Classical example of political correctness having precedence over common sense.
The photos of the trucks emptying the recycling into the landfill would be worth a bob or two though.....
.andy
To email, substitute .nospam with .gl
Yes. They only have to find a landfill for the ashes of the waste which is very small in comparison. The waste incinerators have metal sifting mechanisms anyhow and this is recycled via the incinerator.
Might be better to give people a small discount off their council tax if they recycle, more of a carrot than a stick approach.
Still we need a good way of encouraging us lazy brits to catch up with our continental cousins somehow.
cheers, Pete.
I still fail to see how incinerating glass, metal and paper saves more energy and landfill than recycling it. It may be worth doing alongside recycling but it's not best option by any means.
Also I wouldn't like to live downwind of an incinerator no matter how good the emissions are supposed to be. All those Ni Cad batteries going up in smoke, mmmmm.....
cheers, Pete.
It is the best option overall.
No, just incinerate it all and the re-cycling is done at the incinerator. Mush cheaper all around and you don't need to fine people. Having a law that prosecutes people for something which is needless is just plain crazy.
capacity of 36.8MW (2001) and we are buying more.
According to the website the UK higher education sector currently has some 21 MW of CHP
Interestingly enough the air conditioning in the summer now uses more than the heating in the winter. There is no gas.
-- Jim Watt
I agree.
Why? Much household waste is unrecycable.
No. Turbines are very effecient beasties. More efficient than stirlings.
Yes.
The points are broadly these.
(i) It doesn't take a lot of energy to make paper and its overall carbon neutral when you burn it. Taking it miles on congested highways to recycling plants is a lot more wasteful of fuel than buring it to heat hoses where it becomnes 'waste'. Its much easier to process known quality terees than to procvess a load of assorted much full of god knows what fillers etc etc and you can't make high grade paper out of waste paper.
(ii) the transport issues are killers for bottles. Bottles if smashed up and tossed in teh sea turn into shingle in no time and get recycled rather well. It takes more energy to take a bottle to a recycling plant
- even to a bottle bank - than it does to bury it nearby.
Nearly all plastics and papers are suitable for high temperature incineration, and high temperature incinerators are quite easy to make clean and safe and do localises rubbish disposal. Recycling planst are by contrast less easy to do locally and need fairly massive investment. And tehre is always teh cost of transport of the waste to the processing plant.
The bigger problem is metal waste - ores DO take huge energy to make, and are often poisonous when buried. Aluminium of course burns fairly well, and the residue is actually similar in volume to the original materials.
The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials down to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't involve e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear glass bottle from a green one.
Nature is the best recycler in the world. Landfill is a great way to let nature use the next few millionyears to turn a miuntain of bottles back into sand again.
The trouble is that all these silly environmentalists think that by loading up their volvos with a ton of waste paper and using a couple of gallons of fuel to drive them to the wate paper site, they are benefitting the eco system.
Wheras if they stuffed them in an incinerator, and compsted teh ahs, they could get useful energy out of them and heat theior houses, and leave the volvo in teh garage.
Once again IMM's very sketchy education is growing thin.
All materials when burnt gain weight and mass. The volume of a metal oxide is actally greater than the metal.
Glass does not burn.
Organics turn into gases and liquids tho, which is why e.g. wood ash is much less than teh wood it comes from. The rest has gone out in carbon and hydrogen (and ofen sulphur, nitrogen and other) gaseous oxides.
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Simply because the logistics of recycling it use a lot of road space and fuel to get it to the recycling plant.
Personally I think there is a great future in a machine that would grind glass to a powder suitable for use instead of sand as building material.
Metals are a different matter. They are economically recyclable - almost.
Organic waste - in the sense of stuff mmade of hyrdocarbons - wood, paper, plastics etc - is far better burnt as locally as possible, provided that this does not result in toxic emissions, and especially if the waste heat can be used to do something useful. .
"Pete C" wrote | Might be better to give people a small discount off their | council tax if they recycle, more of a carrot than a stick | approach. | Still we need a good way of encouraging us lazy brits to | catch up with our continental cousins somehow.
Perhaps we could start by the council collecting the rubbish every week in the first place. And picking up the rubbish that spills out of ripped binbags when they haven't collected it for three weeks.
Owain
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "IMM" saying something like:
That's a wonderful way of wasting the precious resource of clean water.
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com (sPoNiX) saying something like:
Just light a candle and don't waste water.
Transport is needed to get it to incineration too.
I've seen claims from one council that their collected glass gets made into bottles - I thought that was impossible though. Are they telling fibs?
Strikes me that a lot of emphasis is being put on recycling but not enough on re-use. For the most part the reuse ideas around seem pretty naive, but there are more sensible ways to do it too. I idly came up with several possibilities, which of course may or may not stand up to further scrutiny.
Regards, NT
This was done during WW2. Power output was single figure watts, ie enough to run one dim CFL. And the water consumption of course...
Regards, NT
Is isnt, thats the problem. If you want efficiency you need complex kit. OTOH you can get something to work with about a tenner plus a ride to the auction. If you have unlimited time, and the expertise to get old junk running.
Regards, NT
What sort of old junk do you have in mind?
How exactly do you get metal cans and glass bottles to burn exactly? ;-)
#Paul NB: I suppose oxidising the metal might count, at a pinch.
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