"Recycling can waste more resources"
 

If you just checked in to tell me that I am a head case, please do not bother. So, I have been having fun with my roommates. If one stays much longer, he will be the first roommate who cleans that lived here for very long. I have cleaned up after the other guys for most of the time that I have lived here. That one "deep cleaned" the kitchen while I was at drill, but threw away many of my things in the process, and I needed to tell him to move the kitchen table from the living room. I have also seen him in a bathrobe more than I have seen him wear clothing. In the back of the refrigerator, I found an old bottle of pasta sauce, which one of them grabbed from my hands and threw in the garbage. I pulled it out and while they shouted at me and one talked about how wasteful recycling can be, with the others agreeing, I rinsed out the bottle and put it in the recycling.

Not that it makes any difference, since they put all of their garbage in the recycling.

So, today I came home to this:
https://scontent-b-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/...98&oe=5569592D

Upright Vacuum cleaner, carpet shampoo-er, steam mop, and a compact vacuum. That's a good cleaning set.

What did I miss?

To be fair, we've all known that for some time. :)

Sounds like an educumation problem. Once they're no longer shouting (sounds like quite a scene), ask them to explain how it can be more 'wasteful' than wasting everything.

Start buying recycled toilet paper and see how they react to that.

The latrines ran out of toilet paper at drill. Had I remembered when I had the time, I might have been Johnny Toiletpaperbox. I heard one Soldier going through the stalls and call out "No, no, no, and this one has a roll of paper towels!"

Did any of you hear about this?

Sheryl Crow's view on toilet paper: one sheet a visit | Environment | The Guardian

I do not recall seeing anyone who kept their vacuum cleaners in the living room. I brought out a third that I had in the shed, but the last time that I tried to use it, the thing just made noise. The house vacuum was the same model and I wanted to take apart both and see if one worked afterward, but allegedly the friend of a former roommate absconded with it and declined to return the item.

Fix it or recycle it, right?

I just wonder how many times I will have conversations about vacuum cleaners when people come to visit. Maybe it would be better to just rig a curtain, so people instead ask what is behind the curtain, I can say "My room," and the boring conversation dies a natural death.

What are you saying bro? My father use to collect vacuum cleaners and lawn boy lawn mowers, but he used neither. :confused:

Don't you love roommates? Id rather be broke then have roommates again.

I got roommates because I was broke, but finances have not improved even though I spend about half as much. I am going to have a two-and-a-half-hour workday tomorrow. That must be a coincidence!

How to dry your hands with one paper towel:

Joe Smith: How to use a paper towel | Talk Video | TED.com

If Ms Crow wants to show me how to wipe with one sheet, she is welcome to try.

regards
mech

How about Angela showing you how she's been washing and reusing for over 5 years ?

Link

Sometimes I need the automotive section of the sears catalog :eek: back in the day. Now I got old magazines, phone books, etc. :thumbup:

"Wagons East"

That can't be any worse than baby diapers, because to quote John Prine—"Baby poop, the worst kind."

I've never needed roommates, and mostly always had them. Never any major problems, and some I really enjoyed having around. I'll be picking up 2 roommates this summer when my wife gets a place closer to school (OHSU). It's all about being picky. Don't just accept the first people that are willing to pay your asking price.

... and this episode of "Bull****" is entertaining.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4

I do not own the place; sometimes I am able to tell the owner that I think that a prospective roommate seems like he will obey the rules.

I do not know how many people have been in a landfill, but I did not enjoy it, although it was not the worst-smelling place that I have visited. The one in Mesa is on my way to Mom's house and even with my windows up and vents off, the smell is terrible, but it did not seem orders of magnitude worse when I was actually there, and I was surprised that there was extremely little garbage to see, since apparently they bury everything every day. The Poo Pond in Kandahar Airfield was worse, as well as the area by the incinerators. Going back to http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...ity-30818.html, were the incinerators simply not hot enough? If fecal matter can be burned without a smell, couldn't much more?

I've had to walk through sewage on occassion, and have ridden in delivery vehicles with pig slop. Dumps are nasty places, but not quite as nasty as that.

Unlike us men, who can simply shake it like a Polaroidtm picture, women sometimes wipe after a number one, too.

And for diapers, guilty, but we toilet-trained our baby as early as humanly possible. She's been napping diaperless since before she was two, with a minimum of "accidents".

I still use as many sheets as I think it'll take.

Ya know, I used to respect Penn Jillette; but that was [accurately labeled as] B. S.

Recycling started in 1987 with that barge from New York? Try Earth Day 1971.

Aluminum is the only metal worth recycling? What about gold?

That scripted scene with the ten source separation bins? An aware homeowner would have called them on putting compost in an open-topped container. (And the dead chicken should have gone in the dead animal bin, not the kitchen compost)

About all they established is that plastic is way overused for food packaging, trees aren't a good source for paper, and modern landfill technology has matured.

