recycle system. I think recycling has gone down in popularity: Its less the rage.
I don't think my system is right or left, donkey or elephant. I don't think there is much difference with the waste streams of the left, right and middle, some perhaps.
I'm proposing a comprehensive system. At the points of manufacture, or importation, products will be taxed, and that tax money will be used to subsidize scrap prices. Materials, at the point of manufacture will be graded for good and bad, on differing levels. Good is a one gallon jug of milk: Let's tax that at half a cent each. Bad is the little wax paper carton, maybe 4 ounces, and that gets a 3 cent tax. The one gallon, #2 plastic is minced and palletized and shipped. The little paper and wax container needs to be land filled. A small #2 plastic 4 ounce milk container, let's tax at half a cent. Good and bad is tied to recyclability, and also optimization of material use. In this case the moral judgements are slight. It is good to contain a gallon of milk, and less good to contain 4 ounces of milk. I don't like the moral arguments needed to tax an aluminum soda can. I like V8 juice. My juice is good and your soda is bad to the tune of 5 cents worth of tax??? I don't like that. I'm looking for materials handling, not excessive moralizations. (Having said that, and this may be far afield, but I would support a sugar and lard tax.) And while I would not invite the government into the bedroom, to any appreciable degree, I would be in favor of a banana subsidy. (bait)
Things at the store, with this system of materials handling, then have a listed and built in recycle, or materials handling price. The manufacturer pays it. What you pay for the products and the materials that contain them will not, with my system design, tie directly to the scrap price for the materials. So the soda can of 5 cents will be out the window with my system. Little on the sin taxations. The money for the scrap market will be partially gotten from the points of manufacture: In other words we tax what we don't like, and subsidize what we do like. Most of the materials do have some value as scrap.
We don't like that we have garbage. That is the foundation of the system. So on one end of the stream the cost of being "materially sensible" is going to be front end loaded. On the other end, kids and disabled people, or people who just love to handle garbage, will collect the glass, cardboard, plastics, aluminum, tin, this and that etc. This price system is the core of the system.
There are socio-economic costs with having the lower rungs of society idle. So this system may or may not integrate social considerations into the equation. I hate idle hands, and I want my Club (ICCD) members put to work.
Barges will be used to collect and ship large quantities of materials. Rails, trucks normally empty will have loads.
Such a system can be ramped up slowly, both in price, and in quantities of things covered. We could start the system and gradually over a few years add in the quantities and the details. I know it would work, but the details of a cost benefit would be the decider. I pulled my recycle system file, and see lots of detail work to be done. I have a design for a round conveyor belt sorting system, so that a stream of recyclable stuff comes to you as you sit grab and chuck. Sound fun? There are good materials to be had in the scrap. Part of a bonus system would be to pay for the blue ribbon ideas that come down the pike. What say ye conservatives and liberals? Oily drummers all.
Plasma gasification
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqrAWYtd6RI&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wmGgxrHAp0&feature=related
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/plasma-converter3.htm
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0103-97332004000...
http://books.google.com/books?id=eVMLO1GM9uQC&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=plasma...
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Plasma gasification, plasma converter, plasma reformer... Trash heated to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit comes apart. The spew of small molecules can be gathered as gas, the metals poured off, the glass made into ingots or wool. -Or-... The 10,000 degrees can be transferred through a working gas, air, and used to burn the small molecules and metals right then and there to make heat and slag. The energy produced from municipal waste is four to five times what it takes to run the plasma torches that burn or convert it. Brazil is installing multi-megawatt municipal waste conversion plants. Tars and oils can be reformed into gasses of small molecules that can be burned cleanly.
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Material sensing grippers
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http://www.optoiq.com/index/photonics-technologies-applications/lfw-disp...
http://www.powdertech.com/plasticid4.html
http://www.cbtcarpetrecycling.com/carpet-recycling-testing-equipment.html
http://www.deltanu.com/reporter/
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I watched a show on carpet recycling... Huell Howser?... The recycling house had hand-held wands that identified the materials in any given roll or scrap of carpet. The material was then marked as such and moved along. Things are made of things, many things... A vision of simple robots ripping them apart into smaller chunks made mostly of one thing...
