US States Banned From Exporting Trash To China Are Drowning In Plastic 427
hackingbear writes "Not only we depend on Chinese labor for the imports but we also depend on them to clean up our mess. Being green is getting a lot harder for eco-friendly states in the U.S., thanks to the country's dependency on overrun Chinese recycling facilities since the start of China's Green Fence policy this year. Recycling centers in Oregon and Washington recently stopped accepting clear plastic "clamshell" containers used for berries, plastic hospital gowns and plastic bags, while California's farmers are grappling with what to do with the 50,000 to 75,000 tons of plastic they use each year. The Green Fence initiative bans bales of plastic that haven't been cleaned or thoroughly sorted. That type of recyclable material, which costs more to recycle, often it ends up in China's landfills, which have become a source of recent unrest in the country's south. For every ton of reusable plastic, China has received many more tons of random trash, some of it toxic. That has helped build 'trash mountains' so high they sometimes bury people alive. For a country facing environmental crisis after environmental crisis, it is no longer tenable to accept US waste exports."
Thank goodness... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm doing my part to keep from burying innocent folks in China!!
They aren't drowning in plastic (Score:5, Interesting)
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And it might mean printing the damned recycle numbers somewhat larger than 0.5 mm. I really don't feel like getting out my loupe just to figure out which bin to toss a piece of plastic in.
come on, this IS the 21st century! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:come on, this IS the 21st century! (Score:4, Funny)
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Are there actually that many people who actually spend the time and effort and keep multiple 'bins' in their kitchens to actually sort out their trash into different categories just to recycle?
I know one person that does this, most people I know are like me...one garbage can...everything goes it in and garbage men haul i
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The county I live in charges me for a mandatory recycling bin. They can sort it. They are just lucky I even bother to put stuff that 'looks' recyclable in it.
Re:They aren't drowning in plastic (Score:4, Interesting)
I suppose they're lucky that you condescend to use indoor plumbing rather than shit in the street, too.
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The old privatise and save 'er' profit thing comes to play. So the privatised the recycling which was going to save money. Promptly cabals formed and prices sky rocketed. As for the recycling, well, apparently they just took all that consumer sorted rubbish and chucked it all into one bin and then sent it overseas. Highly profitable pseudo recycling brought to you by the lowest most corrupt tender.
Re:They aren't drowning in plastic (Score:4, Informative)
They just need to be more thoroughly sorted
Wrong.
Household waste plastic other than clear plastic PET is not worth recycling. The plastic lobby has pulled the wool over your eyes. Plastic can be easily recycled when sorted, is like saying you can easily walk to work when someone gives you a piggyback ride.
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Similar for paper.
There are TONS of household stuff that can contaminate paper and make it unrecyclable. Basically anything with grease, oil, food, etc... So you end up being that even if you recycle your paper, most of it will have come into contact with the grease from last nights pizza and cannot be recycled.
http://americanrecyclingca.com/2011/05/paper/contamination-in-paper-recycling/ [americanrecyclingca.com]
Re:They aren't drowning in plastic (Score:4, Interesting)
A fast food restaurant cannot put their trash bags in the paper recycling bin, no, but a few pizza boxes are not going contaminate an entire batch of recycled paper, unlike plastic where dissimilar plastics will contaminate and entire batch.
Paper recycling handles food residue without a problem. To recycle paper you throw it all in a gigantic vat, boil it, and everything breaks down. Inks, Fat, Oil and grease float to the top and are skimmed off, solids like staples and plastic are filtered out.
Unlike plastic where there is no economical way to remove the inks used to make white/blue/green containers and if you mix PET and ABS, you get garbage.
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In Seattle we put food-soiled paper in the yard waste, along with chicken bones, pizza boxes, and seafood shells.
It all gets turned into compost here. Which is then used to grow more food.
Adapt. Pollution has a cost.
Re:They aren't drowning in plastic (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They aren't drowning in plastic (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't it all hydrocarbons anyways? Why not just burn it in coal power plants?
