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A LOAD OF RUBBISH


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Good point, F.

 

Not doubt this little exercise creates some well-paid jobs in the council.

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Good points here, everyone.

 

I'll add my two cents (pennies, farthings, sen, en, whatever).

 

Having lived in Japan for 17 years the state of garbage there might be interesting to folk here -- I am in no way saying that what is applicable/practicable there has any bearing on what is possible here. Alot of gabrage management in Japan comes down to the mind-set of the individual consumer (sadly).

 

At my last house (more a flat, actually, in a US-style condominium-type development) we had something like 15 different garbage days (I can't recall the specific number as I don't have a calendar to hand). Aluminium, steel, green glass, brown glass and white glass each had their own receptacle and were uplifted on given days -- but you were allowed to put them in their receptacles whenever you wanted. We were required (no jail sentences for non-compliance, but still, you felt a bit of a burke for skyving) to wash containers, and, ideally, de-label them.

 

There were other days for: burnables, non-burnables (excluding plastic), plastic (excluding polystyrene), "waxed" paper (eg milk or juice cartons -- washed and cut so that they lay flat), newspaper, magazines and glossy paper, "raw" garbage (food waste, etc), clothing, appliances and, finally, large items.

 

Everyone complied. In my neck of the woods, there was approximately one garbage transfer station for each 2km radius so the average distance each collection vehicle needed to travel was not very far and if you've ever seen a Japanese garbage truck (about the size of a range rover -- just kidding! but not far off) you would realise that the combination of efficient collection vehicles/proximity to transfer/community cooperation would add up to sustainable garbage maintenance.

 

In a country that small (c. the size of GB, but 80% vertical, so habitable space = Ireland) with that many people (c. 125m), without that kind of policy... what a nightmare.

 

Ironic counterpoint. A former colleague of mine is a legal adviser for Waste Mangement in the US. We had a recycling debate in which she let me know in no uncertain terms that the Japanese multi-collection policy is absolutely untenable in a country as LARGE as the US. The economics of transport simply defeat good practise 99 times out of 100. The sad thing is, she is definitely right...

 

Peace.

SubT

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nice post Subterranimal, and very interesting about Japanese waste management. I think the psychology of this is worth looking at. Reading this, I thought, 'there's no way I'd waste my time delabelling cans and cutting up tetrapaks'. Having said that, if I thought that everyone else was doing it, I'd probably want to 'do my bit' and fall in with what everyone else was doing.

 

However, when I see my binmen picking up my recycling bin, and just bunging the contents in with the rest of the ordinary rubbish, and also hear about UK waste being shipped to China for landfill, it sort of kills any incentive you might have to try and recycle more efficiently.

 

I'm not one to follow the herd, but in this sort of scenario, I'd feel bad about being a waster when everyone else was being conscientious, but maybe that says more about me than the idea, as I'm certainly not doing all I could to be green at the moment. This might not work in the US, but I guess could work in the UK, as land area is much smaller, but the idea of having 15 different recycling boxes in the front garden of a suburban semi/terrace would appear to be unmanageable, even if legislation compelled people to do this.

 

I think this has to be driven by sentiment. If Posh and Becks and the cast of Eastenders started doing it, maybe the herd would follow, and some workable infrastructure could be introduced. At that point I'd no doubt be shamed into following suit....

 

TLM

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  • 1 month later...

It's the plastic that bugs me. The current place I'm living in has pretty good recycling facilities and so an awful lot gets recycled. The majority of stuff that doesn't get dealt with is food waste and plastic. So much bloody plastic! Everything is packaged in it these days...

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It's the plastic that bugs me. The current place I'm living in has pretty good recycling facilities and so an awful lot gets recycled. The majority of stuff that doesn't get dealt with is food waste and plastic. So much bloody plastic! Everything is packaged in it these days...

 

 

Much of the plastic can be recycled, look for the little triangle symbol made with arrows and a number inside it. That indicates the type of plastic used and how/if it can be recycled at the recycling depot.