Like I said, the show is entertaining. Some of their points are more sound than others, but the best thing about BS is its challenge to the status-quot.

Recycling a product is not beneficial if the material is abundant, and can be manufactured new with a lower energy consumption.

Recycling is often good, but not always good. If the materials gained from recycled goods was so valuable, why am I paying a mandatory $4.89 per month for the service? Someone should be paying me for the goods.

The fact that I have to pay someone to remove an "asset" fails the logic test.

Agreed. Did you ever see Penn Jillette and Glen Beck (/watch?v=i3LnVa7zXgc)?

Heh. I started watching that, but it is the entire episode, and I stopped before they actually started talking to each other.

So, how would they have handled ecomodding and hypermiling [on Penn and Teller's show]? Better than MythBusters? :)

Logic is easy if you're willing to use it.

I'd pay for your "asset" if I were a processer who sold the finished product to manufacturers and you delivered it to me. But as a processer, I'm not going to pay you for a few cardboard boxes and plastic bottles every week. I need those raw materials by the truckload and in a predictable amount- like what your town can produce.

But if your town wants to actually turn their truckloads of garbage into an asset, they need to entirely duplicate their garbage collection infrastructure to have a different facility and a second fleet of trucks with all their attendant support. Without doing that and having a processer lined up who can in turn sell to manufacturers, all you've got in your bin is household trash that you need to pay to get rid of. All those steps aren't going to get paid for by the sale of used cardboard and tin cans, they're going to raise that money with a bond and everyone's going to pay that bond off with a few bucks a month. Without doing that and having a processer lined up who can in turn sell to manufacturers, all you've got in your bin is household trash that you need to pay to get rid of.

So is that really an added expense? No, the bond would have to be raised even without recycling because the town would need a new dump. Getting paid for the recycled material isn't a real income stream, but it does help defray some of the costs that you would have been incurring anyway in disposing of your waste.

Didn't Penn say that forty percent of material put in recycling bins is thrown away? That sounds accurate to me, not so much from them being excessively particular, or recycling being less useful than people want to believe, but because many people simply do not care. I remember asking a friend in high school where his garbage can was and he said they just used the recycling bin, because they did not care. I find all kinds of household garbage in the recycling. They say that they reject any recyclables with a single speck of food. I am surprised they find 60% to recycle, considering how easy to contaminate it must be. Oh, pizza boxes are recyclable!

Pizza grease is not...

Dont bother with recycling, most garbage collection companies do it for you and pocket the proceeds. :thumbup:

Very good points.

However, I maintain that if the garbage man is going to be visiting anyhow, and I've roughly sorted my assets (recyclables) from my liabilities (garbage), then at the very minimum, the garbage collection company can sell the large amounts they collect at a price that offsets the collection fee.

Logic still demands that, at a minimum, recyclables can be collected at no expense to the person giving up the goods. If that can't be achieved, it implies that it's cheaper to just produce new materials. To follow the logic further; if it's cheaper to produce new materials, then it's likely that less total energy is expended in producing new prime material than is expended in the collection, transportation, sorting, and reclaiming of used material. Environmentally speaking, it might be better if some recyclable goods were thrown away instead of reprocessed.

While the notion that it may be better to throw things away instead of recycle them is uncomfortable to me; I accept that it may be the truth for certain items.

It sounds accurate to me, too. I see people at work "recycle" all kinds of things that can't be recycled. Heck, I'd even be tempted to "recycle" things that aren't recyclable if my tiny garbage can was full and my massive recycle can had room.

Asking each and every individual in every home to sort garbage from recyclables, and then get the result that half of it isn't sorted properly is incredibly inefficient. It would be better to just collect garbage along with the recyclables and employ more trained professionals to sort through it. They would be way faster and more accurate at performing that function than the millions of dopes already doing a pitiful job.

Heck, the ideal solution would be to tell the people in the business of recycling that they can have all of the product they want for free; all they have to do is pick it out from among the trash.

Interesting idea. I wonder how much they pay now.

From a production standpoint, recycled materials have to compete with new materials.

From a waste disposal standpoint, recycling has a pretty competitive position by reducing the load on landfills and incinerators while letting you get paid something for what gets trucked away instead of paying to have it trucked away. How much you get paid is less important than the fact that money is moving in the opposite direction now.

Apropos of this, an interesting idea from today's news: Sewage sludge could contain millions of dollars worth of gold | Science/AAAS | News

We recycle everything where I come from...we even put the septic tank over the neighbor's well. ;)

After reading your link. Maybe i should be moving my septic tank. :) Thanks for the link.

I try and be open to new ideas.
I watched the video, and while it brings up several valid defects in the recycling process, it failed to offer any solutions to the problem.

