What do you recycle?

“I've recycled newspapers and alluminum for years. Now, a Hamilton county recycle center is nearby and it takes cardboard, mixed paper, all glass, plastics 1 and 2, oil, etc. We have very little garbage after recycling.”

“I started thinking about all the plastic packaging I pitch in the trash, finally. Now the bags crackers come in, wrapping for meat, popscilce wrappers etc, all go into bread bag or something and get recycled too. TP tubes, tissue boxes, etc.

We have a hard time getting rid of oil. So, we save it up and when we have several gallons Birch takes it to work to the bus garage.”

“plastic 1 and 2, cardboard and brown bags, clear, brown and green glass, aluminum. Our waste management burns plant material and generates power. Compost. Cuts our trash pickup load by at least half.”

“Sass-- Murray's Auto store will take used oil and I think Autozone as well!

I've started recycling grocery bags-- Whole Foods and Trader Joe's gives 10 cents back for each bag that you bring in and re-use... :-)

I also do the usual--recycle glass, aluminum, cans, plastic, newspaper... I haven't thought of the packaging as much, unless it's "hard" plastic, but maybe I'll try to recycle some of that, too!

I try to put my veggie scraps into my compost pile (when I remember...)

I tried it once but with poor success, but I understand that vermicomposting (sp?) (composting with worms) is supposed to create great soil, so I plan to try it again next summer....”

“recycling is an attitude driven by consumption not conservation. it doesn't save energy and it doesn't change the rate at which we consume natural resources. it just changes the nature of the consumption.

if you want to conserve natural resource then use less of them. it's like buying "carbon credits" so you can drive your suv to the trailhead.

i make my own beer and wine and then refill the bottles. i have been using the same bottles for about 10 years, adding a few here and there since i lose some to gifts and breakage. my grandmother cans foods and has used the same bell jars for as long as i can remember. these are examples of consuming less rather than shifting consumption.

this is why recycling has to be subsidized by the government... because it's cost ineffective, and is completely unnecessary.
last edited: 9/15/07 10:36:27 AM”

“I gotta go with JS on this one. The energy used to reprocess the materials is often greater than the energy and materials used to make new stuff. Glass and plastic are good examples of this.”

“Gotta go with Jimmy San also. Recycling doesn't do nearly as much for the environment (barely anything at all) as compared to less consumption to begin with. We take a minimalist approach, to an extent. We don't consume a lot, but what we do consume, we try and make it worth our while.”

“I have to admit that I consume massive quantities of packaged goods just so that I can recycle them-NOT!”

“While I agree that less consumption is a better answer, I think that recycling is the next best thing. I think the best you can do is both. Consume less packaged goods and recycle what you can. I recycle paper goods, cardboard, glass, aluminum, cans, and 1 and 2 plastics.”

“Blood”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm sure you all bake your own bread and crackers and churn your own butter. (Rolling eyes) ;)”

“YUP! That's me! Mr. Nofootprint. LOL! What ever!”

“

Use the trash to fill the marshes!”

“glass, plastic bottles and bags, cans, used motor oil, and clothing.”

“Seriously, check out your local recycling plant to make sure it's actually benefiting the environment, as you likely assume. It might not be cracked up to be all you think it is.

PS - Bread, crackers and butter are bad for your health, and the environment. Bread comes from gas-powered ovens, crackers come from oil-driven machinery, and butter comes from co2 burping cattle. Eat fruits and vegetables from your home garden. I don't, but I'm cool wit dat, yo!”

“Jimmy san, you make a good point. There probably is more energy consumed in recycling certain materials. Face it, we aren't going to run out of sand to make glass. However, some cities/counties are making a profit in the effort. It takes time for the system to work, I suppose. I grew up on a farm where 90% of what we ate was grown or raised by the family. We canned and froze veggies and consumed grass-fed beef that wandered about enjoying a good life till our dinner bell tolled for them. Very little was wasted. That lifestyle is mostly in the past and has never been a lifestyle for most in an urban industrial society. I was lucky.”

“Vomik.”

