I've been trying real hard to recycle, but recently I've become dismayed to learn that a lot of times when I put something in the recycling bin, it's just going to end up in the trash. A lot of people who care about the environment and recycling probably do not realize this. For example, plastic bags. While they are certainly theoretically recyclable, the recycling workers will try to grab them off and throw them into the trash because they can clog up the conveyor belt, or get blown all over the place. A had an old pillow with a tag that said 100% polyester cover and filling. Polyester is the same exact material is PET plastic (like for example what your water bottles are made out of). But a worker is probably going to see this pillow, have no idea what it is, and throw it off because they think it's not recyclable. This huge lump of recyclable material is most likely going to end up in the trash. These minimum wage paid recycle workers can't be expected to know whether every item is recyclable or read all the little tags. Then glass. For a long time I was putting glass containers in my recycle bin, but recently I found they were just throwing these in the trash, and that they have a special bin downtown you have to go to to be able to drop off your glass recyclables. If you put them in the regular recycle bin, they will just end up being thrown in the trash. No one cares, and the problem here is never going to be solved.
This has been the situation with recycling since the 1970's. A good deal of recyclables end up in the trash anyway, and glass is expensive to melt down recycle, so it's just thrown out for the education of archeologists at a later time. Something to think about next time you buy groceries. Hey, we tried.
My old boss got fined by the city for not separating out his recycling. He mailed the citation back, but with instead of payment, a photo of the garbage collectors dumping his recycling and his trash both into the compactor truck. He never heard from them again.
So folks, don't recycle, because your efforts will just end up in the trash. Let's all just give up and our concious will be clear. They would have just thrown it away anyway.
Things to recycle: Aluminum and steel cans Newspaper Brown corrugated cardboard (if you have a lot of it, like a business) Glass is borderline as to whether recycling it saves any energy. Things to trash: Plastic Misc paper and cardboard Especially trash any paper/plastic/cardboard food wrapping. Your greasy pizza boxes won't be recycled. My trash goes to the city incinerator and gets turned into steam heat, so I don't worry about anything filling up a landfill.
The point was, if greenies really care about the environment, there are some low hanging fruits to address. They're just not trendy or appealing fruits. Starting a whole new initiative may not make so much sense, if the initiatives you've already started have so many holes and flaws in them.
So folks, recycle because it makes you feel better about yourself not because it does any good. " well at least I tried "
Some places charge extra for recycling. I would investigate and find out if it's just being thrown away.
Not exactly. I have been thinking about how to recycle glass and brick. Glass bottles ... if unbroken ... can be washed and reused. The problem is customers. If you can find buyers for recycled goods. What good are they? I have been in the process of recycling an old house. he wood is old but it is in great shape. Heart pine over a hundred years in use is more rot resistance than today's lumber. A little bit of linseed oil and it is good for another 100 years. This is a shelf in my shed. It is holding up fish tanks now.
Old wood is superior to wood harvested now because it's old growth. Check out how tight the growth rings are. Old barn wood brings big bucks
30 rings per inch of growth minimum. But I just use it around the house. I would buy recycled for one big reason.... saving money. If you can figure out how to make recycled material less expensive you will have something. I have a 100 gallon fish tank made from recycled auto glass. Cost me about fifteen bucks with tape.
Repurposing and recycling are different things. You can do lots of repurposing on your own but putting trash in receptacles hoping someone else recycled them is often fruitless. My wife won’t let me throw away anything resembling a container. She finds a million uses for that stuff with her garden and livestock.
Okay, call it upcycling if you wish. I say,"cool, free lumber." And antique block and window glass. The roof was sold. The 1x12 wall boards were sold. The glass was salvaged. The interior walls were salvaged. Everything possible was salvaged.
A friend told me that bottles with caps are NOT accepted because it costs too much in labor to remove them. So, bottles with no caps are recycled. The rest go in the regular trash.
Less that 10% of plastic is recycled. “Everyone knows recycling is pretty easy. So I throw the bottle into the blue bin, into a blue bin, in the recycling bin. They throw it into some kind of truck all sorted nice and neat. It goes to a separate place, to a plastic recycling plant, to a factory, something akin to the end of “Toy Story 3” where they’re all heading to this big incinerator. Then I imagine that there’s some large machine that just squishes everything together. Everything then is melted down. It’s somehow melted, maybe they melt down the plastic or something. From there, it can be reshaped into sheets of plastic, a park bench. You hear about sneakers being turned into a basketball court. And that turns into new things. Recycling! Turns out, that’s not the whole truth, especially for plastic. This is actually propaganda we’ve been spoon-fed since we were kids in commercial after commercial. “ THE NEW YORK TIMES, The Great Recycling Con, The greatest trick corporations ever played was making us think we could recycle their products., By Tala Schlossberg and Nayeema Raza, Dec. 9, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/recycling-myths.html
Fake Political Science does have a lot in common with The Tooth Fairy. “Who’s behind a lot of this messaging? The industry that produces plastic and the retailers who sell it to us. And it makes perfect sense that they’d want to trick us into thinking we can use as much plastic as we want so long as we recycle. Why not pass the responsibility for a big corporate mess onto individuals like you and me. But here’s the big secret. Entire categories of papers and plastics are rarely recycled. Of seven types of plastic that people put into blue bins, five whole categories hardly ever get recycled at all.“ THE NEW YORK TIMES, The Great Recycling Con, The greatest trick corporations ever played was making us think we could recycle their products., By Tala Schlossberg and Nayeema Raza, Dec. 9, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/recycling-myths.html
That is so...just ugh. I am so sick of all the lies! Can any of these people just be honest? The ex's grandfather would burn all paper products, compost for his garden and recycle aluminum cans. He rarely threw away anything.