 

Though whether your council will collect it the first place is an issue? My council (Kingston upon Thames) doesn't collect cardboard! duh. But they do plastics. When I asked them why not, I was told it will be reviewed in 2008!!

 

Once you get into the habit of recycling, it isn't that big a deal....unless of course you have limited space to store the stuff until collection day. Ours is done fortnightly, but we missed the collection on Monday and so will have a small mountain for them next time :lol:

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hi

 

just caught this thread.

 

my family were discussing this last week.

im not that old but do remember everything used to be recycled...

milk man collected the bottles ...after you washed them...

soft drinks man came once a week...... took away the old bottles

you cold make a little extra money by collecting empty beer bottles from the neighbours, taking them back to the pub, or the off licence... or labour club..

 

my mum never went to the supermarket without her own bags, if we didnt have enough we asked for empty boxes,,, there was always a load of them by the dooor on fridays..

 

i think at the moment its up to everyone to do their bit... i take bags to the super market still, .. and during my years in singapore i never missed an opportunity to chat with the managers of supermarkets and explain to them the wastefullness of plastic bags....their response was always, ''Singaporean like to have everything seperate and double bagged''

 

in the east, as some of you know, they put one item per bag... getting them to fill bags up is unthinkable...

 

if supermarkets charged 10p a bag, money going to the lonely snail charity ,, may induce people to bring along their own....

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Anaerobic Digestion is a technology for consideration.

 

80% reduction in bulk volume with methane gas and a high grade fertilizer as useable bi-products.

 

In a peak-oil world, current oil-derived fertilizers will cost substantially more.

 

Unfortunately AD does not completely destroy certain bad pathogens, so not used for fertilizing foodstuffs...but....can be used for growing energy crops...biofuels, Miscanthus, etc.

 

An old technology, used for 100yrs in UK for powering sewage works, but more modern hi-tech implementations exist, where Netherlands / Denmark / Germany are the leaders and far in front of the UK and USA.

 

The likes of Biffa are re-visiting this technology as one alternative, because they know land fill gate prices are set to go through the roof (as UK seriously runs out of landfill space).

 

Biffa were until recently a subsiduary of Severn Trent Water. I went to a talk last year by their Directory of Technology and came away very impressed. They know exactly where they are and what is going on. I'd say they'd make a good investment.

 

http://www.biffa.co.uk/

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Good thread - and food for thought as well as a trip down memory lane for a few of us.

 

Back when I were a lad, I used to supplement my pocket money by taking

lemonade bottles back to the shop fpr a refund.

Likewise, milk was delivered in glass bottles, and the empties taken away for recycling.

 

To this day, the cost of making a glass bottle from old glass is much lower

than making new glass from sand.

 

Additionally, there was a lot less bottle litter (and subsequent broken glass)

in those days - most of it got picked up by kids for the money.

 

When I lived in Germany, we bought beer by the crate load, and recycled the deposit

on crate and bottles into next week's batch :) Such joy.

 

Right now, I can remember why we ever began to move away from it - cheap oil perhaps?

 

Thinking about it more, I think some kind of material refund deposit

could apply to most objects, from washing machines to pcs.

 

This would give a good incentive to recycle, and reduce a lot of the landfill and

flytipping we se today - not to mention the sheer waste of using petroleum products

for disposable packaging.

 

People would not need fines to encourage recycling, and the transportation problem

would be solved, as people would gladly bring their old stuff to be recycled.

 

I wonder why none of our newly 'green' political parties hasn't

lookedinto this policy...?

 

ABB

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You all should check out www.wastaway.com, I am involved with this company. They can take the municipal waste stream and through a series of grinders, conveyers, and high pressure steam tanks convert household garbage to a material they call fluff. This fluff can then be gasified to produce synthetic gas which can replace natural gas. This can then power boilers to produce electricity and amazingly affordable rates. Granted higher than the local electrical provider; however, considerably less than most green energy providers. They are currently conducting a test to produce biodiesel from the fluff. The fluff may also be used for land applications and nurseries a growing substrate. The process also removes the metals from the garbage stream to be recycled. The company is currently putting a complete system in Aruba to handle a portion of their garbage.