That's basically what the Dutch do, and they're the golden child of recycling. They found that burning plastic is more economical than recycling it. They also recycle all sorts of metals, but after incineration.
http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/06/a-tour-of-amsterdam%E2%80%99s-waste-to-energy-plant/ [triplepundit.com]
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Actually, we recently started collecting plastic separately [plasticheroes.nl]. Which means that we now collect glass (white and coloured often separate), paper, clothing, compostable waste, batteries and other small chemical waste, and plastic separately in most places, and then there is a separate recycling scheme that puts a small extra fee on PET soft drink bottles, glass beer bottles and beer crates, which you get back if you hand them back in in the shop. Supermarkets have machines that you put them into, and they're co
Re:They aren't drowning in plastic (Score:4, Interesting)
You are probably referring to Plasma Gasification (if it works) would be great for "recyling" hydrocarbons into nothing more than power and slag, minimizing the hydrocarbon's pollution cycle as I like to call it.
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...and slanted article.
I see what you did there.
cheers,
Re:They aren't drowning in plastic (Score:4, Insightful)
Chemo is correct.
What most people fail to understand is we recycle even food waste in Seattle, which you put in with the yard waste.
When I moved here in the late 80s, used to be the largest bin you put out was Garbage, the next largest was bottles, and once in a while you put out paper.
Nowadays the largest bin we put out is recycling, the next largest is compostable yard waste - which includes food waste like seafood shells, chicken bones, food soiled paper napkins/plates. A lot of forks and knives and spoons and cups you buy here are Compostable - we throw them in the yard waste.
Most of us barely fill a very small plastic shopping bag with garbage - about the size of the thing your newspaper comes in.
Adapt. Pollution has a cost.
But what will the container ships do? (Score:5, Interesting)
They'll have to dead head back to China with empty ships!
This story reminds me of the documentary "ShipBreakers" [wikipedia.org] showing the plight of the Indian workers breaking down ships and dealing with the toxic and unsafe conditions. At one point a ship arrives that had been on a toxic list for a long time, had had it's name changed multiple times and was finally going to get scrapped in India because no other place on Earth would take it.
CBS 60 minutes did a story on it too but it was in Bangladesh and three years later than the documentary.. [cbsnews.com]
Re:But what will the container ships do? (Score:4, Insightful)
> They'll have to dead head back to China with empty ships!
Exports?
I know, crazy idea.
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Cute, but what could we possibly make in the US that can compare to the prices you get when you don't bother with labor and environmental regulations?
Aircraft
CPUs
Software
Movies
Tourism
Food
Although, except for food, these don't take up much space on container ships, so many are empty on the return trip to China.
America is the world's second biggest exporter [npr.org].
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Re:But what will the container ships do? (Score:4, Informative)
Because there's gold in them thar ships. If you look at the CBS report 80% of the steel used in Bangladesh comes from ship dismantling. The guy who owns the yard is doing well even though he has kids working in his yards. That was shot in 2007, I wonder how many of those kids are still alive today?
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I saw that 60 Minutes report (and other similar one they did on the dump kids of Brazil). It's sad how many people in this world live in (and off of) the toxic trash dumps of wealthier people. It's hardly uncommon [globalpost.com] in the third world, sadly.
Incinerators (Score:5, Informative)
Guys, lots of other countries use incinerators for non-recyclable stuff. You get rid of it, and get electricity and heat as a bonus. Modern incinerators are so clean, they rarely even emit visible steam.
Why is the US so allergic to incinerators?
Re:Incinerators (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is the US so allergic to incinerators?
NIMBY.
Re:Incinerators (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Incinerators (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, they are doing it wrong!
The incineration plant was 50 miles from the city that produces the garbage. The idea is to have the plant so close to the city that you can use the heat to heat houses in the winter. Also, the stuff they take in contains all kinds of stuff that doesn't really burn, the article mentions refrigrerators. Around here we recycle all kinds of stuff (and definately refridgerators) so that what is left in the dumpster burns very well.
And finally, saying that solar is cheaper may be true in the summer, but how will you heat houses in the winter with solar? Only run the plant during nights and winter or whatever are the peak hours. Obviously this will probably make the individual kwh:s even more expensive, but peak hour power is much more valuable when other sources are not enough.
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And finally, saying that solar is cheaper may be true in the summer, but how will you heat houses in the winter with solar?
Most people around here do it by running their air conditioner in reverse, but a lot of people use gas, too.
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Most people around here do it by running their air conditioner in reverse, but a lot of people use gas, too.