Yeah, well, at $1000 per axis for anything real...
...
Household recycling is nonsense. It uses energy and drains wealth out of our economy. It makes us poorer because we are wasting our precious resources. Go ahead, save up all your "junk and garbage" for a week and call someone and ask them to buy it from your or even take it for free. No one would want it because it takes more energy to pick up the small individual pile than can be created from it, that is why it is not worth any Money. Yes, the Evil Money, is the measure of value and energy. A man making paper could buy pulp made from virgin trees or he could buy used paper. Even though the price for used paper is likely lower than for virgin pulp trees, it costs him more because the process to convert the recycled junk into a product take more energy and chemicals. So the entire process must be subsidized with countless individual "labor" to sort this stuff, of course to the good greenie, individual labor has no cost or value whatsoever.(Cause as the guy said above, you are being forced to do it). Then it is additionally subsidized by the taxpayers paying the county to buy these big extra trucks and pay recycling workers to move this junk around. Then, in this day an age, with paper etc value at a bottom, the taxpayers again subsidize the entire system by selling the junk to the recycling center at a loss. And, I don't know, but are those recycling centers all subsidized also?? I live 2 hrs from NYC and we have endless space for landfills, endless. A 100 acre landfill could go anywhere, there is an endless supply. Funny how the greenies cant' find room for a landfill but they have no problem whatsoever forcing a 25 turbine, 100 acre wind farm right in neighborhoods across this country.
Recylcing Is Nonsense and costs our society. We are not running out of these materials, that is why in bulk the base materials cost almost nothing.
glenncz, your post is a superb example of why we need mandated recycling.
If landfills were cheaper, EU-countries would not export some of their waste to Swiss waste power plants:
http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/zuerich/kehricht_als_begehrter_energielief...
(Household waste has an energy content comparable to brown coal).
glenncz: I too do not think too highly of our current inefficient systems. I don't like our disposal systems, and I don't like our recycle systems either. It's not that I'm not a happy person; I am just not inclined to be satisfied with sub-standard systems work.
Let's not forget too, that there are greenies and then there are greenies. We are not all from the same litter of dogs. I am a Republican Party greenie, actually I'm not a real Republican, just a wannabe, according to the anointed ones, who hasn't learned to chant and obey yet. So I may be more inclined against recycling for philosophical reasons, and more inclined to recycle, or design systems to recycle, based on just practical (future) materials markets, as an offset to a mishmash of waste stream style options. But beyond markets for materials we have issues, which are worth thinking about. I don't think these waste or recycle systems in their entirety will fit in with a Yes, or a No to recycling, or landfilling. Some good issues were brought to the table by pondlife, in regard to standardization. Standardization happens to be a colossal game changer for systems, allowing unforetold efficiencies, and the consensus process here may well be filled with agitants to any progress at all on one extreme, and happycakers; the wishful and unrealistic thinkers, alike. But I am of the hope that the wiser minds of the mainstream will prevail. And so, I propose the " New Market RRR System. (reduce, recycle, reuse)
You and I (I have an old libertarian core) may hate the oppressive hand of government intervention, but on the other hand, driving on the right hand side of the road does make some sense, here, and I don't find it too onerous. Roads were not constructed for these horseless carriages: And they just should not be allowed on the roads. Well? The point is the happy recycle train has left the station, and "we" will recycle. But, I hope we don't involve ourselves with stupid systems, rather systems that are cold to the needs of the esoteric myopia mindset ,,, aka recycle at any cost and at any labor .... just to be "green". I hope we develop rational-market-based practical systems that have the accent on materials handling. We need a cash flow based closed loop system. We need a recycle system that can be plugged into so comprehensiveness, or continuity of side by side systems, can be achieved.