“I haven't consistently recycled, but not for any high (or low) minded reason, just laziness. My vegetable garden has been a big plus this summer and will continue giving back into the winter. There are also apple trees, plums, grape vines and other potential edibles I haven't identified yet. In the spring I'll plant some chickens and see how I like the responsibility of raising living things (not that plants aren't). If successful, maybe I'll move onto larger animals. In the meantime, the deer continue to trespass on my property despite ample signage to the contrary and must pay the price. Wild turkeys seem to love this place as well.

I've already noticed that I drive into town a lot less than before the garden and that is a good thing. Now and then I yearn for the company of humans and the occasional trip to town quickly reminds me of why I moved this far out:)”

“Nimblefoot, I have a book you might be interested in, "Five Acres and Independence, A Handbook for Small Farm Management" by M.G. Kains. If you'd like to borrow it email me your address along with an oath to return it (because someday I will have five acres I hope). Another good book is "The Homestead Year" by Moffett, out of print but still available online for cheap.”

“don't get me wrong, we recycle buckets of crapola every week. my wife insists on it and my family of five isn't represented by my opinions alone. i just don't see it as an exercise in conservation. it's a way of justifying consumption like "carbon credits".

consider bauxite (aluminum ore). it is strip mined because it exists in such abundance on the surface that it's not worth digging into the ground for. it's not the most ecologically friendly product to produce.

at the current rate of consumption there should be enough for a few hundred years. the process for commercially refining bauxite into aluminum was invented in 1854... 154 years ago. this process is well understood and has been fine-tuned to be as profitable as it can be... you get pretty good at something if you make money doing it for 154 years. this would be a strong case for continued investment in recycling... after all, the commercial process of refining bauxite into aluminum has had 154 years to develop itself... how long has recycling had to accomplish the same thing?

now consider that the US produced 3,800 million metric tons of aluminum in 1999. this is primary production. i could not find more recent numbers.

How is aluminum consumed in the US?

Transportation: 38% (1444 metric tons)
Domestic consumption (us) 24% (912 metric tons)
Building 14% (532 metric tons)
Electrical 8% (304 metric tons)
Consumer Durables 7% (266 metric tons)
Other 9% (342 tons)

All recycling resulted in 3.8 million metric tons of recovered aluminum and only 40% of this came from "old scrap" (discarded aluminum products)... so we got 1.52 million metric tons of aluminum from people recycling consumer goods and other scrap.

... 1.52/912*100 = .167% ... recycling recovers less than two-tenths of one percent of the aluminum we produce.

Perfect world? Even if we consumers recycled EVERYTHING in the consumer packaging category (912 metric tons out of 3800) the best we could accomplish is 24%.

Consumer recycling of aluminum is at best aspiring to mediocrity. Think of it this way, if you wanted to really make a dent in the consumer figure you would have to raise our 1.52 million metric tons to 912 metric tons. Let's say, for sake of the discussion, you wanted to recycle 50% of this... surely you could get 1/2 the people in this country to recycle their pop cans and other aluminum consumer goods. That would mean you would have to get from 1.52 million metric tons to 456 million metric tons... 300 times the amount we recycle today.

Good luck with this. Even if you did get everyone on board you could only get 24% of our production back. The other 78% would continue to be strip mined to feed our consumption. We would go from a 300 year supply to a 372 year supply and simply make this a problem for another generation to solve for us.
last edited: 9/16/07 7:51:07 AM”

“...by the way, I made the assumption that we consume what we produce. We produced 3800 million metric tons of aluminum in 1999. we imported 4000 million metric tons. so in reality the numbers are probably almost 2x worst than what I quoted. It really is a problem with consumption and recycling doesn't work to change the way we view the natural resources of this planet. It only makes us feel good about how we consume them.”

“Hopefully it will become 'profitable' for someone before the country becomes one huge landfill.”

“Nice job on the homework Jimmy san.”

“Yeah, Jimmy, good job. BTW, how much do you get when you add 28% to 74%? :)”

“28 and 74 percent of what?”

“Production.”

“oh, you mean 24 and 78. It's likely a rounding anomaly.”

“I thought the same, but if I just accepted it, than I would have had to pass on giving Jimmy a ration of crap:)”

“Refining bauxite is a well understood process and it takes HUGE amounts of electricity.

Re-melting scrap aluminum requires but a fraction of that energy.”

“naw, i just subtracted wrong.”