Where do you live? Heat pumps work best where winters are mild. In America, that usually means south of the Mason-Dixon line or Ohio River. So if you are in Arkansas, a heat pump is fine. If you are in Wisconsin, you need a furnace. They also work better when they use a ground loop rather than the outside air as a heat source. A ground loop costs more to install, but is almost always worth it.
Re:Incinerators (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the article the 50 miles drive is one reason the plant is not competitive against cheap landfills. The garbage trucks need to drive 100 miles with each load.
Here (Finland, Europe) we have pipes that circulate almost boiling water in city and town centers. The plants can be a mile or two away and the losses are not too bad - the pipes are underground and they have a lot of polyurethane around them for insulation. The plants do produce both elecricity and heat.
It may be true that is Michigan it's not cold enough to make something like that worthwhile. Here we can easily have a month of -20C cold and in December days are 8 hours long, so solar just isn't not an option. During that time my house uses about 200kWh of heat a day - and it is well insulated. I am looking at ways to get as much as possible of that 200kWh from something other then electricity.
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I remember when I was a kid, my grandmother still burned most of her trash (and was very efficient about not producing trash), since she lived in the country and didn't have city trash pickup. She hated to deal with plastic, though, since even she wasn't crash enough to burn that and so many more things were coming in plastic containers (this was back when you could still find most stuff in glass and paper containers).
I think we would be better off going back to more glass and paper. But that's going to mea
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When I was a small child in the early 70s, we still sent glass bottles back to the store to be re-used. Yes, they actually steam-cleaned soda bottles and re-used them. Crazy, eh?
I'm not sure what's more energy intensive though. A proper cleaning of the bottles to me implies raising them to some standard temperature long enough to kill pathogens. You also have to inspect them for damage and things that are stuck in the bottle even after the cleaning process. Huh? Well, we actually found a mass of what
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I used to go across the street to a local store and get a bottled soda occasionally when I was a kid and return the bottle, but I much preferred the fountain across town two squirts of Dr. Pepper and one squirt cherry. I don't really drink soda anymore but I do miss those kind of places. Pinball machines... yes I still stop and play them occasionally when I see one.
Re:Incinerators (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern incinerators are so clean, they rarely even emit visible steam.
Why is the US so allergic to incinerators?
Dioxin and other ''invisible" nasties, perhaps? Those stable substances have to go somewhere. And putting them in the atmosphere, although a time honored tradition, isn't really a good idea.
Re:Incinerators (Score:4, Informative)
In the 21st century, there's no excuse for significant dioxin emissions from incinerators:
In 2005, The Ministry of the Environment of Germany, where there were 66 incinerators at that time, estimated that "...whereas in 1990 one third of all dioxin emissions in Germany came from incineration plants, for the year 2000 the figure was less than 1%. Chimneys and tiled stoves in private households alone discharge approximately 20 times more dioxin into the environment than incineration plants." [wikipedia.org]
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Interesting, but here's one significant problem:
As of the year 2000, although small-scale incinerators (those with a daily capacity of less than 250 tons) processed only 9% of the total waste combusted, these produced 83% of the dioxins and furans emitted by municipal waste combustion.[8]
(from the Wikipedia article).
Looks like you can get it to work economically on a large scale only. Might be a reasonable answer for bigger cities. There are still other things burned off that the incinerators tend to put out, like metals.
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Why is the US so allergic to incinerators?
It's not that we're allergic (although they're more often called waste-to-energy plants these days).
It's that the public solid-waste agencencies don't have the money to build them, and the private industries that would build them as "turnkey" enterprises can't be expected to respect the public health and safety interests.
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We have activist groups who are so insistent on a perfect solution, that they will fight and poo-poo any less then optimal solution to the problem.
There was a way to make biodegradable plastic from corn. However they fought against it because it mean Bio-engineered corn. We have Nuclear Energy which has a better safety record then Fossil fuels, but they are bitching and moaning because of the radioactive waste problem. We could burn our garbage but we create carbon to add to global warming.
We can't go ba
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Companies that do try to use plant plastic get whined at by the consumers for the most ridiculous reasons. Because it's too noisy? Wow.
http://myplasticfreelife.com/2010/10/sunchips-discontinues-compostable-bag-do-we-care/ [myplasticfreelife.com]
i loved that they made compost-able bags and i consciously bought sunchips over other chips while they had those bags so what it the made a crinkly noise. I always composted those bags to. To bad people are so stupid.