Standardization of color coded plastics for computer aided sorting may make lots of sense, freeing up labor to do more valuable work: If that is, we are going to go with a scaled up materials handling systems approach. Most juice is contained using the #1 Plastic, and the gallon jugs for water or milk are using the #2 plastic. I don't see anything wrong with this, but a good post consumer materials handling system may have a problem with it. A good system for handling the garbage, or materials, may just be a land fill operation, just like we always used to do. But I don't think so. Perhaps we have better things to do with our labors than sort all this utter rubbish. But one of my points is this: Many of our lower rungs are not busy, and this is not good. We conceivably could kill two birds with one stone, gaining a double economic productive hit. We could create markets, especially by our use of externalized negatives, and positives too for that matter, as real plug-ins, to the real and practical economic models or equations, that we need in order to move forward. I think we are evolving away from the strictly disposable doctrine of closed eyes, to a more informed systematic approach to handling materials. Landfills have their issues. When I was a kid, (I'm 53) my dad opposed a new landfill for the town of Harwich. He said we should keep and expand the dump in its existing location, which was on the edge of the aquifer, also on a salt marsh. The new dump spoiled the ground water, which I think was a valuable asset. I'm sure the new dumps, or landfills, have more reliable membranes to keep the ground water in good shape.
There are comparative costs on the table: There is a cost to people's conscience with waste. Our collective gut feeling (% of majority?) to start a battle on the recycle front, may prove, in the long run to be right on the money. Or: you could be right in rejecting the movement. I personally don't prefer the waste disposal option. I don't think waste is just waste, just throw it to the dump. I prefer re-use, recycling as a discipline. I used to pick a lot from the old style dumps. I feel that when started an inefficiency in systems design, will be seen and dealt with, even though, I know I am not confident in peoples choices politically, and even though I know; bad systems become very entrenched, like our fisheries systems. So I'm suffering with a paradox. I believe in the hopeful evolution of recycle systems being dynamic, and not static. You may force me to agree that in strict terms the inefficiencies out weigh the efficiencies when it come to recycling. And I as well, feel that I have wasted many hours of my life sorting garbage, dutifully, perhaps stupidly. But recycle systems are new still, and these systems are in need of real systems designs, rather than liberal happycake let's all sort garbage and call it a success type systems designs. I am too practical to be either a liberal or conservative chanter, but the evolution needs the liberal mind set to put it's neck on the line and have it get its head chopped off a few times. Also if conservative pragmatists are not at the table, all hell will be paid to inefficiencies. Any pioneer facet of society, or budding industry, does need to go through it's growing pains.
Yes, glenncz, as you said correctly,
"Recycling Is Nonsense and costs our society. We are not running out of these materials, that is why in bulk the base materials cost almost nothing."
But I don't think it will be so for too long. I think good (real and true) market systems can allow for the adjustments that we need to make in common, and that these adjustments will not be onerous, but partially practical, and then in time, eminently practical.
I want a system that will reward a good idea. My dad would always tell me: "If I want you to bark, I'll throw you a bone." But did I listen? I have an idea, a really great idea, to use toilet paper rolls, and paper towel rolls, as a core material for building construction panels and wall trusses. There would be a market created by the materials handling system for four sizes of tp rolls, again standardization may dictate to a toilet paper manufacturer that the twelve rolls in a case have different size cardboard tubes. And these may be color coded, in order to nest them together, then into a dip bath of hot plastic, then onto a line where the two core skins are attached, and all this could be local, creating jobs in the housing industry, creating wealth. The plastic would be free. And the paper rolls would be free, but not strictly speaking. The costs of standardization would be born in subsidies gotten from the "new market rrr (reduce, recycle, reuse) system", so the unfunded mandates could or would be small. The rewards may be societally diffuse.
I have often spoke of the Tripe System Report. I am BEGGING you all to read it, PLEASE. Recycle issues are broad. Urine (recycled) to bamboo, along with #1 plastic (recycled) can be a good economical core for a large diameter multi conduit Transportation/Utilities/Energy system pipe, of my own design. Good system designs can dovetail together for synergies that are very productive. www.environmentalfisherman.com Steven J. Scannell Hyannis, Massachusetts USA
Here is an excellent balanced article.
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=1524
The bottom line is even NOT considering the free "green slave" labor of the resident, recycling costs money. It costs the City more to recycle than it does to just throw it in a dump. Here in the United State we have endless land available for landfill space. Also, paper, plastic and even aluminum are incredibly cheap to buy as a raw resource. Does anyone KNOW why it costs more to recycle than it does to put the garbage in a dump? Likely because Recycling uses more of our natural resources and energy than simply manufacturing the product from raw resources. The article above quotes a number of city accountants who say their township is loosing money by recycling. One complains about the fee they have to pay to haul this stuff away to the recycling plant. The recycling plant doesn't can't pay much for the "junk" because it is obviously (at least me) a very inefficient to create our products.