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If the government doesn't want you do do something.. it can normally either make it illegal or tax it to make it unviable and prompt alternatives.

 

You can't ban packaging outright and the concept of trying to apply a tax to millions of different types of packaging doesn't make sense.

 

So what's the best way?

 

To me, just a fleeting idea, taxing the import and production of plastics and other decomposable materials seems to be the simplest way.. perhaps with the ability to reclaim part of the tax on items which are recycled?

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  • 10 months later...
OK. I know I am radical which is probably another word for a c*nt. But if you have been unemployed for more than say 6 months then this is exactly the type of work you should be forced to do if you want to continue receiving benefits.

 

Same goes for single mums. Whilst the kid is at school why should i pay for them to sit and smoke fags and eat pies?

 

I think you might see a marked improvment in peoples efforts to get a a job!

 

Well thats my cards on the table. I'll go now. :)

 

 

A view that you're not alone in. How much of it is what they actually cost you as a tax payer compared to the feeling of injustice that someone gets (in your opinion) a cushy life but you have to work? I know some single mothers, they all do more in a day than the civil servants I know and they do it 7 days a week.

 

Give a firm like HP or IBM the same efficiency of organisation as our government departments have and you'll be shorting them to the limits of your credit. Does the single mother cost you more than one of my civil service mates with his feet on the desk? I doubt it. Does the single mother cost you more than the self employed guy being creative with his tax return?

 

You also have to deduct what people like J K Rowling have earned. Would Harry Potter have been written had she been forced to work rather than claim benefits. Same goes for bands like Frankie Goes To Hollywood and UB40.

 

I saw a doc about an American single mother forced to work, whenever she saw her kids she was exhausted after being bussed to and from a minimum wage job many miles from her home. Those kids are far more likely to cause expensive social problems as adults than the children of stay at home single mothers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ONE SOLUTION is to get consumers to do it.

 

One way this is done is to put a Deposit cost on an item. Thus, the buyer of a can of beer might pay 5p or so extra for the beer. And he can get his 5p back, if he returns the beer can to a collection point. This provides an economic incentive to collect all those empty beer cans

In Finland there are deposits on bottles and cans.

Small glass bottle, 10 cents.

Large plastic bottle, 40 cents!

 

Also on aluminium cans, maybe 20 cents (not sure as I never buy them).

 

Near households, rather than a single rubbish skip there are several divided according to glass, paper, cartons, mixed burnable rubbish etc.

 

We the customers end up doing the sorting.

 

On 30th April there is a massive Mayday party (ginormous piss-up basically) and the large number of bottles discarded in the streets and parks are soon collected up by guys wanting the deposit money. Some even take a van to collect them.

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Going back to companies and solutions for waste (to energy), these lot seem to have come up with a pretty interesting solution:

 

http://www.reclaimresources.com/

 

Apparently you can put in all rubbish unsorted, then once processed can be sorted and converted into bioethanol or electricity. Sounds pretty good to me and the fact that the BBC picked it up has to be a positive.

 

DrZ

 

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Going back to companies and solutions for waste (to energy), these lot seem to have come up with a pretty interesting solution:

 

http://www.reclaimresources.com/

 

Apparently you can put in all rubbish unsorted, then once processed can be sorted and converted into bioethanol or electricity. Sounds pretty good to me and the fact that the BBC picked it up has to be a positive.

 

DrZ

 

Looks interesting.

 

by the way, Do you own the company or just work for them :P

 

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I live in Wandsworth. We are every actively encouraged by the council to recycle our waste. They give us free orange bags to put out recyclable waste in.

 

This is then, I am, shipped to China to be recycled.

 

Bearing in mind the damage to the environmentof transport, how can that be environmentally friendly?

 

What's more. The accusation is that once it gets to China it is not recycled, but just dumped.

 

So it becomes deeply environmentally UNfriendly to channel your waste through the existing 'green' routes.

