Posted on 07/05/2014 7:36:27 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Recycling is authoritarian, demeaning and an unutterable waste of time, energy and money. No surprise, then, that the European Union is planning to force its vassal states to do much, much more of it.
Last week, the European Commission proposed its most draconian waste disposal legislation yet: a plan requiring 70 per cent of all municipal waste and 80 per cent of packaging waste to be recycled by 2030; a total ban of the landfill of recyclable waste by 2025, aiming "to virtually eliminate landfill" by 2030.
As even the Guardian quietly concedes, this is an impossible ambition:
The new targets will be difficult for the UK to meet, as recycling rates have recently stagnated after a period of rapid growth in the past decade. According to figures released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in November, 43.2% of waste in England was recycled in 2012-13. That figure was just 12% in 2001 but the UK is still well behind Austria and Germany, which recycle 63% and 62% of their waste respectively.
But that won't, of course, stop the green activists who have hijacked our councils (in accordance with Local Agenda 21) using it as an excuse to inflict further hairshirt misery on householders. On average, councils in Britain expect residents to sort their waste into four separate containers; but with some local authorities it's as many as seven boxes or multi-coloured bags. The record is held by Newcastle-under-Lyme which has nine different bins, bags and boxes.
This is the most extraordinary imposition on people's time. Research from Seattle suggests that it takes a typical household about 45 minutes per week to recycle its rubbish. In the US that works out at ninety million hours expended every week dividing green glass from brown glass from cardboard...
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Penn and Teller did one of their “Bullsh*t” segments on this a while back - pretty much demonstrated that it takes more energy and expense to do the recyling bit than to simply toss all the waste in one bin to be collected and disposed of all at once......
Being a conservative, I delight in conserving things, including raw materials and energy, therefore I recycle as much as I can. I compost. I take my tree branches to the tree branch dump where they’re turned into free wood chips. Anything that still has enough value to be reused by someone is given to a charitable organization like ReStore or the Salvation Army.
While some recyclables don’t pay for themselves at all times depending upon market demand, recycling metals (ESPECIALLY aluminum which is often called “solidified electricity”) is ALWAYS a big win in terms of energy savings, reduced mining, and pollution savings.
Sometimes recycled paper pays for itself and sometimes not, but it’s satisfying in terms of the number of forests that don’t have to be cultivated and harvested. Kraft paper and products made from it do usually bring a profit. Mixed glass is probably the least profitable of the recyclables.
I believe in making use of the raw materials placed on this planet to make better lives for ourselves, but I see no reason to make wanton and unnecessarily destructive use, and keeping our air, water, and soil free from obvious poisons is a no-brainer as well. There’s no reason we have to use everything up now and leave little or nothing for our children and their children.
I had a do-good neighbor, called the area transfer station to be sure they too TV and computer monitors. They said Yes they do.
So I helped him collect dead TVs and CRTs from a few other neighbors as well because we were making the trip, and we drove them there.
Once there we were informed by the idiots working there, that No They Don’t. We would have to drive them to the main landfill 30 miles away.
So we drove to the end of their driveway, just outside the fence, and opened the tailgate and dumped the whole load on the ground.
Hahaha...I did that with a huge woodchuck on my property...I tried all kinds of things, but it was the cat litter that drove him away!
Tells you all you need to know about how foul used litter is!
Reminded me of this past March. Son had sublet apt at school in mid year, and prior tenant had left behind a ratty old sofa. We put it on Craigslist as Free - come and get it.
2 days later no bites, so dragged it 100 yards to back of the complex and heaved it into the dumpster. Old 80's era heavy wood style, etc. Weighed a metric sh*t ton.
Couple hours later, I took some plain old kitchen trash back to the dumpster and the sofa was gone. Cushions were still there.
Note to dumpster divers, look on C/L first - you might find something that has not yet had coffee grounds dumped on it.
I do NOT bother to recycle anything other than paper.
When I lived in CA in 1990's, we had to sort glass into 3 categories. Take the wax paper out of the Cheerios box and recycle the box with the newspaper. Plastics #1 and 2 rinse and put into another container. Only 32 gallons for family of 3 for trash, with the threat that they'd audit what was in there.
Moved to Texas. 96 gallon container and you can get another one if you need it.