But the Green Society doesn't really care about the details whatsoever, because it is part of the New Religion we have in this world. So you take you three bins to the curb after doing after doing about 30 minutes of work. The 3 tubs are actually worthless, but let's say that we put about 4,000 of them together so they now have value. So your 3 tubs are now worth 50 cents. (just making up numbers, but i am sure it is not much). So you are a Green Slave for the New Religion, you have worked 30 minutes to create 50 cents of value, or 1 dollar per hour. And that doesn't include extra trips for the truck, fuel and workers time. But who cares? Because you are doing the "right thing", somebody told you so, and "everybody knows". Only the accountant knows, and if he knows what is good for him he will keep him mouth shut, right?
Now who would promote this kind of wasteful program? I'll tell you who! Others who are also involved in wasteful energy and resource sucking programs in our society. They know they can train the population to participate in such nonsense then they will be more $secure$ in their own nonsense.
On a side note. I am actually a Democrat, for the past 2 years, because I was embarrassed to be associated with the greatest waste of our (USA) recourse in our countries history, that has occurred since 2003. It's a crazy world. I was at church(Methodist) today, and the Pastors sermon was how money was the route of all evil and how we should give money to the church. I know and like the pastor, and such sermons don't offend me personally, but the Pastor should consider ourselves quite lucky that there are hard working capitalists such as myself who give $80/wk to support the Church, otherwise the $5/wk'ers just don't add up to pay the bills. I know, because I'm the Finance Chairman.
But the moral of the story is that there are many in this world who try to define what "being good" is. And most of us want to "be good". And many take advantage of human nature which usually wants to "be good". Like the Climate Scientists. Somehow we are not supposed to care about money and how much electricity costs, they have many utterly convinced that using alternative energy is "being good" and will leave our world in a better state for our children and grandchildren, yet most citizens have no idea that the only reason ANY alternative energy is constructed is because we use the alt energy produced and just throw the bill on the tab for our children and grandchildren. All of it is highly subsidized. It is like going on vacation, and then just paying the $30/month on your credit card, the rest of your life. It makes no sense whatsoever to go into debt to pay for electricity that is used instantaneously and temporarily, and then pay for it forever. And somehow this is supposed to get us away from foreign debt, hah!
Then we hire people, scientists, who know they have to come up with theories and models that create worry and value, otherwise they wouldn't even be employed. And then the whole mess of NGO's and scientists and other co-conspirators, like the media and politicians, convince the world that "being good" in not worrying about economics and money, because you shouldn't worry about money, because their definition of being good is what counts. This gets us back to the Pastor, "be good" and give me your money, you shouldn't want Money, but I want it!!!. I know he means well, and we really need the money to pay our weekly bills, but when you really look at the logic of all this, all i can life is absurd! But a good place to start, is always look for and accept the truth.
glenncz: Thank you. I did read the link (Fed. Res. Bank of Minneapolis: Fedgazette, Douglas Clement, of The Region March 2005) Which was an oldie but a goodie.
per the article:
I'm learning that illegal dumping is the answer some have to recycling, which I don't like. Florence Wis. Early 1990's, garbage volume dropped by 50%, sounds good .. only 14% of this is real, Nearby Iron Mountain Homes got stuck with the garbage, and illegal dumping. Imagine exporting your garbage for spite, or as a message, or trying to save money? Who are these garbage dumpers? What are the fines, and who is getting bagged? Is there any political element to the dumping? I would guess, 27.7% of the dumpers are "conservative" systems refuse-nicks, fighting the good fight against the liberals, but I'm certainly not an expert.
