Above all that rubbish
Some people are born tidy, others have tidiness thrust upon them.
Humans, by and large, are pretty filthy creatures. Not only do they produce a vast amount of waste, they’re just not that willing to clean up after themselves. If there’s one thing that illustrates this it is their propensity for sweeping things under the carpet.
The only problem is our dwindling supply of carpet… there are only so many golf courses we can make, or need, from landfill, only so many mountains we can cram with radioactive nasties.
So as I see it, we have a few options…
We could stop making a mess – ideal, but also rather unlikely, it’s a human characteristic… you can hunt some animals by their tracks, you can hunt humans by their fast food wrappers. No plan based on the idea that we will suddenly stop creating mountains of the stuff will ever work… it’s a bit like combating carbon emissions by stopping breathing.
We could make more carpet – this has already been put into use with entire islands being created from landfill… mostly this carpet is rather neat and manicured and caters to another peculiar human trait, golf. The downside, as with most things related with consumption, being gas.
We could send our rubbish to the sun – a terrible idea if you ask me, you always need something after you’ve decided to get rid of it, let’s no be so hasty.
Or, and it’s a long shot, we could just face up to the fact that we really need to get a grip of this recycling thing. That logo on packaging telling you that it’s made from recycled material shouldn’t be a badge of honor it should be a requirement… Councils shouldn’t pay lip service to green lobbyists by organising recycling schemes that still end with plastics being shipped overseas to be buried under someone else’s carpet…
..even better, re-use, cut out the whole recycling thing altogether…
I know that you already know that, indeed, everyone I speak to agrees that this seems like a plausible course of action, so why is it that in real terms very little is happening?
Someone somewhere must really like the idea of global house stilts.
“That logo on packaging telling you that it’s made from recycled material shouldn’t be a badge of honor it should be a requirement…”
Hear hear!
In the US they can get away with just shipping it to another state, because there are things that the federal government has no power to regulate. So states like New York, which has pretty strict rubbish and recycling laws, just ships it’s trash to Virginia, which has fairly lax laws.
On the bright side, San Fransisco recently started a city-wide composting programme to go with their excellent recycling programmes.
I should probably start by saying that I’m sorry I haven’t been replying to many comments this last week… very busy… lack of keyboard… but I have been reading them.
So, I apologise for the torrent of comments some of you are going to get…
Anyway, a city-wide composting programme is a fantastic idea… we need one here, really.
The problem we have, especially in a lot of Northern towns is that we do not have gardens – many of us live in tiny terraced houses with little or no outdoor space. That means unless you are willing to compost in your house (or pocket mulch), you have no option but to throw away perfectly usable composting waste.
But our city-wide recycling is a joke. Since moving on to the programme, our local council (Lancaster) has just shirked all responsibility as far as waste management goes. Right now we have ankle-deep litter on most streets because they refuse to collect any rubbish not in the recycling boxes… which is all well and good, but then who is responsible? I can’t imagine anyone else walking around picking it up, and technically we all pay council tax for waste management…
Essentially local councils have used the ‘recycling buzz’ to make cut backs in how much they spend on refuse whilst reporting greater services.
>Someone somewhere must really like the idea of global house stilts
To be fair, though, now that you’ve mentioned it, so do I.
More seriously, though: when we refine metals from rocks, we do it by super-heating them with carbon, so that the various metal ores react themselves into metals.
Can we do something similar with waste, indiscriminately melting it down to create raw materials, or at least molten processed ones? Or am I just talking- wait for it- rubbish?
/b
From what I gather this is possible to some extent, but is a cost issue, mainly it would cost more than extracting/making the materials in the first place.
The situation can and usually is improved by mechanical seperation prior to the recycling process. Magnets are a great and cheap way of removing iron-based materials, but we lack the methods to perform similar tasks with plastics.
That doesn’t mean that it can’t be done though, just that it can’t be done yet… I imagine bacteria will have a massive role to play in future processes, perhaps liquifying certain materials…
Your homework for the night is to sort this out… I expect a fully detailed solution by the morning…
Turns out they do it with mobile phones: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21237/page1/
/b
There have been some circles that have made strides in reducing things back to their component elements. Unfortunately, a lot of this type of planning and technology would be dependent on massive organizations (such as governments) and will be lost in lobbying and bureaucracy. I say the sun is definitely our next best bet after actually somehow being smart with our resources.
