All this garbage!

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=MGibson]
I’ve never lived in a location where it was “free” I had to actually pay for it. For example in Little Rock I get a utility bill that includes water, sewage, and trash pickup. That’s not really a tax. When I lived outside the city I had to arrange for my garbage to be collected by a private company.

I think we’re a long away away from garbage costing 10 bucks a bag to get rid of.

Marc
[/QUOTE]

I do too. My point is that if you make the effort to reduce/recycle right now, for most people, this does not translate to any money savings. Only when it does, and those savings are significant will people get serious about it. If I reduced my garbage generation to zero, I wouldn’t save a dime on my taxes, which include trash pickup.

22

[QUOTE=Eonwe]
There’s no solution? None of the things you’ve listed are ‘necessities,’ or have even been a significant part of our culture for more than a generation.
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You’re right, but in that short time, they’ve become incredibly pervasive. They may not be necessities, but they sure* feel* like them to some folks. As an example, it would take a lot of convincing for some parents to consider switching to cloth diapers. Nor are we likely to go back to buying scoops of flour from a barrel.

Packaging may be able to be further reduced, but for a lot of people, packaging is an important part of the product. Using the example of food, many people believe that buying unwrapped food is vaguely unhygenic. (I once knew a woman who was hesitant to buy unbagged apples, even though she washed them before eating.) Some people buy products just because of the brand (as indicated by the packaging).

Product manufacturers like packaging. It gives further opprotunity to promote branding and makes their product stand out among others. Quite a bit of time and effort goes into making the packaging appealing (even to the point of analzing the psychological aspects.)

Not at the mercy, no, but there’s enormous resistance. Companies who have built up an industry around disposable cleaning products aren’t going to be very enthusiastic about the idea, especially when they’ve spent a lot of money to try to convince us that it’s the more hygenic and easier way to clean. (Think of the disposable toilet brush advertising campaigns.)

And don’t forget that consumers like these products. I use paper towels when cleaning the kitchen because I’m a bit squicked about the rag afterwards with its little crumbs of food. I don’t want to put it in the laundry with my other clothes, so I have to trop down and put it right in the washer. Using a rag is a pain in the butt, so I do what is convenient.

Few woman would really want to go back to using cloth menstrual pads or go through the mess of the cup. We don’t want to wash a dozen plates after a picnic so we’ll just use paper ones. To put it blunty, we’re lazy and landfill reduction doesn’t seem like such a pressing crisis that it’s worth washing bodily fluids out of cloth or lugging back a crate of greasy dishes.

23

Didn’t someone do a study of the environmental impact of cloth vs disposable diapers? As I remember, the question was whether the water and detergent used to wash the cloth diapers periodically was more environmentally damaging that the disposable diaper was in the landfill. And there’s more impact if you used a diaper service, where a guy in a truck visited the house once or twice a week to exchange the clean diapers for the soiled ones.

24

[QUOTE=Dewey Finn]
Didn’t someone do a study of the environmental impact of cloth vs disposable diapers? As I remember, the question was whether the water and detergent used to wash the cloth diapers periodically was more environmentally damaging that the disposable diaper was in the landfill. And there’s more impact if you used a diaper service, where a guy in a truck visited the house once or twice a week to exchange the clean diapers for the soiled ones.
[/QUOTE]

That’s the problem with almost anything when we a take a hippy-like approach to the issues of environmentalism. It takes a hard numbers, scientific approach to find out if any of these small-scale measures are actually beneficial and there are surprises everywhere. You certainly can’t assume that the drudgery of washing clothe diapers is helping anything except to gain imaginary karma points. Likewise, that small collection of cans and bottles in your kitchen may be hurting things if you have to drive to turn them in. We have no shortage of aluminum or glass and won’t for the foreseeable future. There are plenty of things that cost net energy and resources to recycle but people continue to do it because it hands out feel-good points.

The radical environmentalist movement fucked up badly by opposing nuclear energy starting decades ago and have contributed a disproportionate amount to environmental harm there and in other ways. Just because something looks crunchy and causes moderate discomfort to the people that participate doesn’t necessarily mean that any good is being done at all.

I am my own style of rational environmentalist and I don’t like what I see in thought processes behind what makes people participate and what they think is most effective.

