I went to a commercial belt distributor to buy a belt for my snowblower and it was less than half the price of the cheapest one I could buy on-line (including shipping) - and it was a premier brand (gates Tri-Power) WHo'd have thought the cheapest place to buy a belt would be a brick and mortar local specialty shop????
I wanted a spare in case this one breaks in the next snow storm - or the one after that, or 5 years from now. I called the local NAPA store
- not in stock, but available in 2 days - same price - again half what I'd pay on-line.
Gotta love this "offline shopping" and buying from places you might actually logically expect to stock the stuff - - - -
I did agree with your use of Gorilla tape. It might extend the lifetime. Container is likely PE which is recyclable.
Speaking of recycling, I think it is stupid to have multiple cans for different trash. Look at your friend Adam Schiff's house and you will see three cans. That means 3 different trucks will have to come to his house for pickup. Trash should go into one can, handled by one truck and should be picked for recycle at the dump. It is done like that in many places and in order to recycle you have to have people at the dump anyway to pick through the recycle.
Paper for recycling has to be clean. If it's got coffee grounds, oil, etc., it cannot be recycled.
I doubt they could hire people to wade through disposable diapers, rotting meat, etc. just to get the useful recyclables separated and cleaned.
We switched some years back to single-stream recycling, so we only need two cans (and two trucks). One for recycling and one for things headed to the landfill.
If I am reliably informed, King County, WA, requires compostables to be disposed of separately. Your carrot peels can't go in with your diapers.
Here we have : 2 wheeled bins ; 1 truck ; every 2 weeks. No compost pick-up - we're rural and composters are no problem. All the recycle-bin stuff gets sorted at the big recycling facility. Homeowners need to take any hazardous waste to the landfill's collection area on certain specific days. My only complaint is that they recently excluded some plastics - not because of recycling value - but for sorting difficulty -
- a better solution should be offered - like having the homeowner sort/bundle/bag the difficult items. John T.
And then more and more that one stream is going into the landfill anyway. China doesn't want crappy plastic and paper anymore, for it to be acceptable it has to be very clean and not mixed up. Once you mix soup cans, tomato sauce jars and paper together, what do you think you wind up with? We went from several streams that mostly did get recycled, to one that doesn't.
The "recycle" should just be metal. Everything else is trash except for a few localities close to a place that can use it. Most "recycle" is too dirty to use anyway and goes to the landfill. We did paper recycling at IBM way before it was cool and it is amazing how pure it has to be to have any value at all. Clean white "bond" was worth 6 cents a pound. Newsprint was 2 cents. Mixed paper was ZERO. They would reject the whole load if they saw anything else in it.
The only plastic with real recycle value is type 1 and type 2 (basically bottles). They don't want any of the other stuff. We are starting to see ads saying they would rather you not recycle at all than to throw everything you think is recyclable into the bin. (everything with that "recycle" symbol on it) They also want you to wash everything out first.
Even then, most of it goes to the landfill anyway because we generate far more than the companies who manufacture from used plastic can use. Glass is particularly useless unless it is carefully sorted and you are near a glass plant. Same with paper.
I doubt everyone has their original bin, even if they checked. If the wind is blowing hard the empty ones get scattered down the street. People just grab one and the last guy may have to walk a ways to get one. Mine is easy to spot tho because it has lots of weird paint on top. I use it for a work surface when I am spraying various little things.
True that clean recycle wanted. I think you have to look at the overall picture in terms of economics including pollution. There is also the value of the recycle which varies with demand. Paper products are the lowest value. That's why I think clogging up our driveways with cans and having multiple trucks for pickup is not as efficient as doing all the chores at the dump.
While clean recycle is preferred it is not that simple. Take a PET soda bottle for example. It has a PE cap and a paper label which must be removed. If the PET is dyed it cannot be used. The bottles must be chopped up and washed. PE and paper float and are skimmed off. The PET cannot be used directly and most is probably depolymerized and repolymerized. Even then the polymer is not as color free as virgin resin and must be used where color is not observed or a problem.
It is 3 trucks here every week. One for horticulture, one for trash and one for recycle. The recycle trucks have the lift for the 65 gallon tote. (when they are all working) Otherwise it is all the regular garbage truck with a hopper in back and a guy hanging on.
We have county mandated chest-high garbage cans of three different colors, where they give us five of the landfill color, two of the recycling color, and only one (which is the one we pay by the gallon for) of the trash color.
I've had to repair the hinge, but it only needed a zip tie since it had cracked when I was stomping inside compressing the landfill and then it fell over on the lid with me inside so the round hinge opened up at the 4 o'clock position.
I've also had to replace the metal rod about knee high, which, inexplicably, fell out (where it's blocked at both ends, so that was a treat to get it wide enough momentarily to fit the metal pipe inside).
I do have two cans with cracked tops, which I haven't bothered about, and where I'll be interested in what this thread develops, since I can test it out on the tops. These things are thick plastic.
While the heat gun or epoxy might work, I suspect it matters greatly where the cracks are in the OP's cans, where reinforcing tape or strips of plastic might help, and which can be epoxied in place.
As for the poster who claimed your time isn't worth it, the main argument I always have to that is that for a business, that argument makes sense given you don't generally care about being kind to the environment - all you care about, generally, is making money.
But for a home-repair group, fixing things is good for the environment, and, besides, if your time was that critical, you'd pay someone else to do your relaxation for you as you need to make money every second of the day.
For the person who claimed that only some types of trash are the money makers, I called the California folks on this matter years ago, because our locality has _every_ store being fined (I think it's $15K/year) for _not_ having a CRV bottle recycling procedure at the store - where they told me that, of the three cans, only one costs money, which is the landfill can.
The other two make far more than they cost to pick up and process.
Regarding what one poster said about who "owns" the cans, it's often the case that the recycler will replace your cans for free, but that's not the point of the question so it's moot from the standpoint of how to fix it.
Please do keep us informed as to how to end up repairing it, as I may try it with my cracked tops (I can send a picture if you like of my repairs).
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