 

In this age of globalisation, it has become an impossibility. But surely the route forward on every level, not just the green one, is to do things LOCALLY. Local banks, local business, local government, local schools, local leaders and so on and bloody so on. I'd much rather have a street or block leader who I know and do (or don't trust) than Tony Blair and Gordon Sold All Our Gold Brown. Gordon Brown and his Golden Brown.

 

Hi. Might be an idea to read the leaflets that we posted round couple of months ago! ;) ( I was working for Wastewatch in your area. ) No . It doesn't all get shipped off to China....

 

nice video of where your orange bags go, the film of the SE London Materials Recy Fac. is about 4/5th of the way through.

 

http://www.westernriverside.org.uk/recycling-movie.php

:rolleyes:

 

 

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A lot of the problem with recycling in the UK is the

patchwork of policies implemented by local councils.

 

Some provide separation bins (from 2 to 5), others

will just collect paper for 'recycling', fortnightly.

 

The differing policies make it much harder to achieve

economies of scale that could be obtained by a more

consistent national policy.

ABB

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How to exploit the green revolution using multilevel marketing

 

As society reduces its dependance on global supply chains I believe that new local supply chains will emerge to meet needs such as producing food. A comment on here has lead me to think of ways of strengthening these using multilevel marketing. I'm very interested in Transition towns. This is a viral community movement that aims to empower members to prepare for a world with lower energy use by preparing at a local level. It states its aims are to

 

* significantly rebuild resilience (in response to peak oil)

* drastically reduce carbon emissions (in response to climate change)?

 

To do this TT have employed similar ideas to those discussed on this forum

 

Alternative currencies

Reskilling - wood working, natural building, permaculture repairing and cooking,

Working in cooperation with local government and businesses

 

A fuller description is here

 

http://transitiontowns.org/TransitionNetwo...ransitionPrimer

 

A lot of thought is given to how to direct peoples energies, overcome change and achieve change in a community from the grassroots up.

 

From my understanding multi level marketing is a community that grows organically driven by the need of existing member to recruit new members so that they can make more money.

 

A MLM business that could achieve this by providing a service to the Transition town initiative is interesting. The handbook that I've linked to says

 

The business exchange is a project that takes a different look at waste. It aims to match up companies where one business's waste is a raw material for another. For example, the building trade discards huge amounts of wood that could be used by companies making wood chips for the new type of household boilers.

 

Almost waste could be recycled like this couldn't it?

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Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic

PhDs have been searching for a solution to the plastic waste problem, and this 16 year old finds the answer.

 

It's not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis.

But such was the case at last month's May's Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

 

burd.jpg

NOTE: there are TWO high school students who discovered plastic-consuming microorganisms. The first was Daniel Burd (last year). The second was Tseng I-Ching (last month), a high school student in Taiwan.

 

Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn't considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

 

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

 

That was Daniel's question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

 

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.

 

/more: http://www.mnn.com/technology/research-inn...at-eats-plastic

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Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic

Let's hope that those microbes are controlled very securely. I for one would be most disappointed if my lovely brand new pair of shiny bri-nylon underpants started decomposing after wearing them for about six weeks.

 

On the other hand, maybe we could sprinkle a few of them over Pyongyang's missile silos.

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  • 8 months later...
Boy discovers microbe that eats plastic

PhDs have been searching for a solution to the plastic waste problem, and this 16 year old finds the answer.

 

It's not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis.

But such was the case at last month's May's Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

 

burd.jpg

NOTE: there are TWO high school students who discovered plastic-consuming microorganisms. The first was Daniel Burd (last year). The second was Tseng I-Ching (last month), a high school student in Taiwan.

 

Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed PhDs hadn't considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

 

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

 

That was Daniel's question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

 

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.

 

/more: http://www.mnn.com/technology/research-inn...at-eats-plastic

 

Wow, that's absolutely fascinating. Such a simple, logical thought process. These kinds of things always make me feel like a moron. :angry:

 

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