This points to a need for some systems homogeneity. We seem to be on the fence, or betwixt and between. Should we go back to landfill, keep trudging along with our old silly five cent recycle systems, or try to model a more thorough and comprehensive materials handling system? At the end of the article; "Like politics, all garbage is local." I would tend to disagree, because I would want mandated systems to rely on carrots and sticks and mostly market or quasi market prices. Markets don't fail by virtue of being non-existant. Ineptitude and ignorance in the management of value for value transactions, coupled to a refusal to price the real factors (primarily cost externalizations) that are generally quantifiable, is why "common management", or public resource systems fail. These are similarities I see with public resource economics. There is also a dual system in fisheries as in solid waste management: one system for commercial fishing, and another system for recreational fishing. It's not good. Same thing: at discretion, some garbage goes to the landfill, and some goes to the separate recycle system. From a systems perspective, I don't like that: and I would say it's broken.
I'm learning that my comprehensive materials handling system is called ADF, Advanced Disposal Fees, which means your purchase price on a battery, tire, computer, TV, cans, bottles, newspaper, etc. also may contain the disposal costs.
I'm learning that so called cost to benefit analysis with no adjustment for subsidized virgin materials is a problem in thinking. And it amounts to an unfair comparison, or competition between system genres. And to be fair the "slave labor" so called should be more realistically quantified.
I'm learning that unit based pricing per bag or per barrel to be landfilled can work to both increase recycling and increase illegal dumping.
And I know systems where people are "paid" (from their own money at retail) to recycle would also work to increase recycle numbers and to decrease, ostensibly dumping. The most likely scenario, would be for a household to donate it's recyclables, which would have more value, to charities, or children, or low rung or disabled workers. This full cost accounting and full charge off of costs, using ADF, coupled to an increase in unit dumping fees, and coupled to other subsidies, could make the system start up. I really think sorting would be a good job for many disabled folks. I think we would love it, if we did it together around a circular conveyor, and were paid piece meal. Whether or not the total rrr system would carry itself is debatable. The thing of the comparisons now is the full cost accounting just isn't being done. The subsidies aren't being figured in yet, unless I'm in the dark, which may well be, as I'm just getting into this particular system again now. But to me a major point would be the transformation of existing social services subsidies for idleness could be used for the gainful employment. Employment is the best form of therapy.
Thanks Steven J. Scannell www.environmentalfisherman.com
glenncz: Thank you. I did read the link (Fed. Res. Bank of Minneapolis: Fedgazette, Douglas Clement, of The Region March 2005) Which was an oldie but a goodie.
per the article:
I'm learning that illegal dumping is the answer some have to recycling, which I don't like. Florence Wis. Early 1990's, garbage volume dropped by 50%, sounds good .. only 14% of this is real, Nearby Iron Mountain Homes got stuck with the garbage, and illegal dumping. Imagine exporting your garbage for spite, or as a message, or trying to save money? Who are these garbage dumpers? What are the fines, and who is getting bagged? Is there any political element to the dumping? I would guess, 27.7% of the dumpers are "conservative" systems refuse-nicks, fighting the good fight against the liberals, but I'm certainly not an expert.
This points to a need for some systems homogeneity. We seem to be on the fence, or betwixt and between. Should we go back to landfill, keep trudging along with our old silly five cent recycle systems, or try to model a more thorough and comprehensive materials handling system? At the end of the article; "Like politics, all garbage is local." I would tend to disagree, because I would want mandated systems to rely on carrots and sticks and mostly market or quasi market prices. Markets don't fail by virtue of being non-existant. Ineptitude and ignorance in the management of value for value transactions, coupled to a refusal to price the real factors (primarily cost externalizations) that are generally quantifiable, is why "common management", or public resource systems fail. These are similarities I see with public resource economics. There is also a dual system in fisheries as in solid waste management: one system for commercial fishing, and another system for recreational fishing. It's not good. Same thing: at discretion, some garbage goes to the landfill, and some goes to the separate recycle system. From a systems perspective, I don't like that: and I would say it's broken.
I'm learning that my comprehensive materials handling system is called ADF, Advanced Disposal Fees, which means your purchase price on a battery, tire, computer, TV, cans, bottles, newspaper, etc. also may contain the disposal costs.
I'm learning that so called cost to benefit analysis with no adjustment for subsidized virgin materials is a problem in thinking. And it amounts to an unfair comparison, or competition between system genres. And to be fair the "slave labor" so called should be more realistically quantified.
I'm learning that unit based pricing per bag or per barrel to be landfilled can work to both increase recycling and increase illegal dumping.