It was not my generation that came up with disposable diapers, plastic bottles, disposable furniture and all the plastic on everything at the grocery store. I still have and use most of my mom’s Tupperware, drink water out of a real glass and we use cloth napkins. Everything that’s trash goes in a large plastic bag at the curb twice a week. I also refuse to wheel that obnoxious green and yellow cart back and forth. I did find a good use for it though and store all the rakes, hoes, shovels and other lawn implements in it.
We recycle almost nothing. We buy the products at the asking price, and pay the service fee to dispose of the waste.
However, I do agree that aluminum, and to add to your point, lithium batteries (and a few other things) should be recycled. However, while other countries are teaching their children advanced math and engineering skills, I discourage teaching our Americans to sort trash.
Follow the recycling trucks sometime - - as I have done. Often, their contents are dumped into the same compacting pits along with the garbage. This is a known fact in our area.
Here in my waste disposal district, we collect the following separate streams:
waste glass (again sorted by color: brown, green, and white) - must be taken to the various stations located about town;
packaging waste (in the so-called "Gelber Sack" - after rinsing yoghurt cups, etc.) - curbside pick-up;
waste paper - curbside pick-up;
residual waste ("Graue Tonne") - curbside pick-up; bulky waste - curbside pick-up on different days for different varieties (electronic waste on one day, waste wood on another, etc.); and
bio-waste ("Grüne Tonne") - curbside pick-up.
Additionally, one give the responsible waste disposal authorities a call and arrange to have them come by and pick up "Special Waste."
Further, many people take their dead batteries to work for separate collection and recycling.
Naturally, this all take quite a bit of effort and ti-
Sorry, gotta go: More waste to be processed!
Regards,
Next come the recyclers. Even though there is a special dumpster that takes all of it no sorting required they stand there sorting and saying goodbye to their garbage as well by reading labels looking for the recycle icon etc. How long does it take to put a bag in a dumpster? A recycler can take 5 minutes.
I just bag my trash, toss it in the truck, take it off to the center and dump it usually tossing two bags at a time. I've watched. I can have three times the trash to put in as the ones in front of me but I can get it emptied out in the third of the time one of them usually can. Even if I had 20 bags I can toss them all in the dumpster in less than 3 minutes time and be pulling away.
Nah the trash in the regular general dumpster gets recycled also. The landfill it goes to has buried lines that collect methane and other decomposing combustible gases that are then piped to an onsite power generating station.
A) We don’t like to be told what to do ... see Revolutionary War, Shay’s Rebellion, the War of 1812, Prohibition and the Civil War (B) we don’t want to waste hours sorting through our trash, washing certain items and etc. for free.
Some of the neighbors have their bins out every week and some have never put them out. As long as it's voluntary, I have no problem with it. If it becomes mandatory, I'll start taking all my recyclables and stuffing them in dumpsters instead of submitting.
That's what Haitians do, dude.
That should be easy to tell in most areas since the dumps and the recycling centers are at different locations.
The county decided it couldn’t raise our property taxes by 10% or they’d be lynched. Instead they closed the dump sites unless you pay a $10 monthly fee. For that they’ll send around a garbage truck. Now, the reason they opened so many dump sites is this is very rural and before it was convenient to do so people just dumped their trash in the woods. (I’ve noticed trash bags on the side of the road, which I never saw before.)
But, they’ll take your recyclables for free. So, all of my neighbors, save one, have bought burn barrels. The stuff that won’t burn is, amazingly, recyclable.
Now, you dump this stuff in long containers with doors but no divisions between the sections. One is for cans, one for plastic and one for something else. Yesterday they had signs up that you couldn’t mix the cans, plastic and whatever. (Once they go through the doors there’s NOTHING to prevent them from mixing. Also, do they unload this thing by hand or dump the whole thing at once? I’d say the dump the whole thing at once.) I just looked around and saw nobody was watching and tossed in all my stuff. To keep it all separate means either standing there and doing it by hand or keeping three separate bins at home. Fluck’em.
I recycle it by using it to kill fire ants.
The transfer station to which I refer processes both recyclables and garbage, which are supposed to be treated separately, but instead are often lumped together. I’ve personally witnessed it.
I’ve gotten into heated discussions on the fallacy of curbside recycling. And won most arguments.
In my city, I pay for trash pickup by the pound but recyclables are free so I do “recycle”. However, I flat out refuse to wash out cans and bottles not do I spend any time analyzing whether a piece of plastic is recyclable. If it’s heavy, it goes in the bin.
I am the only employee at my company to refuse a recycling trash can. I refuse to participate in this farce. I know I am the rebel scum of the galaxy.
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