One thing that I hate about discussions on the internet is that everything you know as a fact has a debunking argument out there. ( Also, it wastes so much time !! )

Unless you are truly evil, you probably feel that it is a morally right thing to do to feed a hungry person, yet unless you chose to do so yourself, there are arguments to the contrary.
A person could point out that it is actually worse to feed someone that is starving in another country because the effort and expense it takes to feed them could be used to feed many more people. They might point out that the pollution caused by the transport of the food results in long term health effects, or that in the process of transporting the food, 'X' tons are wasted, which could be used to feed people locally, and so on and so forth.
While i may be true that we have more trees today in America than we did in 1920, it was not pointed out that many of these trees are not the size of the trees that they have replaced, because they are still growing.
And what about species diversity ? Are the trees that have replaced the forest been selected for fast growth and wood quality or as a replacement for the tree that was cut down.
And what of forest in other parts of the world ? Are they being replaced too, or simply being used as timber that now is clearcut.

Penn discussed the sludge and pollution produced in the recycling and bleaching process of the paper, without mentioning that this same sludge and pollution is caused when all paper is created, regardless of whether or not it is new paper or recycled.
If you have a load of white office paper that is bleached in the recycling process, isn't it common sense to assume that it takes less bleach than ( new ) brown paper pulp ?
It was pointed out that plastics do not have a good profit return when recycled, yet the idea of using less plastics in the first place was not mentioned. For example, think of how many things could be packaged using corrugated cardboard, versus styrofoam made from plastics.
At my job we throw out enough styrofoam to fill a box truck...every single day 365 days a year.
Since the company i work for makes a profit from recycling cardboard, they make sure everyone bales the stuff up and ships it out.
( The did away with plastic recycling because, while they made a slight profit, they felt it was not worth the "effort". )
Is anyone here familiar with the Great Pacific garbage patch ? Surely you are right ? Great Pacific garbage patch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The fellow in the earlier mentioned video mentioned that it was wrong to force people to recycle by law, because this was imposing their views on his lifestyle.
Seat-belts were opposed the same way when they were first made into a law.
Human nature is to take the easy route, and unless there is a law, people will ignore any advice, no matter how beneficial it is.

It's a shame that greed corrupts everything. There are a huge number of obstacles to overcome with recycling, but unless money can be made from it, no one cares.

How will your great grandchildren view this generation ?

CD, Individual effort by each person is how a huge difference is made. Before you buy something, ask yourself "how will I dispose of this when I'm done with it". The money is counted at the time of purchase. Until the recycling effort is also counted at that time, recycling profit won't count, unless there is government intervention.

Great points, Cd! :)

Two other things that were not mentioned in the video were "single stream" recycling, and that just how much of the recycling that 'just goes back to the landfill' is caused by a-holes that intentionally place things like soiled diapers ( and others disgusting things that I shall not mention ! ) / pizza boxes / left over half eaten food, etc. into the recycling bins.
I see it all the time.

With "single stream" recycling, you don't have to sort your trash - the city does it.
'Single stream' recycling was put into effect a year or two ago here in Austin, and it does have it's faults ( several - for instance the trash was hauled almost 100 miles to the sorting facility. )

Everything has to start off somewhere, and yes, recycling has not been perfected in over 40 years, but i hope this next generation changes that.

I can't find a reference online but when Lane county decided source separation was too hard on people's little brains and implemented a centralized sorting facility (manufactured by Allison as I recall) it blew up.

But here's a story from this year in Shanghai: Shanghai garbage incineration plant explodes|Society|chinadaily.com.cn

I also notice the Lane Central Processing facility which finally let the hippies do their recycling (after years of keeping them in a ghetto under the railroad tracks) is still leery of propane bottles.

I think people have this idea that recycling is something hippies do, and that this somehow makes it bad. They don't want to be associated with it.

If you recycle, you are a " filthy hippie ".

I don't understand how that people have so much hate for hippies.

I have a question concerning the recycle-ability of plastics. Could it be that of the 40% of what is recyclable that is thrown away that is not just wanton laziness is actually recyclable. Some plastics are not clearly labeled, i.e. cheese wrappers, ziploc bags, sandwich bags, etc... What about these most certainly recyclable items that are easily overlooked.

Live for today? Anti-consumerist? Because they are right?
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I think it could be for much the same reason that some guys express so much hate for homosexuals: in a word, envy.

I don't have to refute your point or even justify mine if I can discount your very existence with name calling. After all, you're not a real American.

I love hippies; just don't care for their stupidity.

I still recycle cardboard, among other pointless things, because I still have a mandatory recycling fee if I want garbage service. No wonder people use it as a dumpster if they are forced to pay for it, and the garbage can is smaller than the recycle. At least I don't every other week service like Portland, which also requires composting in addition to recycling and garbage service.

I'm still willing to perfectly sort through my recyclables if someone is willing to pick it up for free. Failing that, then it's pointless to recycle items that are cheaper to just make new. If it costs more to recycle something than make it from scratch, then it takes more energy. Consuming more energy is not environmentally friendly.