And I know systems where people are "paid" (from their own money at retail) to recycle would also work to increase recycle numbers and to decrease, ostensibly dumping. The most likely scenario, would be for a household to donate it's recyclables, which would have more value, to charities, or children, or low rung or disabled workers. This full cost accounting and full charge off of costs, using ADF, coupled to an increase in unit dumping fees, and coupled to other subsidies, could make the system start up. I really think sorting would be a good job for many disabled folks. I think we would love it, if we did it together around a circular conveyor, and were paid piece meal. Whether or not the total rrr system would carry itself is debatable. The thing of the comparisons now is the full cost accounting just isn't being done. The subsidies aren't being figured in yet, unless I'm in the dark, which may well be, as I'm just getting into this particular system again now. But to me a major point would be the transformation of existing social services subsidies for idleness could be used for the gainful employment. Employment is the best form of therapy.
Thanks Steven J. Scannell www.environmentalfisherman.com
glenncz: Thank you. I did read the link (Fed. Res. Bank of Minneapolis: Fedgazette, Douglas Clement, of The Region March 2005) Which was an oldie but a goodie.
per the article:
I'm learning that illegal dumping is the answer some have to recycling, which I don't like. Florence Wis. Early 1990's, garbage volume dropped by 50%, sounds good .. only 14% of this is real, Nearby Iron Mountain Homes got stuck with the garbage, and illegal dumping. Imagine exporting your garbage for spite, or as a message, or trying to save money? Who are these garbage dumpers? What are the fines, and who is getting bagged? Is there any political element to the dumping? I would guess, 27.7% of the dumpers are "conservative" systems refuse-nicks, fighting the good fight against the liberals, but I'm certainly not an expert.
This points to a need for some systems homogeneity. We seem to be on the fence, or betwixt and between. Should we go back to landfill, keep trudging along with our old silly five cent recycle systems, or try to model a more thorough and comprehensive materials handling system? At the end of the article; "Like politics, all garbage is local." I would tend to disagree, because I would want mandated systems to rely on carrots and sticks and mostly market or quasi market prices. Markets don't fail by virtue of being non-existant. Ineptitude and ignorance in the management of value for value transactions, coupled to a refusal to price the real factors (primarily cost externalizations) that are generally quantifiable, is why "common management", or public resource systems fail. These are similarities I see with public resource economics. There is also a dual system in fisheries as in solid waste management: one system for commercial fishing, and another system for recreational fishing. It's not good. Same thing: at discretion, some garbage goes to the landfill, and some goes to the separate recycle system. From a systems perspective, I don't like that: and I would say it's broken.
I'm learning that my comprehensive materials handling system is called ADF, Advanced Disposal Fees, which means your purchase price on a battery, tire, computer, TV, cans, bottles, newspaper, etc. also may contain the disposal costs.
I'm learning that so called cost to benefit analysis with no adjustment for subsidized virgin materials is a problem in thinking. And it amounts to an unfair comparison, or competition between system genres. And to be fair the "slave labor" so called should be more realistically quantified.
I'm learning that unit based pricing per bag or per barrel to be landfilled can work to both increase recycling and increase illegal dumping.
And I know systems where people are "paid" (from their own money at retail) to recycle would also work to increase recycle numbers and to decrease, ostensibly dumping. The most likely scenario, would be for a household to donate it's recyclables, which would have more value, to charities, or children, or low rung or disabled workers. This full cost accounting and full charge off of costs, using ADF, coupled to an increase in unit dumping fees, and coupled to other subsidies, could make the system start up. I really think sorting would be a good job for many disabled folks. I think we would love it, if we did it together around a circular conveyor, and were paid piece meal. Whether or not the total rrr system would carry itself is debatable. The thing of the comparisons now is the full cost accounting just isn't being done. The subsidies aren't being figured in yet, unless I'm in the dark, which may well be, as I'm just getting into this particular system again now. But to me a major point would be the transformation of existing social services subsidies for idleness could be used for the gainful employment. Employment is the best form of therapy.
Thanks Steven J. Scannell www.environmentalfisherman.com
Really? Somehow I doubt that. Also I'm somewhat curious as to why you have dug up this balanced article from March 2005.
