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Recycling is a scam. I’ve said it before. It does nothing for the environment. It does plenty for the wallets of the well connected who have recycling businesses. That’s the only reason for recycling.Western countries dump their “recycling” into Third World countries in heaps indistinguishable from the old bad landfills. Except the difference is that they’re in major cities. These filthy photographs show monstrous mounting piles of waste overflowing into streets and even blocking roads in the city of Shenzhen in southern China’s Guangdong Province.The smell is so bad nauseous residents have taken to wearing masks.Tonnes of plastic recycling...

5 Recycled Life Hacks

When was the last time you used your computer's disc drive? What about your DVD player? E-waste is all around us, but as the brilliant Instructables user behind this $60 3D printer proves, there's plenty to be done with it—if you've got some engineering chops. Last week we wrote about the world's smallest 3D printer, which costs less than $300 and prints resin. But an Instructables user named Mikelllc has gone way further, uploading his designs for a 3D printer made from 80 percent recycled e-waste and costing roughly $60. Part of the idea, he writes, is to "help us...

Green Sky workers being told that the recycling plant is closing. A prominent Clifton-based recycling company abruptly closed its doors on Friday, informing more than 100 employees that they had worked their final day while dozens of North Jersey towns scrambled to forge temporary arrangements with other collectors. Green Sky Industries, which promoted itself as the stateÂ’s largest private recycler with 75 municipal contracts, many in Bergen and Passaic counties, announced in a letter to towns on Thursday that it was shutting both of its plants, in Clifton and Carteret in Middlesex County. The companyÂ’s Clifton employees on Friday were...

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...

The Filastuder One question arises quite often when talking to people who utilize FDM 3D printers on a daily basis. What do you do with your 3D printed scraps and junk? When an object doesnÂ’t print correctly or when an object just simply is not wanted or needed any longer, where do they eventually end up? Most likely they get tossed in a the trashcan, and end up in a landfill for the next 500 years before the earth reclaims them. That filament that you paid $40/roll for becomes wasted money. One 15-year-old boy, named Grayson Galisky, has taken it...

Early in the morning, while most are still sleeping, groups of elderly Chinese women spread out across city streets. They tear open trash bags, pick through the litter and sort out bottles and cans that come with a deposit. And then they bring them to the local supermarket to a machine that scans and evaluates each can, accepting and rejecting them one by one, and finally printing out a receipt. The interaction between the elderly immigrant who speaks broken English or the homeless man who is barely holding it together... and the machine is a stark contrast between what the...

Not only is manufacturing goods using a 3D printer far cheaper than purchasing items, new research appearing in a recent edition of the Journal of Cleaner Production reveals that it can actually help preserve the environment. The 3D printing process was very expensive when Charles W. Hull of 3D Systems Corp created the first working model in 1984, and while the costs have dropped dramatically over the past 30 years, the cost of purchasing plastic filament still needs to be factored in. The new study, however, shows how old milk jugs can reduce those expenses. In their study, Michigan Technological...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Plastic shopping bags, an abundant source of litter on land and at sea, can be converted into diesel, natural gas and other useful petroleum products, researchers report. The conversion produces significantly more energy than it requires and results in transportation fuels – diesel, for example – that can be blended with existing ultra-low-sulfur diesels and biodiesels. Other products, such as natural gas, naphtha (a solvent), gasoline, waxes and lubricating oils such as engine oil and hydraulic oil also can be obtained from shopping bags. A report of the new study appears in the journal Fuel Processing Technology....

The growth of three dimensional (3-D) printing technology brings opportunities scientific, entrepreneurial – even culinary. Some people are using the devices to build custom creations out of chocolate. “I don’t know if it’s good chocolate,” said Prabhjot Singh, Director of Additive Manufacturing at General Electric (GE), which uses 3-D printers to make parts for aviation and advanced energy-generation machinery – presumably out of non-edible materials. The process delivers performance while producing designs and prototypes for parts more quickly. Three dimensional printing uses a digital model to create a 3-D object by adding consecutive layers of material to it. That requires...

Kathleen Sebelius, one of the many laughingstocks to come out of the Obama Administration, went to Nationals Park in April to kick off the new baseball season by talking about… saving the planet and its effects on your health. Accompanied by a man dressed as Theodore Roosevelt, Sebelius offered platitudes about the environment’s health, and how, she believes, it is tied to our own. She explained (emphasis mine): “Do you know that activities that are good for the planet can also be good for your health? Preserving energy and water; choosing healthy and locally grown food; walking and biking instead...