Someone’s got to manage cold fusion one of these days. Then we could take all the crap and turn it into something useful.
*just fiddling with the flux capacitor*
I made a watering can out of a 2 litre milk bottle and a big knife to stab the lid with.
Is that a good start?
Hellz yeah! I use wine bottles for that… more controlled flow for the house plants. (-:
..even better, re-use, cut out the whole recycling thing altogether…
I know that you already know that, indeed, everyone I speak to agrees that this seems like a plausible course of action, so why is it that in real terms very little is happening?
I’ve often wondered why the public sanitation department (that if funded by the gov’t) doesn’t just transform into the recycling department. Oh wait…cause then the already existing recycling departments would have to split their turf.
Between there not being enough water (b/c there’s not enough rain to over-power insanely fast evaporation due to summer heat) to depleting natural resources of the arbor kind, many a policy maker is shaking his/her head.
“Tell them to wash all their dinner ware!”
“Um…we’re still in a drought.”
“Oh right. I forgot.”
Oops..i meant to say “that is funded by the gov’t”
Oddly, ‘if’ works almost just as well.
This is always going to be a problem – the fine line between public and private responsibility, especailly as far as these sort of organisations go.
Until someone figures out a way to extract gold and diamonds from waste there is going to be too little money in it for it to be attractive to either side as a rule.
So, do your bit for recycling, scatter rare stones in your rubbish.
Well, actually, now that you mention it….
There is a mob in NZ that extract gold fro sewerage/sewage (not sure correct spelling, very different meanings).
Apparently the gold is suspended in the food we eat in minute amounts and it some how is extractable.
Not sure if they get much, but it is pretty shitty gold *boom tish*
mmm, panning for gold…
Eventually oil will get so expensive that it will cost to much to produce plastic packaging and then deliver them to the stores just so people can throw them away five minutes after getting home. Once that happens we should see some decent reduction in crap produced by humans.
Alternatively we’ll all just drown in a sea of rubbish.
The major problem with mass recycling is the high levels of impurities or contaminants that are often involved.
I have heard it said that a single lid left on one bottle amongst 1000 other bottles is enough to destroy that entire lot if it is melted and processed.
There are numerous things that we as individuals can do, and more that we can do at different levels of commumity, ie, neighbour hood, local, regional, state, federal and international.
An assignment I have to do for uni involves dealing with (as one choice of tasks) wastes from sanitation.
It will be interesting to see what we can come up with that will work in a third world situation.
The main problem with lauching waste into the sun is cost.
The second is the extremely high risk of a mid air disaster, resulting in a massive dispersal of contaminant over a wide region. This is a great reason for burying nuclear waste.
Oh, and rockets are polluting.
Would it also be too expensive to hire three persons to go through recyclable goods and make sure those lids are all gone?
And anything else that shouldn’t be there?
I’m not sure the tax paying public would be happy to pay $120K pa (based on lower average wages) to have some rubbish sorted.
The tax paying public is the type of person who will save a penny, but lose a dollar, or however that saying goes.
Like Terry Pratchett says, the collective IQ of a mob is inversely proportional to the size of the mob.
I was thinking more of this after we have a nice space elevator.
Even so… I’m with Adam. At the rate we consume things, if we start throwing all the rubbish into the sun, there will be very little left before too long. And as soon as we figure out how to use it, we’ll feel mighty silly for having thrown it away, permanently.
Then we start mining asteroids!! Seriously tho, I do hope we figure something better out first.
I suppose a mid-air nuclear explosion is technically a solution to wate production though…
You know, San Francisco now has curb-side composting. Wild.
no, those are just the homeless people, roo.
I think they’re not ‘homeless people’ once they start composting… I think they’re ‘corpses.’
That is a fair point Roo.
if people aren’t willing to change,
then technology has to provide the solution.
more biogradable materials, for instance.
more atomic bombs.
it occurs to me that everyone you speak to is willing to do what they can, but somehow there are still so many people who dont do anything. where are they all hiding??
Is it possible some of them are lying?
Alternately, many people would love to help, but they feel trapped, or unable. Especially in places where there is nobody to help or teach them better. It’s one thing to say “recycle!” it’s another to actually know how. In my case, it’s a 20 minute drive to a recycling bin an I don’t have a car to drive there regularly.