That is not an economic choice, just a solution of last resort. It still makes inferior concrete because the cement does not bind to the glass like it would to stone. I would not want to drive across a bridge made of this concrete. It is also far more expensive than using stone that seems to be in good supply.
I think that's true, it's certainly happened with recycling before. I remember when old newspapers went from being worth some bucks to worthless. But this China thing sounds much worse. Even if you forget about China, the root problems seem to be that to process it cheaply it has to go offshore to someplace that doesn't care about the environmental effects, the worker safety, etc. So, if it's about doing what's right, what's the point? Did you see the workers in that article, standing in plastic bag crap, up to their knees, sorting it?
I would say they are similar and that is why they have more new natural gas plants. Coal plants are in places where the coal itself is very cheap and politically subsidized.
They are trying to educate people here but I don't think they are going near far enough. They still say you can recycle most plastics when in fact they really only want #1 and #2 (mostly bottles). The rest of it is trash. The same with paper. Corrugated cardboard (brown boxes) is valuable if sorted. Newsprint and clean white bond paper is valuable too but only when sorted and only when the trucking cost does not eat up the value at the paper mill. Unless you are pretty close to the glass plant, glass is useless. Saying you are putting it in concrete is saying it is about as valuable as dirt. You would be better off putting it in the hole where you dug out your suitable aggregates. The thing we should be throwing in the recycle is metal and they are somewhat particular about that, mostly because things like wire jam up the sorting machines.
That gets back to why not just landfill the plastics? Isn't that sequestering the carbon?
Nothing even remotely like that gets recycled now.
Pity about the cost of getting PAID which is more than they get PAID.
You PAY to recycle, f****it.
Here they will haul away sorted cardboard box material *cheaper* than hauling it as trash but you don't get paid for it. It still made sense to do at the club my wife ran. The problem is if it is not "clean" the hauler back bills you at the trash rate.
Your DOT might have decided it really did not hold up as well.
That binding issue sounds logical, but I can't see how it could cost more than stone. Towns have to pay to put it in the dump, so even if they just washed it, crushed it, and gave it away they would probably be even. Of course what the tipping fees are vary widely across the country.
I know at the local municipal facility where you can bring stuff, if you have a question about whether something should be recycled or go into the trash dumpster, the guys there always say, the recycle one we get paid for, the trash one we pay. At least that's what they were saying a year ago, before China quit taking it. Looking at the single stream huge roll on dumpster that you put the recyclables into, I'm not surprised China said enough. As I;ve said, it's loaded with food cans that still have food, wet mail, cardboard with spaghetti sauce on it, plastic flower pots with dirt still in them.....
That gets sent to a local processor who separates it, cleans it, before it goes to China or wherever, but just looking at the mess, the first question I always had is how can they clean that so it's usable? And the town never sent any education materials, etc, to try to make it cleaner. The guys telling people that when in doubt, just put it in recycling isn't helping. You'd think the proper message should be that when in doubt, trash it, there is plenty of what they want, so why screw it more with crap?
That is really just an example of supply and demand. When the only paper being recycled was boy scout groups and a few homeowners, the demand was higher than the supply. When you have universal recycling, supply quickly overwhelmed demand. I used to be able to get 6 cents a pound for clean white bond paper (Carter administration) but even in the short period that we were recycling it, we saw a price drop because more people were doing it. They finally decided it was cheaper to throw it in the trash and pay the tipping charge. The labor and transportation was never covered by the money we made.
You don't put dirt into concrete.
We put all out landfill there.
But most households don't put much metal in their trash bins anymore, mostly just drink cans.
Don’t believe it. It costs a lot less to crush rock than to sort glass from the trash stream, wash it and crush it. And you end up with much worse concrete.
And few modern roads are concrete anymore.
If it was any use for roads, they would be using it for roads and they don’t, so it clearly isnt viable.
Sure, but we are running out of places to bury it. How about every homeowner bury their own plastics in their yard?
Some plastic can be reused cheaply. We used to take some where I worked and it can be easul mixed in some cases and save money. We got it free but would not pay for it.
Typical plastic is 18,000 BTU of energy per pound. We burn oil, why not plastic? At least get the heat out of it and save new oil.
The popular phrase is "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle." In that order. Our grandparents were masters at reducing and reusing; there's no reason why we shouldn't, too. Recycling, landfilling, and burning should be the last resort.
I'd much rather buy meat in butcher paper than on a styrofoam tray.
I miss the old hardware store where you could buy three screws, put them in your pocket after paying for them, and never see a bubble pack.
Cindy Hamilton
Because the chemicals used to give plastic desirable characteristics (flexibility, uv resistance, et alia) leach out and enter the groundwater.
Instead of speculating, try researching the topic first:
bottom line:
"It was found that in most cases the GA (Glass Aggregates, ed.) do not significantly alter the durability-related properties of concrete"
Incineration for generation of electricity is the best thing to do for the bulk of the unusable plastics.
When I worked in fibers and plastics R&D you would be surprised on uses we had for recycled plastics. These were premium products and we did not tell customers that recycled plastics were used. We even salvaged competitors plant waste and this was over 30 years ago.
People decry the use of plastic packaging and want to use the likes of refilled bottles. By the time you transport the bottles and clean them you have consumed more energy than it takes to produce the plastic.
There is actually. They mostly got what they needed from the store loose, particularly with grains, flour butter etc. That doesn’t work well with modern supermarkets where it works a lot better to have it in containers and those containers have to be dealt with in the home etc.
Not going to work now, in spades with stuff ordered online and delivered to the home etc.
I wouldn’t because it’s a damned nuisance waiting for the butcher to cut it up and then wrap it in butchers paper while you wait.
And the meat arrives at the supermarket sealed in plastic with the big slabs of meat that are cut up into individual steaks etc now, instead of a truck showing up at the butchers with whole sides of cattle hanging on hooks in the back of the truck with the butcher carting the sides into the fridge in his shop with the side of beef quite literally over his shoulder.
Only one of our supermarkets even has any butchers onsite anymore. With all the rest the meat is cut up and packaged into the styrofoam trays and shows up in the f****ng great semi daily now.
We still have a couple of those, but quite a bit of the time I find it a lot better to buy stuff like that on amazon or ebay or aliexpress because you have a hell of a lot more choice that way. And you don’t see every town with vast numbers of loose screws in bins sitting there for years so that someone like you can buy just 3 of them to fix something.
We still have Ace Hardware that will sell you loose screws and cheaper than the bubble packs at the BORG. Retailers like plastic for food, simply because of a better shelf life and easier retailing. Grab a package, toss it in the cart and go. Land filling is sequestering carbon. I thought that was a good thing ;-)
It is until you run out of landfill sites and have to cart the trash for hundreds of miles before you can sequester it.
New York discovered that problem almost a century ago now.
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