Kathleen Sebelius, one of the many laughingstocks to come out of the Obama Administration, went to Nationals Park in April to kick off the new baseball season by talking about… saving the planet and its effects on your health. Accompanied by a man dressed as Theodore Roosevelt, Sebelius offered platitudes about the environment’s health, and how, she believes, it is tied to our own. She explained (emphasis mine): “Do you know that activities that are good for the planet can also be good for your health? Preserving energy and water; choosing healthy and locally grown food; walking and biking instead...

SACRAMENTO — California authorities have arrested five people who allegedly bought bottles and cans from recycling centers in Nevada and then redeemed them for cash in California, the California Department of Justice said Thursday. The suspects were charged with conspiracy, grand theft and recycling fraud as part of the scheme valued at more than $300,000, officials said. The five arrested — Gerardo Gomez-Vasquez, Magdalena Hernandez-Sebastian, Luis Aguirre-Alacon, Ludin Rosales-Valladares and Elfego Gonzalez-Ramos — are Nevada residents. Authorities say a sixth man, Argelio Hernandez-Torres, remains at large.

There are plenty of examples of structures built from recycled materials—even Buddhist temples have been made from them. In Sima Valley, California, an entire village known as Grandma Prisbey’s Bottle Village was constructed from reused glass. But this is no new concept—back in 1960, executives at the Heineken brewery drew up a plan for a “brick that holds beer,” a rectangular beer bottle that could also be used to build homes. Gerard Adriaan Heineken acquired the “Haystack” brewery in 1864 in Amsterdam, marking the formal beginning of the eponymous brand that is now one of the most successful international breweries....

At a new, 14,500-square-foot facility in Bridgeport's South End, three men spend their weekdays deconstructing old mattresses to be recycled. "I enjoy myself," said 44-year-old Angel Morales, who walks from his house a few blocks away to arrive at the plant at 5:30 each weekday morning. (Since there's no air-conditioning, the employees like to finish their day early to avoid the worst of the heat.) "It kills time, and I'm doing something constructive," Morales said. The facility is called Park City Green, and Morales is surrounded by hundreds of mattresses that are brought in by trucks each year. He can...

With shortages of power and rising costs of fuels, Embu prison in Kenya has turned to human excrement to generate power. Bio-gas now fuels three boilers in the prison kitchen, and firewood costs have been cut down by more than half. Many hope the innovative form of recycling and generating power could be applied in not only all prisons across the country but also in other institutions to significantly reduce energy bills. Waste not, want not To generate power, human waste is put into a machine called the "digester" and bio-gas is produced by bacteria during a 30-day fermentation...

Miami Beach - Miami Beach city commissioners have passed an ordinance making recycling compulsory. Effective from July 2013, hefty fines will be applied to transgressors who fail to recycle. Local 10 reported that Miami Beach commissioners hope the new ordinance will raise awareness about recycling. Fines for those that fail to comply will increase with each violation. First offenders will be fined $350. This will rise to $500 for a second violation and $1,000 for a third violation. Commercial recycling became mandatory for business owners in Miami-Dade County in 1992, according to Miami Dade, with fines for non-compliance ranging from...

I am looking for links to stories about recycling not working. I seem to recall one of the Scandinavian countries admitting that they did not see any good in it. I had read many stories of how recycling was piling up at waste centers because it was to expensive to haul, and the economy had slowed down. But I cannot find links to show my leftist friend who believes all the fairy tales the leftist have to tell. Thanks fellow Freepers!

A 16-year-old boy and a 14-year-old believed to be his brother were arrested on first-degree murder charges Friday after their mother told police she found her sons standing over a young man's body in their Tacoma house when she came home. The relationship, if any, between the unidentified victim and the teenage boys was not immediately disclosed. Tacoma police spokesman Mark Fulghum did not say how the man died, except to say there were "signs of trauma to the body."   According to Fulghum, the boys' mother drove to a police substation and told police she arrived home at 847 E....

Sergio Squatrito knows all about food waste. At Carla's Pasta, his family's company in South Windsor, in addition to an array of easy-to-prepare pasta and other Italian specialties, the company produces 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of food waste a day. "We've tried four different ways of getting rid of our food scraps and all of them have failed," said Squatrito, who is vice president of operations. "I have nothing against the waste companies handling our trash, but there's got to be a different mousetrap." That's pretty much Connecticut's thinking, too. Faced with statewide data that showed food waste is, by...