I see that the semi-skimmed milk now has a white top but the full cream is still blue and the skimmed red. I was told at one of the supermarkets this is because there is a problem with recycling green plastic. Is this correct? I think using up old stock is a more likely explanation but I still cannot see how removing the colour coding benefits either the customers or recycling.
I'm guessing it might be that they changed from making the tops out of coloured polypropylene or HDPE to LDPE, like the rest of the milk bottle. That means a bottle with the top screwed on can be recycled as a single plastic, rather than being mixed plastic. This improves the quality of the output plastic.
I tried to check the recycling triangle on a top to confirm if this was true, but it was so small I couldn't read the number inside. Which makes it rather ineffectual as a recycling label.
If you have a coloured top, is there a triangle on the underside and is the number legible?
Theo
I never thought of this. I shall investigate next time I see a coloured top.
My skimmed milk white top has a triangle with a 2 in it (High Density Polyethylene)
The reclycing instructions are simply "rinse/top on"
Ours are made of foil, but I guess that is the exception rather than the rule these days!
According to most outlets, all coloured plastic tops are now being changed to white. Any labelling on the package will still retain the expected colour of the milk within. I guess it has something to do with the end result when you recycle that sort of plastic if it has lots of colours.
I can well recall some planter tubs made out of recycled plastic which came in a very great selection of colours a bit like the colour was random and changed over the object. That is the problem I guess the finished product does not look very good. I have noticed this in those packing chips too, but as that is polystyrene, and not actually for any other purpose than packing that does not really matter much. Brian
Unfortunately all the triangles in the world won't help a blind consumer, and neither does the colour of the lid, so if its plastic, it goes in plastic bin, end of story. I get some milk in glass bottles. Do you remember we all used to, but then the aluminium tops could be saved and sent to places where money was raised for charity. Nowadays these sort of top as I'm told to put into landfill, as there are so few, and many are no longer made of aluminium any more apparently. I wonder how other blind people sort their recycling, I mean on drinks cartons, how would you know if a given on had a metal coating inside? What about hose with plastic lids on a cardboard carton? Brian
Just burn the lot.
Fundamentally the correct idea. Municipal CHP stations with uber high burn temperatures to break down all organics, scrubbers to remove water soluble gases like SO2, NO2, etc...and just take the slabs of metal slag and oxides out the bottom for reprocessing.
Then give the plebs free hot water to heat their houses with and wash in.
Its so sensible that the UK government will never allow it.
There was a plan here to create a high tech incinerator for our landfill. A local rich guy, funded the development.
The materials are not burned in the open in that case, they were to be burned in a sealed enclosure. A small model of the device was created, for evaluation.
The project stopped, at the point they discovered one of the byproducts would be dioxin. No more funding went into the project after that.
To do it right, maybe that takes a 10000 degree plasma. You would need a healthy supply of free energy, to convert and separate and deal with the outputs. At a high enough temperature, there would no longer be pesky organics involved.
*******The city I was born in, had an incinerator. It used to shower the countryside in paper-ash. If you hung a wash outside, "black stuff" would be stuck to it. It all depended on which way the wind was blowing, as to whether the washing would have to be redone.
On one of my jobs, I went there in a pickup to dump loads of trash. The tailgate fell off the pickup, and all the way down into the pit that feeds the incinerator (that's
200 feet below grade). The crane operator saw it fall, and he fished out the tailgate out of the trash, and hauled it back up to ground level and put it next to the pickup. Nice guy :-) That operation was eventually closed down. It was polluting a local waterway -- just the runoff was filthy.It took decades, but today that area is "clean". The smell level is so low, even tourists don't notice :-) They used to dump sewage into the water. Today, a five hundred million facility processes the sewage instead.
Do we live in a great timeline, or what ?
Paul
You burn the waste in a plasma arc furnace, using a sacrificial coal arch to support the waste, to produce syngas; that gas is passed through a heat exchanger to produce steam, which is used to drive a steam turbine to generate power, the cooler gas is then passed through another heat exchanger to pre-heat water passing to the first exchanger. The syngas is then used to fuel a gas turbine, also providing electricity. There is enough electricity to power the whole plant and excess to export.
That is not just something that I have read, but the plant design (from
10+ years ago) that I worked on the control system for, that was just about to be built. Unfortunately I left the company at that point, so I don't know how it went.
How odd that there are a number of them in western europe.
Bullshit with crematoria ovens.
Never happened with ours.
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