From the article you linked to:
I'll wager a considerable sum of cash that those economists were not schooled in Biophysical economics and they probably never did a whole cost accounting of the respective supply chains involved.
Rubbish, we have a guy who drives around picking up all your scrap metal, appliance, tin cans AND pays you to do it. I can put out my plastic bottles and the council picks them up for me, that's if the local hardware store doesn't pick them up firt to re-use them.
Rubbish, just google it, the truth is quite the reverse.
Rubbish, they make money from recycling and the recycling centres make money from it and so on up the chain. Most of our recycling pretty much bypasses the council or is only organised by the council, the companies work direct and everyone makes money.
NAOM
Wow! Thanks for putting into one comment a shinning example of everything that is wrong with America. I'm sending a copy of this to my friends and relatives who live in Germany as an example of what I meant when I recently told them people in the US have their heads screwed on backwards.
Well, actually I used slightly different terminology...
Lets see my center uses the money generated from the recycled goods to pay for the center.
Spot prices for metals per metric ton
Aluminum $2272.0
Copper $7956.47
Scrap steel $332.00
mixed paper $75-120 (per metric ton)
http://plasticsnews.com/resin-pricing/recycled-plastics.html
plastic #2 (post consumer) $800 per ton
plastic #1 (clear post consumer) $1200 per ton
plastic #5 (post consumer) $1000 per ton
plsatic #6 (post consumer) $1000 per ton
Curbside recycling cost per ton $30.
Cost to dump $50 per ton.
You need to get your facts together man. You are very uninformed about garbage issues and off by orders of magnitude.
Keep also in mind, that the Swiss waste power plants not only produce heat and power, but also metals (Zn, Cu, Pb, Cd etc.):
(These links are only available in German):
http://www.avut.ch/downloads/231109/Referat_Trockenaustrag_der_Schlacke_...
http://www.bafu.admin.ch/abfall/01495/01496/index.html?lang=de&download=...
I have lived in Zurich for the last 4 years. The approach to waste management here follows the maxim "the polluter pays". I came across a seemingly accurate article here, although it was written in 2005.
http://sustainablecities.dk/en/city-projects/cases/zurich-zuri-sack-popu...
To dispose of household rubbish, one must use so-called Züri-Säcke which cost around CHF 20 for a roll of 10 bags of 35L capacity. There are other sizes available. Some Kantons use a sticker system where you buy a normal black bag and put a sticker on it. It is not unknown to be fined for not using an official refuse bag, or bag without an official sticker. That's right. Someone might rummage through your rubbish.
There are various ways to help you reduce the amount of stuff that must go into a rubbish bag.
All paper and cardboard ("Karton") is recyclable. You can also include paper-based refuse that cannot go to the paper recycle plant. There are collections from the street outside your front door every fortnight for paper, and for cardboard once a month. The cardboard and bits of sellotape, IKEA catalogs, etc. are burned at a facility that is at a quite central location.
There are special bins you can keep for the disposal of garden waste. My understanding is it goes to a central composting facility. I assume the resulting compost is redistributed among the various city gardens and flower beds.
Supermarkets have provision for the return of PET bottles. Milk bottles, mineral water bottles, etc. Some allow you to dispose of used batteries there.
Metal cans, glass bottles and used cooking oil can be taken to a (usually) nearby recycling point of the type in the picture at the top of this article. There are containers for metal, clear glass and green and brown glass.
Before chucking out a glass bottle, check the label. There might be a reclaimable deposit. In which case, visit your local Coop and put these through a scanner that will give you a printed voucher you can use against your next purchase.
Most packaging, including Karton, can be disposed of by returning it to the supplier. That includes expanded polyurethane, non-recyclable PET, etc. Dead light bulbs can also be returned to the shop you bought them from. In practice, you can dispose of any dead light bulb at any shop that sells them. They tend to have a large skip behind the premises. Household electrical goods have similar disposal policies.
The only real questions I have of the system are whether this mixed waste stream processing, with all the different disposal points, is more efficient than a single stream waste system. And that only PET bottles ae recyclable here. My final criticism is that not everyone recycles. At least it costs them more to do so.
