Posted on 05/30/2003 6:40:35 PM PDT by Willie Green
Edited on 04/13/2004 3:31:17 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
SACRAMENTO - Health-conscious Californians guzzle more than 1 billion water bottles a year, tossing nearly three million plastic bottles into the trash each day.
The deluge is becoming a "crisis" for landfills, the California Department of Conservation said in a report Friday.
(Excerpt) Read more at bayarea.com ...
I think next week it's supposed to be lawn chemicals that are the "greatest threat."
Plastic bottles are like cigarettes. These types claim to want to get rid of them, but they salivate over the cash generated.
Can someone name a greenhouse-gas that harms the ozone-layer?
They are trying to force us to recycle at work. First they started with laughable olive-drab containers the size of a large cocktail glass, shaped like a trash can: "This is all the garbage I produce" it said on the side.
Having a brainstorm, I went out and bought dozens of those little paper umbrellas you get in sissy drinks at bars. Soon they popped up on every green container.
They took them away and put yellow plastic 'recycle' containers in everyones' office (paper boxes). You were supposed to separate trash into recyclable and non-recyclable types and put them into the 'appropriate' container.
What this really meant was that you had to make innumerable trips down the hall to throw away non-recyclables.
I bought several inexpensive trash cans. Into the first I placed the silly yellow recycle container. On it I placed a sticker: "I AM NOT A JANITOR."
Hint: it does not make sense to cause degreed engineers to perform menial functions. My employer charges the government $200 per hour of my time. I earn, I dunno, $80/hour. Pretty pricey for a part-time garbage collector, eh?
--Boris
Unless there has been some great technological advancement made recently in sorting plastics in refuse of which I am unaware, this statement is patently untrue. The problem with plastics recycling is that many different polymers are used for different applications, and mixing them is a no-no. Having even a few HDPE containers (such as detergent bottles) in a batch of PETE soda and water bottles can ruin the entire batch and render it useless for any purpose. And there simply isn't (or at least there wasn't, when I was studying solid waste in school 5 years ago) any reliable way of sorting the material that isn't very labor intensive (read, expensive).
Until this problem is solved, it will be cheaper to make these containers out of virgin stock, thus there will be no market for recylced plastic and thus, no incentive to recycle.
Combine the two.
You and I think alike. I have always said that we could put the homeless or prisoners to work sorting garbage if it is necessary.
In my town of Lodi, the garbage country asks us to wash the stuff before putting it in the recycle, while the city has us on perpetual water conservation. I told our mayor at the time that I would not wash garbage, as long as our water use was restricted. He denied even knowing that such a policy was instituted by the garbage company. Go figure. They are all idiots.
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