I took some logs to the recycling today and was about to put them in a skip marked 'wood'. There was a shout of "You can't put that there sir, it goes in general waste!" Apparently wood does not come from trees, it comes from furniture!
Round here, if you cut branches from a tree (or even cut a tree down) that wood goes in the "green" skip to be composted but if there's a nail in the trunk it has to go in scrap metal because they can extract metal from wood but not wood from metal. So if you remove all the fabric from a bed base and you're down to the wood frame and the metal springs, you'd think that would go in scrap metal? No. It goes in the special bed place. When the skips are taken away to wherever they are taken to, the beds are put into the general waste skips. But you cannot chuck the bed straight into the general waste skip.
Fluorescent tubes have to go in a special bin unless that bin is full when you must smash the tube as you put it into general waste skip - you can't put the whole tube in because it contains a nasty greenhouse gas that would be released if it got broken in the skip.
Oh it's worse than that, it's mercury vapour. Schools now have to evacuate a class if you drop a thermometer, but break a strip light and nobody cares, but one contains a liquid which is easy to deal with, the other contains the gas which isn't.
ISTR reading that with ours, max branch thickness for composting is 2", and anything bigger goes into the landfill one (although they'll have to stop that when timber is banned from landfill).
Not a greenhouse gas - mercury vapor.
For whole tubes, an attempt is made to recover the mercury, whereas for broken tubes, it's already lost. (Actually this isn't true, as during the life of the CFL, much of the mercury migrates into the glass, phosphors, etc, but this is normally overlooked.) If you collect 1000 CFLs, you have about the same amount of mercury as the average human body contains at death (via fillings). If you eat a regular portion of fish, you probably get a mercury dose about 50 times higher than you can inhale from a broken CFL.
What we should be spending more attention on recovering are the rare earth metal phosphors. These are currently seriously limited resources on the planet with new uses for them being discovered for various energy saving and energy efficient devices that we're likely to need in the future, but I'm not aware there's any attempt to recover them. There is a risk we'll run out, and/or access will be restricted by political borders, just as their use becomes even more critical.
Doesn't China have most of the known rare earth metal deposits?
I don't think so, it just has most of the active mines, I seem to remember reading a lot of others were shutdown when it was easier/cheaper to import from china, now they've imposed export quotas, the others are looking at restarting ... scananavia IIRC?
I find that very hard to believe...
...the recycling centre staff addressed you as "sir"? And in Tyneside?
No.
It has most of the rare earth mines, but that's because they produced at such low prices* that all the other ones shut down years ago.
*Low wages, vile working conditions and no environmental worries. Just poison the land,. There's plenty more in China.
California for neodymium.
Heh! I hadn't even twigged that the name 'scandium' was derived from scandanavia, but while googling around, stumbled over the swedish town of Ytterby, which explains four more element names ...
I doubt any schools use mercury thermometers any more.
AFAIK, they're no longer legal.
Hmmm. Seems like the answer is "it depends";
No, except maybe for some older equipment stashed away.
for normal pupil use they would be spirit ones
Our council tip has a bin marked "timber and wood" but, of course, nobody, especially the staff, knows where to put kitchen carcasses. A simple booklet telling people where to put the most frequently dumped items would save everybody a lot of hassle. An Ikea furniture bin might be a good idea. I've seen their slatted beds dumped on the street, and have saved myself a good few quid by putting the bits into my timber stash.
I believe this to be incorrect in the UK
The BBC seem to agree with you:-)
There are three other places, Mount Weld in Australia operated by Lynas corporation, Mountain Pass in the USA operated by MolyCorp and a deposit in Greenland operated by GGG Minerals.........
China currently has monopolistic control at over 97%, the other mines are not being online till at least 2012...... so China has us by the proverbials till then
(I've studied the rare earths market for work so thats how I know)
Regards
Stephen
Ah, that's what I should have said.
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