Recycling thought

[Huge]

Which is what the Government *should* be doing.

Oh, look! A flying pig!

[Man at B&Q]

We're not.

As it gets scarcer, prices rise and encourage alternatives to be used as well as making it viable to extract the more difficult to get at stuff.

Taken to the extreme, we will never run out of oil, we just won't use much of what is left.

MBQ

[tinnews]

We're well out in the sticks in Suffolk and we still have *two* milkmen delivering up our tiny little private road.

At least one of them runs an electric milk float, I'm impressed that they have such a long range nowadays.

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:30:06 +0000 someone who may be DM wrote this:-

It shows rubbish being spread in a big hole by large machines.

No. However, I have seen it in the higher quality of a DVD on a full screen. I suspect some of the details are not as clear on Internet.

The first four of your words are the important bit. It is far more efficient for there to be less waste to do something with than try and bolt a green fig leaf on the end.

Not if it is an example of the tail wagging the dog.

Good business for the quarry owner and operator. Not necessarily good business for broader society.

If waste can be created and transported to the site without using energy.

[Tim Southerwood]

Mary Fisher coughed up some electrons that declared:

Indeed.

That's a possible concern, but I don't remember any issues with Corona pop bottles (which are the ones I remember with a 10p deposit). Nor milk bottle for that matter.

It may be a shift of labour. I heard of recycling plants where hand labour is needed to sort recycables, so in the grand scheme of things it may not make much difference. A more radical, and even more old fashioned idea might be to sell liquid products on-tap and the customer brings their own recepticle. Probably to inconvenient for most people with their hectic lives thought.

No point. There is nothing I could do. This needs the impetus and might of central government. It's what they *should* be doing for the money I pay them, instead of buggering around with irrelevant and unpopular crap like Part P, ID cards and wars in countries which are none of our concern.

Of course. But I would expect a low percentage.

This is a reasonable argument on the face of it, but what if you factor in the cost of production of said plastic, including the fact that it requires oil which is a finite resource and possibly better used for other things (like lubrication products). I'm not convinced though, that the extra percentage of fuel used to transport the weight of glass over plastic is that significant, given the weight of the bottle is a small ratio of the total weight of bottle plus product.

It is difficult to evaluate without studying all the costs involved, which is why I keep an open mind rather than taking the green argument as gospel.

Cheers

Tim

[DM]

Quite interesting but the occasional judicious choice of reference material makes some of her material on landfill decomposition very misleading, the same may well hold for other parts although it does sound feasible. I would certainly agree that not all recycling is worthwhile, and some is a waste of time and money

[Andy Hall]

I'm just amazed that people have got the spare time to waste on this nonsense.

[Andy Hall]

I'm just amazed that people have got the spare time to waste on this nonsense.

[Huge]

Blimey. We didn't even get the rubbish collected until recently. Never mind bloody recycling, I had to take the wheelie bin a 1/4 mile down the drive. Where it got burned most weeks. Even now, it's about 200 yards. If we ever end up with the customary half-a-dozen brightly coloured bins, the council can go hang if I'm going to schlep them up and down the drive.

(Mind you, we already compost everything compostable.)

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2008 16:26:20 +0000 someone who may be Andy Hall wrote this:-

What is nonsensical about the film?

It is not that long, from memory about ten minutes. It can be stopped and started should one wish. I doubt if anyone is so busy that they cannot watch it in one window while doing something else in another.

[jal]

2/- deposit! Bluddy ell. We used to get tuppence.

[chris French]

In message , Mary Fisher writes

In supermarkets in Copenhagen they had machines that took bottles and gave you the deposit back.

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2008 11:33:36 -0000 someone who may be "Mary Fisher" wrote this:-

Glad you liked it.

Those with an interest in waste might like to peruse which is about the plague of plastic in the Pacific Ocean. There are a variety of films and photographs on the site to see what effect the plastic has on animals.

One of the people who made the film "Message in the Waves" for the BBC, from which the clips are taken, was so shocked by what she saw that when she got back home she made the town plastic bag free

[Dave]

The council provides you with a service to collect your waste. Why not charge them for washing out that waste?

I have no wheelie bin, but have black bags instead. This was started when they introduced wheelie bins. If they ever put one of their bins on my property, they will get a bill for it, for ground rent. It will rise at twice the rate of the combined council tax.

Dave

[Mungo "Two Sheds" Toadfoot]

Yes, yes, I've read all the happy clappy writings on many subjects but whether it's true or not is the big question. Look how many people shout from the rooftops that vegetable oils are good for you and natural, saturated fats kill you dead, for example.

Si

[geoff]

In message , chris French writes

Yeah, "my" local supermarket in Liege has a beer bottle machine which you feed bottles into and you get a receipt which you can cash in at the till

I've experimented with English and German bottles, it rejects them, so it must be fairly sophisticated

[Bob Eager]

Still happens round here. And then he goes back to Canterbury through the woods, followed by a traffic queue which includes me....

[geoff]

Pushing up the population

[Andy Hall]

Nowadays they have machines that give you a bicycle in order that you can ride around the city. The idea was that you could leave it at another machine and get your money back. The City Bike Program.

They even managed to persuade misguided sponsors like Coca Cola to sponsor them with logos on the side.

Like many other similar tourist attractions like the mermaid in Copenhagen Harbour and the Maneken Pis in Brussels, this is a big disappointment.

A lot of the bicycles end up in one of the lakes or the harbour because the ROI is not worth it.

[Andy Hall]

It's not the film.

It's the whole idea that people, in all seriousness would spend time messing about with packaging, sorting out plastic, washing bits and pieces under the tap, disinfecting with bleach, removing labels and putting the proceeds into different boxes and bags.

Please tell me who these people are. I have a great range of brushes, double glazing and Lottery tickets that they will find interesting.

In the meantime, the Ruskies have added several more large Mercs to the streets of Moscow, the Chinese have added goodness knows what and the inhabitants of Alexandria have burnt the insulation from several hundred more metres of phone cable that they pulled from a manhole in Johannesburg this afternoon.

However, the inhabitants of the Peoples' Republic of Sheffield will be able to rest in their beds secure in the knowledge that their fortnightly collected, rat infested wheelie bin will be making a much larger contribution to ecowank than that of their neighbours in Rotherham.

I despair. I really do.

This all makes the Archbishop of Canterbury look like a sane human being.