25

[QUOTE=Dewey Finn]
Didn’t someone do a study of the environmental impact of cloth vs disposable diapers? As I remember, the question was whether the water and detergent used to wash the cloth diapers periodically was more environmentally damaging that the disposable diaper was in the landfill. And there’s more impact if you used a diaper service, where a guy in a truck visited the house once or twice a week to exchange the clean diapers for the soiled ones.
[/QUOTE]

The someone who commissioned that study (in 1990) was Proctor & Gamble, manufacturer of disposable diapers.

26

I visited France just over a year ago.

They had stopped giving out plastic bags in shops

  • it was not a problem, actually it was interesting seeing how people got round it, my preference was a couple of plastic crates kept in the boot of the car.

While I know that recycled glass is useless, and aluminium has a small value, I would like to see deposits reintroduced - if nothing else we used to enjoy scavenging bottles as kids and turning them into ice creams.

27

[QUOTE=Mtgman]
More than most people realize. Consider only throwing away those parts of your meal’s packaging which are not recyclable. If you get a hamburger in a cardboard box and there is not a bunch of condiments/sauce/grease all over the box, consider wiping it out with a napkin and then breaking it down and taking it home to recycle. People look at me weird for carrying my recyclables out of a fast food place, but those of us in the US have a very long road to travel to get to carbon neutral and I feel some social weirdness is an acceptable price to pay to get further towards that goal. At very least break down and fold flat all items you are placing in the trash. This keeps the trash cans from filling up as fast with mostly empty space.

Recycle is the third “r” in the three r’s mantra of “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” because it is the least preferable of the three. If you regularly eat salads at fast food places, consider getting your own place setting to keep in the car, perhaps in a draw-string bag, you can take in with you. Stainless steel can be washed in the resturant bathroom after your meal and will take just a few seconds, or you can wrap it in a napkin to take it home and put it in the dishwasher and re-fill your bag with a clean set from the drawer. This re-use of durable silverware reduces your need for disposable silverware(often made of non-recyclable plastics). If you take the food back to the office, just set the recyclable trash aside so you can take it home at the end of the day. Most fast food boxes, from fries to fish, are made of paperboard or corrugated cardboard and are recyclable in many areas.

Vote with your wallet. Investigate which resturaunts in your area support environmentally friendly initiatives(everything from using recycled materials to automatic faucets/toilets in the bathrooms). Patronize those over less environmentally conscious resturaunts. If a shop which orders their take-out bags from a factory which makes paper bags with post-consumer(recycled) paper makes more orders the factory’s demands for paper from municipal recycling programs will go up and the cities will see the programs are working. It’s a virtuous spiral which all revolves around you and your daily choices. If you bring your own silverware they will reduce their orders for plastic silverware, which is often non-recyclable and uses non-renewable resources to make.

Think globablly, act locally. It’s one of the wisest buzz-phrases I’ve ever heard.

Enjoy,
Steven
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These days, when I tend to eat at a “fast food” restaurant, it’ll be one that has reusable containers for foods and other things. (i.e. Panera Bread will serve me soup, sandwich, salad, etc. on a washable plate/in a washable bowl that’s served on a washable plastic tray with metal silverware, and the only disposable parts of my meal are napkins, the tray liner, and the drink container. I bus my own table, and the stuff gets washed and reused.) This may create waste via dirty water, but it’s certainly not contributing as quickly to landfills.

Another thing that my family does is we reuse a lot of glass and plastic containers from items bought at the grocery store. Those Pom Tea containers are great water glasses, and the various jars and plastic tubs that things come in are great for storing leftovers and small parts. (Nuts, bolts, beads, sewing notions, and other things are pretty commonly stored in these types of containers in my house. Why not reuse what is essentially “free” container storage once you use up the contents?) We also have a lot of cleaning rags that we use for things that would normally take up a ridiculous amount of paper towels, but not many rags.

When I don’t need a bag, I don’t take one, and when I’m able to, I use my own bags for shopping. If I had a back yard, I’d probably build a composter, as I enjoy gardening and it’d cut down on my fertilizer and potting soil costs in the long run. Little bits help, but a lot of them take a little extra effort, and some of them may not be cost effective in the long run.

28

Of course there’s always plasma arc gasification.

29

So, how about Penn And Teller’s premise that recycling is BS? That it takes more energy to recycle something than it does to produce it from scratch?