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Funny, it's usually the pro-nuclear groups who are poo-pooing things because they are not perfect. Solar is a complete waste of time because it is incapable of providing 100% of our energy needs 24/365, for example.
Face it, there are dickheads on both sides of the argument. There are also people with genuine opinions and insight, but trying to cast them all as reactionary activists just makes debate even harder. People like you are as much to blame for us not having certain new technologies.
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That's irony! (Score:2, Insightful)
"For every ton of reusable plastic, China has received many more tons of random trash, some of it toxic."
That's okay, the toxic stuff was all stuff they made and sold to us anyways.
Such a terrible heading (Score:2)
Single stream is part of the problem (Score:2)
Much gets landfilled, other stuff is sorted poorly to where it is not easily recyclable. In my city we do not have single stream, but what we can put in the recycle bin is limited to type 1 &2 plastic, three colors of glass, and
Re:Single stream is part of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that the more complicated you get, the less it gets done. We have a central recycling area for our small town. Giant bins with clear descriptions of the material in large, friendly type.
While most people get it right (except the plastics which do get confusing), there is a significant number of idiots that don't understand the difference between plastic and glass, between steel and aluminum. Even when you have big ex-hard drive magnets for people to test the cans on.
And then there are the plastics. At least six types, many of which look similar. Most retail products do have the number stamped on the package. Somewhere. In a font that is all of 0.5 mm tall and blurry because it's actually stamped in the plastic. I doubt anyone over 50 can actually see the stupid things without some form of magnification.
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We recently got 1-7+glass+paper+cardboard - 1-7, glass in a single bin with paper, cardboard flat and underneath the bin for pickup. It's pretty amazing how much paper we go through.
Irony (Score:2)
Oregon and Washington are so green they won't accept recyclable plastic because it's actually too hard to recycle?
Idiocracy (Score:4, Funny)
That has helped build 'trash mountains' so high they sometimes bury people alive
Great, now I can't get the scene from Idiocracy out of my head that involves the garbage avalanche [dailymotion.com].
Reasonable. (Score:3)
Time to face the music and deal with the garbage produced, instead of making it somebody else's problem.
Externalized costs (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Externalized costs (Score:5, Informative)
Most people do actually pay for their garbage removal. The cost is just usually lumped in with some other bill and isn't variable depending on how much they generate. I know my waste disposal fee is lumped in with the sewage and water. The annoying thing where I live is that we don't have curb side recycling at all. We have to sort it and then go find a municipal container that we can cram it into. So as a community our recycling is even less efficient because each individual has to drive to the silly containers.
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Bury it... (Score:3)
It's just a bunch of polymeric hydrocarbons... bury it in the ground until you know what to do with it.
I used to be scared of plastics, but after looking at the chemistry the only thing I worry about is plastic in the wrong place(i.e. - around a seabird or in the gyres). Sure, the polymerizing catalysts can sometimes be scary, and some plasticizers like BPA can have minor effects, but generally plastic is OK in my book.
Hell, once I understood what plastic was it became really cool. It's like they found a way to turn crap into useful products. Hydrogen and carbon...
Paper <strike> or plastic</strike> (Score:4, Interesting)
Semi-humorously, since WA state banned plastic bags, the stores have used that as an excuse to start charging for paper bags. Which are completely recyle-able. As though they decided to punish the voters for doing the right thing.
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God damnit, I used WHICH INSTEAD OF WHOM, I have failed :(
Grow the fuck up (Score:2, Insightful)
No one forced the Chinese to buy the trash in the first place.
Yes, that's what was happening - the Chinese were willfully BUYING it, trying to make money by recycling it.
So get over your childish "America is teh EVUL" and grow the fuck up.
Re:The American way ... (Score:4, Informative)
The answer is pretty obvious. Load up all the trash onto a rocket and launch it into space. Problems solved forever.
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Not a rocket, but maybe a rail gun.
Rockets run $10,000 per pound-- with a goal of hundreds of dollars per pound by 2025.
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Not in a few hundred thousand years when the aliens attack because they just got a shitload of our crap dumped on them.
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Absurd, but really, really cool.
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That's certainly more environmentally friendly than shipping it all the way to China so they can dump it in a hole in the ground.