“Louisville takes all plastic 1 through 7. I am fully aware that what I do is a drop in the bucket. But it reduced my girlfriends weekly pickup from 2-3 cans to 1. Besides the recycling bin is in the parking lot at work, no gas wasted to take it wherever. To me it is less in the landfill.”

“Plastic grocery bags had a thickness of 30 microns in 1976; the thickness today is at most 18 microns.

I hear that! ... riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip”

“Where did you find that information Jimmysan? From what I understand water bottles are now the single most frequent item in landfills now.”

“Would you rather they be pushed out the wind'a?

- Archie Bunker”

“This is all research by the Garbage Project. They back in the 70s by applying modern archaeological methods to landfills.

One of the things they do that is really interesting is compare the results of survey data with the dated contents of landfills. They found that people basically lie in surveys when it comes to things like alcohol consumption, etc based on the volume of what they throw away... basically society can lie to socialists but your garbage doesn't lie and in many cases will tell a different story.

Here is their web site at Stanford: http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/GarbologyOnline/48

They jokingly call it "garbology" and I have seen many PBS documentaries over the last 10 years on their work and most quote the results I posted on light-weighting of plastics and the volume of diapers (since these are hot issues). They also illustrate the paper figures and I _think_ were the first to show that items in landfills don't decay as fast as people thought. They produced readable newspapers that were REALLY old, I forget how old, and I think there was an incident involving an ancient mummified hot dog or something. I am working from memory on the hot-dog but I seem to recall seeing that in a documentary.

Regarding the number of plastic water bottles... I would not know one way or the other. It's important to note that frequency is one thing and volume is quite another. As my post illustrated, something can be the most frequent item in a landfill but not take up the most space. A plastic water bottle gets crushed down pretty darn small when a massive compactor drives over it. Construction waste doesn't compact by comparison. Plastic grocery bags, for example, may be very frequent but they compress down to almost nothing. The things are 18 mils thick!

Personally, I think plastic water bottles are a perfect example of the consumption attitude I am talking about. Something almost worthless stored in something almost worthless sold for a lot of money. The amount of energy that goes into bringing that bottle of water to a consumer has to be far, far more than what it would take to run tap water into a glass... the glass (or plastic cup for that matter) being 100% recyclable because you use it over and over.

I don't have anything against recycling but I can't accept it as a conservationist strategy. Like I said, I just see it as a way to justify consumption... to feel good about all that bottled water people drink because they recycle the bottles. If one wants to practice conservationism one should drink water from the tap and use a container that you can wash out and reuse.

We live in a very wasteful society. Everything seems disposable. The problem as i see it isn't that we are running out of place to dispose of things or that we are running out of things to throw away (both debatable points in my mind)... it's that we are so wasteful in the first place. The solution isn't to "put back" some of what we would throw away. The solution is to change our attitudes towards consumption in the first place.”

“"Personally, I think plastic water bottles are a perfect example of the consumption attitude I am talking about. Something almost worthless stored in something almost worthless sold for a lot of money. The amount of energy that goes into bringing that bottle of water to a consumer has to be far, far more than what it would take to run tap water into a glass... the glass (or plastic cup for that matter) being 100% recyclable because you use it over and over"



I could not agree more.”

“"They jokingly call it "garbology""

Archaeology really is "garbology". The study of past life ways through material cultural remains (garbage). I had to complete a "garbology" project for one of my courses. It was more of a hassle than anything else. That study is an interesting read -- pretty general, but good for the gross-out factor.

What you hope to find on a site is the privy -- that's where all the "good stuff" is.

"For the record it should be noted that the item most frequently encountered in landfills is plain old paper-it accounts for more than 40 percent of a landfill's contents; this proportion has held steady for decades and in some landfills has actually risen. Newspapers alone may take up as much as 13 percent of the space in American landfills. A year's worth of copies of the New York Times has been estimated to be equivalent in volume to 18,660 crushed aluminum cans or 14,969 flattened Big Mac clamshells."

The other note people should be aware of that recent investigation into the decomposition rates of the various contents of the landfills reflect that the paper component is breaking down at a far less rate that predicted (and hoped for). What would be best now is to cap the landfills and harvest the methane for power. Our state is currently working on stuff like this, along with new investment in the renewable sector. It's amazing to see what is going on around "here" recently.”

