At workplaces and at home we congratulate ourselves for recycling a bit of paper, metal and plastic yet we happily buy products that add little to the quality of life yet are costly in terms of transportation, materials and labour:
eg. Cheap "Pound shop" batteries that don't last long but have travelled half way round the world and have consumed materials and will end up as polluting land fill.
Useless tat such as Engerland Flags to clip onto the car.
Cheap Xmas tat that is tasteless and - again - comes from the far east consuming cargo space and transportation fuels.
Items such as PC Monitors that are packaged with a PC when people really only need a new base unit.
Domestic appliances that could perhaps have one more repair.
Cheap consumer items that have obsolescence built in that will end up as land-fill even though items such as power supplies are good for many ears. - Eg. Mobile phone chargers which could last 20 years but will be thrown out when we get the latest phone.
I don't if I can source it from this country, locally etc. I try to=20 minimize the packaging I consume and actively avoid food miles, clothing=20 miles where possible.
eg.
I tend to see cheap batteries as a false economy. Most of the batteries=20 in my house are European high power rechargeables. The solar rechargers=20 were made in Germany and althought they take a while, can keep us=20 supplied with well charged batteries most of the time. The mains charger=20 supplements when needed. The extra expense has already been absorbed by=20 not having to purchase batteries. =20
That isn't useless. It is counter productive. I've seen figures that=20 claim that flags can cost over 3% in terms of drag and turbulence on=20 your fuel ecomony. The flags are likely to be attached to the car for 6=20 weeks in total. Assume the average 12,000 miles a year and a =A340 fill=20 up. The flags cost =A32? Add on to that =A34.50 in extra fuel used. =20
and packaging, plastics etc.. I assume that you are referring to the=20 exterior stuff. A lot of it is still low efficiency bulb stuff so the=20 power consumption is pretty high. Some of it is ultra bright LED though=20 so that is much cheaper to run. =20
I'll differ with you marginally there. Most new PCs are being shipped=20 with LCD screens. The power consumption is much lower. Add in that they=20 have a more stable picture and you get less eye strain. Bearing in mind=20 that the average consumer CRT is probably still refreshing at the=20 default 60Hz then the LCDs may be reducing the number of work days lost=20 due to headaches. =20
There does come a point where changing out the 40% efficient boiler for=20 a 93% efficient one just makes sense. As long as the units are replaced=20 with much more efficient ones then there is a good argument to change=20 them.
Voltages change. The charger voltages on Nokias have come down over the=20 years. The chargers are also becoming slightly more efficient in that=20 once the unit is charged it is able to send back a signal to the charger=20 that no further current is needed and that the power can be cut to a=20 running level. Also the charger should be recycled with the phone so=20 that it can be re-used where it is needed.
My 'domestic waste' bin is never more than 1/4 full. The recycling bins=20 are always full. The district council has extra recycling facilities at=20 the tips and I'm careful to make sure that I build up a journey's worth=20 of stuff before I make the trip and I make sure I can do something else=20 as part of the trip (maybe give the dog a walk somewhere special). I=20 made a trip with a heavily laden car on Saturday. It may be that I'm=20 fortunate in the efforts that Blaby District council has made but I=20 managed to take a car full and not a single item went into the general=20 waste bins. Everything was recycleable.=20
The vast majority of our general waste is in packaging.
There is a lack of impetus in the average consumer (and I'll admit I'm=20 not average) to demand that change happens. Look at the pet food=20 industry.=20
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"Simply peel off the lid, feed your cat straight from the dish and=20 dispose of when empty. No need to scoop the food out and no washing up!"
The packaging is a plastic lid and a plastic container. You bin one=20 every day. The plastic isn't a recycleable one. It is selling well=20 though due to the sheer convenience.=20
If you have an item that you think should live a bit longer but don't=20 want to maintain anymore then freecycle it.
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huge network of people giving stuff away rather than landfilling it.=20 There is a growing desire to do the right thing.
The simple answer is to allow the price of materials to rise high relative to labour (as they once were, and are getting so again) and all these issues will solve themselves by market forces.