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:5, Insightful)
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I imagine cleaning it is the much bigger problem. I've often wondered as I tossed soda bottles in the bin just how they deal with getting the soda residue out of each bottle. And that's just soda. Imagine the REALLY nasty stuff that must come in on some of that plastic (like medical waste). I would say that we should make it a requirement that you had to rinse out recyclables before putting them in the bin, but let's face it, that would only lead to people just tossing it in the trash. Probably better to ju
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I've often wondered as I tossed soda bottles in the bin just how they deal with getting the soda residue out of each bottle.
Shred it first.
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Then the heat from the reshaping process mostly takes care of the residue.
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in Finland we actually have a very functional PET and glass bottle recycling system. When you buy a drink, your bottle contains a "PalPa" symbol (palautuspantti - english "return pawn" as in pawn shop) with price of the bottle. You pay this price on top of the drink when you make the purchase. Then you can return the bottle into machine at the shop that will read the bar code, recognize the worth of the bottle and print you a voucher for total value of all bottles, cans etc you return. You can use the voucher in the shop for your next purchase.
The old system which was mainly used for glass bottles was fairly complex. They had things like smell detectors used to detect if bottle was still not clean after washing cycle since you couldn't actually break the bottles - you reused the same ones. Many glass coca cola bottles sold here back then had distinct marks of wear on the outer sides where machine probably grabbed them for washing and refilling. They were apparently reused about 33 times on average before they were crushed and glass mass was reused. But the process was somewhat costly because of the smell detectors and other extra hardware needed to ensure safety of the returned bottles.
Nowadays PET bottles just get crumpled up by the machine itself and then sent to factory for melting and being recycled. According to wikipedia http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palpa [wikipedia.org] they get shredded and then reused as anything from new bottles to things like raincoats, bags and even ties.
Same thing is done for aluminum drink cans (apparently we have about 96% recycle rate on cans because of it).
The general idea is that you basically you pay a bit of extra for the container when you buy the product, and you get that money back by returning it into the machine at the shop. I.e. the container is pawned to your, and you get your money back when you return it for recycling. This creates strong incentives to recycle the product rather then just put it in the trash.
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It used to be that way in the U.S. too, with glass bottles. You would get 5-cents back when you returned empties to the stores. Then they were washed and reused.
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I remember those two episodes [wikipedia.org].
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:4, Informative)
The 10 cent deposit in Michigan factored into college party etiquette. If you were going to a party and brought your own beer, it was considered polite to leave your empties with the host. If the hosts were able to wake from their hangover the next day, they'd return the empties and have enough for breakfast.
At least that what a friend tells me.
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OH wow...I didn't know they did deposits on bottles anywhere any more.
I remember as a kid, gathering up bottles to trade for $ to get candy at the local 7-11 store, but they did away with that ages ag
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Or you could use machines like we do here in Finland at every store alcove. You simply feed everything you have - plastic bottles, glass bottles, cans - into the machine and it sorts them and gives you a small reimbursement for your trouble. Some people actually get a side income from looking for abandoned bottl
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If you dig too deep in China... (Score:3)
So, if you dig a really deep hole in China, do they say "You're going to dig all the way to the US."
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:5, Funny)
Nope. This is all plastic. If it were iron, we could recycle it much more easily.
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. This is all plastic. If it were iron, we could recycle it much more easily.
Hidden in your humor is root of the real problem.
Look at anything supposedly made out of recycled plastics and you see just totally ridiculous prices.
Compared to wood or steel, similar sized playground equipment, picnic tables, lawn furniture, always is at least a third more expensive, (even when purchased from the same company), just by virtue of being made out of recycled material.
Its not clear if this is predatory pricing or the actual cost of re-refinement exceeds the price of new materials. If recycled material really does cost that much more, then maybe we ought to be looking for ways to cleanly burning this material for electrical power generation, rather than make new things out of a more expensive resource.
In the mean time, modern land fills (or mountains) of bailed plastic may as good a way of stockpiling it until the recycle technology catches up. Grinding it and dumping it in the ocean is clearly the wrong way.
Re: Just dig a really deep hole (Score:4, Informative)
Depends on where you dig from. I always heard that one as a kid, especially when digging a deep hole in the backyard. However, if you go from NY through the center of the earth to the other side, you wind up in the Indian Ocean not far from the southwest corner of Australia.