“don't think of it as a landfill. think of it as archaeological enrichment... a time capsule for future generations! why we are preserving the past for future generations so they will know how we lived and what kind of people we were!”

“I'm going to throw away my remote control.”

“That reminds me Jimmy. I have an empty bottle of yours.”

“SEE FOLKS! RECYCLING IN ACTION!

high-5 for all use home-brewers and vintners out there...”

“Jimmy is making a lot of good points. We have to look at the big picture, not just go emphasize one thing, such as recycling. Prevention should be the primary strategy for protecting the environment, not cleaning up messes. You have to look at the whole life cycle.

When I visited Japan I was surprised at the huge difference in packaging of products. Their concern is putting as much into a store as they can without wasting shelf space. We could save a lot by just changing our attitude about packaging and use the most friendly and sustainable materials.

We have three trash/waste cans in our city: trash, recycle, yard waste. I would hate to think what it would be like if the recycle and yard waste was going into the landfill like it was 20 years ago.”

“We haven't used our yard waste can yet; it all goes into the composter so far. The yard waste here isn't composted, like they did in Jacksonville. It just goes to a special landfill that's strictly yard waste, and the dump periodically catches on fire.
The recyclables driver will take cardboard boxes (even ones cut down) out of the bin and stuff them in the garbage can. He just won't take cardboard even though he's supposed to. There's a recycleables dropoff location a few miles down the road from here. I may run down there and see if I can take all of my remaining moving boxes there for recycling instead.”

“Recycling truck went by Monday morning. They take non-deposit everything, but I burn my paper stuff, either in the wood stove (you SURE not everyone down there owns a chain saw?), or in the fire pit.

All places that sell anything in a bottle or a can charge a deposit (5¢ to 20¢ /can, 10¢ per bottle) that is returned when you bring the empties back.

Right now one-time bottled water bottles have no deposit and are causing a problem - which is the current eco-fight.

The Quebec gov't is talking about having stores charge 20¢ for plastic shopping bags (I re-use mine) and all grocery stores sell re-useable bags (I have two) and some will give you a discount if you use them.

Mountain Equipment Co-op (www.mec.ca) will donate 5¢ for every purchase to an affiliated environmental cause if you don't take a bag.

Now that I'm home for good, I'm getting back into veggy gardening and will go to a locally organised composting seminar this winter where I'll get a free plastic composter.”

“http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7000991.stm maybe this can go here”

“There are lot of good points here. Personally, I think recycling works cost effiently if it's done on a large enough scale.

Just seeing so many empty plastic bags and water bottles as litter makes a believer out of me.

Montreal has community compost binds on the streets and some communities are really getting on the garbage seperation bandwagon.”

“Phil wasn't it the Japanese who created biodegrable food wrap made from shrimp shells? That's the type of thing I like seeing.

There are tons of little things the average family can do to reduce their consumption. Cloth napkins and single ply TP are two very easy changes.
last edited: 9/19/07 8:43:23 AM”

“"Prevention should be the primary strategy for protecting the environment, not cleaning up messes."

Excellent point and I also agree that Jimmy has gotten the ball rolling. One of the things I see in our American culture is the lack of a proactive norm. Americans seem to be locked into too much a "wash and toss" society. And let's not forget that recycling should not even be viewed in a pure micro sense. With the push toward globalization, cheap goods wear out fast, causing the consumer to replace that cheap good twice, even up to fives times before quality goods would wear out. These cheap goods are in turn filling up our landfills at a very fast pace.

Even laws that are trying to protect our environment are sometimes counterproductive. Stack scrubber by product goes in the landfills, too.

Everyone pretty much knows the Detroit Pistons around here. Right behind The Palace is a main landfill. I've been able to watch that sucker grow over the years. Actually, around your travels in the Metro Detroit area you'll past some of the finest (and the fastest growing. We take Canada's crap, too) future methane pits in the Midwest. Just think -- in the future not only will be "The Greats Lakes State", but we'll be known for our methane export as well.

We're a hot bed of renewables...I tell y'all!

What to do? Do the best you can. No one is gonna be able to "comply" fully to the art of recycling; however, I feel that if America were to increase recycling even just 5% it would make a huge difference -- it would be real and visible change that might inspire additional "compliance".”

“The highest point in Cincinnati is the Rumpke landfill and they just got OKed to make it even higher.”