The message from The Natural Philosopher contains these words:
I've been wondering how long it will be before old rubbish dumps will be worth mining for their metals and plastics. It wasn't that long ago that things just went unsorted into the dump, and even now if you turn up at the dump with something like a vacuum cleaner, round here they'll tell you to sling it in the non-recyclable compactor, despite all that lovely copper going to waste. As for the plastic - some ingenious soul will probably come up with a way of either burning it or distilling it for feedstock.
In message , at 23:43:41 on Sun, 11 Jun 2006, Warwick remarked:
Ah, but if you multiply that by the number of cars involved, then divide by the cost of a hip replacement operation, you'll get a headline that the Daily Mail would be proud of.
That will have to wait for the invention of an effective sorting device. (Let's be practical: you'd probably need a short-distance matter transporter with a reconfigurable submolecular field filter.)
Waste mining is occasionally workable, but only when the material hasn't been mixed up with other kinds of waste, and a process exists to re-refine it. For example, in the early years of plastics manufacture, whole production batches of polypropylene that had failed to polymerise correctly were disposed of as landfill. They were dug up again when someone realised that amorphous polypropylene would make a very good hot-melt glue.
Rumour has it that that Newmarket transistors used an out of spec batch of transistors as hard core for their drive. Clive Sinclair found out about it and put a bid in for them, dug them up , tested them and sold them into the hobbyist market.
Now, I always thought the recycling mantra was: Use, re-use, recycle. OK, it's missing the important 'repair' step as far as most DIY'ers are concerned, me included. I am pretty much obsessed with repairing things as both a physical (skills) and intellectual challenge.
I used to skip scrounge from a University skip that was always full of interesting things, electronics components, PC bits, shelving, you name it. I even found a brilliant flatbed scanner that I fixed and passed on to a charity - it took about an hour to empty out the water, dry off the boards, re-calibrate and re-assemble.
Anyway, having been caught a couple of times, I was warned off and told I was stealing, which technically I probably was. Next time I went, they'd exchanged the skip for one with a steel lid and padlock.
Being that I was re-using stuff destined for land-fill, or at least examining it's re-use potential, surely I was doing something that
*they* should have been doing in the first place.
Checking their website reveals no end of nonesense about how they are environmentally friendly. I think not but understand why. The tension for them was obviously between insane Health-and-Safety legislation and the urgent global necessity of repair and re-use.
Incidentally, I was told that when the legislation came in declaring that chairs should be fireproof (for some reason), the same skip was full to overflowing with perfectly good, new chairs that didn't meet the legislation...
He used to pop up now and again in the newsgroup demon.service, usually to have a little whingette about something. AFAIR, any such thread would tend to rapidly descend into a "crappy C5" discussion. :)
I think pulling things apart and fixing should be _the_ topic taught in school, and should then be the incentive for kids actually finding out how things work and what can be done to improve them.
Giving kids exercises based on making thing new - emulating mass production (let's make another three legged stool, tommy) is a waste of time. Kid's see past that, and would rather go to IKEA to buy a stool.
Skip Diving and other give away moments should be encoraged under a legal framework that avoids individual liabilities. Not everyone needs nanny intervention...
I've developed whole school plans for Technology and taught the subject and I'd be very interested in seeing how you would implement such a strategy. What would you pull apart and fix, how would you teach it, and how much would it cost? Then the biggy: what learning outcomes would you expect?
I've used the technique in one aspect of Technology (teaching IT) but, except as an occasional ad hoc example, never found the means to implement it in the CDT area of Technology.
There is the theory of how cars work and then the massive number of modes of failure to contend with. Most car-fixing diagnoses are straightforward, some require a degree of lateral thinking - all require physical skills, most of which are easily teachable.
Listen, look, think, formulate hypotheses, look for evidence for each of the hypotheses. Loop until solved.
Oh, look, it's the Scientific Method !
Surely the hands-on version philosphy of science it worth teaching in an CDT class ?
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