Just my $0.02
Post Carbon Institute just posted a chapter on Waste from their Post Carbon Reader. It gives some background on the waste issue, and is not enthusiastic about burning waste to generate energy. A PDF and short video are available:
http://www.postcarbon.org/report/141147-waste-climate-change-peak-oil-and
We recycle everything* here and compost the rest.
Mixed paper, metals (Al and steel), plastics by number, and green materials are the only major services a city requires. The recycling center recoups the funds from the sale of the materials.
*Here are the items that get thrown away:
[1] Mylar wrappers
[2] Dirty diapers
[3] Any rubber pieces or old parts not designed for the normal plastics recycle center.
I would compost the dirty diapers ;-)
Here we take excrement along with other soiled products as a recyclable product.
NAOM
OCT: Dirty Diapers are a significant enough part of the solid waste stream to take seriously. Adult briefs and some other things fall into the same category. It's one of the most vexing articles on the rubbish heap.
Let's look at the diaper deal with the old system and with my new proposed system. The diapers now have three categories. First the old cotton, second the standard plastic, third the new recyclable; and since the current deal with the existing system, is such that our current system waits passively for waste to come out the pipe line, there we have it. Dirty diapers, unplanned, from a systems perspective. This is the bad side of complexity. Pondlife advocated for standardization, and I agree. There is more to recycling than yes or no.
With a comprehensive recycle system, the planning and work starts at the points of manufacture, or importation, essentially the same thing. Few articles will warrant social considerations, but diapers will be one of those articles. Because diapers are a bio-hazard, chemical construction, social, medical, and composting challenge, the work does need to start at point A not at point D. So a good system will subsidize diapers to be recyclable, and will also absorb much of this cost. How? The mechanism is simple. Recycle taxes with lots of strings, will be put on the materials going into the market. Accounting wise, this is simple, and the budgets for dumping and recycling are there already, so additional monies will not be big, in fact I would argue it will be cheaper. The money from this going in tax, recycle materials going in, will be put towards puffing up the markets for materials. We are almost there, and a systemized, holistic approach will get us there. Cardboard, paper, aluminum, glass, some of the plastics, are almost pretty good, but with a holistic system we can electrify the whole system. Economies of scale will figure in when we recycle much more than we do now. And, although I am not proposing a mandatory recycle system the garbage materials will de-facto create a market for grandmothers garbage, to be sorted.
The simple one gallon milk jug will perhaps cost an extra one half cent to manufacture, with the going in tax. But a four ounce wax paper carton may cost 3 cents to manufacture, with the going in tax. These materials are going into the system, and it's better to have control, than not. The monies will not relate to the materials subsidy directly, but instead this will be an engineered market based on all of the negatives and positives that need to be in the equation. The diapers may need pant-loads of subsidy, but aluminum perhaps will be a money maker for the whole of the system. The system is comprehensive, and the core price system allows the control, and the efficiency that comes from that control. Systems are all about control.
Dirty diapers are the acid test of materials handling systems. With a true system we control going in. We have control, and it's all about that. Steven J. Scannell www.environmentalfisherman.com
With a comprehensive style materials handling system, (unlike our passive "wait till it comes out of the pipeline" type system) the appraised manufactured value, positive or negative, of the recyclable packaging material .... going INTO the upper part of the economic funnel ... is the strategy. We use a "good or bad" based materials tax. The tax relates NOT to the food or soap being sold, but only to the finished recycle, or material product. So we are then thinking the recycle industry and the packaging industry are one in the same ... to the consumer ... and then since that is true we need a system to reflect that fact.
Building this system will be easy.
It's not punitive penalty "you bad" taxation. It's what the materials market needs. It needs to be "rationalized". I hate that word. There is not any economic rationality to allowing the "bad" packaging a free ride that will cost us all a lot of money at the end of the stream. The tax money in the recycle "Kitty", or enterprise account goes to support materials "market" prices, programs to put people to work, likely tied to social services systems, all local based.
My motto with a value price core system is this: We tax what we don't like and subsidize what we do. In this way we trend a system to bend to our will with no shock to the system itself. Very mainstream stuff I think: Not Right, Not Left: but just Practical, workable, fair.
Steven J. Scannell www.environmentalfisherman.com Read the Tripe System Report. (11 pages)