Re: Just dig a really deep hole (Score:5, Informative)
Handy map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipodes [wikipedia.org]
screw-sorting robot X-43 reminds you: (Score:2, Informative)
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Only ABS or PLA plastic, cleaned and ground into small pieces.
Those clear and crinkly plastic berry boxes are PLA.
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Well then we need to 3D print a lot more stuff. Maybe new plastic berry boxes? Maybe it could be molded instead. I wonder why the berry box manufacturers don't do it?
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:5, Interesting)
I read a proposal where all garbage collection would be financed by a levy on goods based upon their disposal cost. While there are some real challenges in properly estimating disposal costs, it would make for an interesting incentive to create goods that are easier to recycle, and which come with less packaging.
I can see how it would also reduce incentives to innovate on the disposal end, so that would have to be taken into account. Perhaps a 50-50 split on the disposal cost.
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:4, Insightful)
That sounds just like a levy on processes based on their carbon production - the exact kind of regulation that supports public good while enabling capitalism to work with it. In other words, exactly the kind of thing that everyone seems to hate.
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Certainly hated by the gravy train industry that wants to keep things just the way they are.
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only is it an obvious waste, it is incredibly irritating to have to break out tools to extract a purchase.
Funny experience was watching a person at an airport wrestle with a sealed package with a bluetooth headset inside. (Of course no one has anything sharp because the only good human is a helpless one) They ended up cutting their hand on the packaging before they got it open.
!!! Wait!!! Doesn't that mean that plastic packaging should be banned from airports as it can obviously cut someone?
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:4, Informative)
My question is: In a time where everyone is screaming, "Green!!!", why is every little object packaged in a large plastic case 10 times the size of the little object?
It's a theft deterrent. Keeps the dirty hippies from stealing stuff by being environmentally unfriendly and too large to stuff in their pants.
Re:Just dig a really deep hole (Score:4, Funny)
It is the Chinese sending back all that useless plastic they don't know how to otherwise get rid of.
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Glass would likely be too difficult to shape, remember we're talking about those clamshell containers that many consumer electronics come in. Plastic can be easily moulded into w/e shape is needed.
Foil might work, but would need to be extra thick to hold it's shape, and could not be seen into.
Cardboard also a possibility, but would be easy to defeat for possible shoplifting, and more easily damaged; also cannot see into it.
-----------
Of course all this is moot if you're ordering online, since you'll already
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Why do you hate America?
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FYI: We Eurotrash use public transport. We Eurotrash recycle plastic, glass, paper, and metal. We Eurotrash burn our burnable household waste to produce electricity.
Med vänliga hälsningar,
Sweden
Truly green will pay for it (Score:2)
The problem is that they expect the other 95% to pony up the money for the same services they feel are worthwhile. It's easy to ask for a recycling fee of $50/mo to cover manual sorting, cleaning, and processing of the stream when you make 6 figures. The backlash comes from the non-green who have then money but don't give a shit and the every-day folks for whom $50/mo requires a significant change to their budget.
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The problem with all those greenies.... throw their hands up get in the private jets that burn more feul in onme day then a family of four...
Do you have any evidence that people who are environmentally conscious are likely to own private jets? Anecdotes about one person is not evidence. Your dislike of people who say things you find inconvenient is painfully obvious.
Regarding the point of this article, your country produces an awful lot of unnecessary waste - easily the most per capita. But anyone suggesting that people produce less will be smeared as a communist greenwash faggot.(All those hilarious jokes about NPR canvas totes and "Portlandi
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The problem with all those greenies. They are willing to be green about everything until it becomes their turn to sacrifice then they throw their hands up get in the private jets that burn more feul in onme day then a family of four does for 10 years and say "Oh well."
Ya. Who cares what TFA says when you can just rant on "greenies" who own private jets???? I know I keep thinking I need to quit flying all my milk bottles to Asia -- one bottle per trip -- and just put it in the bin, but I'm just too entitled.
I suppose we should be glad you were even marginally on topic, you could have gone off on how the gold standard would fix everything.
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Plastic is cheap, light, and sanitary. Going back to the old ways is going to mean some sacrifices. And people really hate making those (especially the "higher cost" bit). Not to mention that there would be a huge political push-back from the petrochemical industry (and they're an INSANELY powerful lobby).