Where I live people contract with private companies to pick up their trash. There is no recycling. So, we save our glass/cans and haul them every so often to a collection site. However, the bins there are typically overflowing and the area is not kept up at all. Sucks.
You wouldn’t rather reuse what we have now, rather than toss it into landfills and dig it up in a few decades, centuries, what have you? I nominate your descendents to be Head Refuse Scavengers, then.
By “might” I meant something along the lines of, “unless it gets carried back to shore early and some poor asshole steps on it while it’s still sharp.” Perhaps you’re right, and no one ever goes diving in your harbor and no one goes walking along the shore and the glass has no possibilty of working its way anywhere that people will be until it’s already worn down. Having lived in Milwaukee all my life, and more than once having narrowly avoided impaling some bit of myself on a piece of broken glass that some moron probably chucked into the lake for the same reasons as you, albeit probably in a higher-traffic area, I’m a little sensitive about the subject.
I would much rather reuse – but definitely not because I’m afraid we’re going to use up all the resources.
These are provided where I live. Black bins are provided for everything else and they’re collected on different days.
ShotFromGuns…there’s a difference between salt and freshwater…Saltwater turns glass into beachglass faster then freshwater. I also drop it in deep water/ as far away from the shore as possible…Plus where you live its more likely that the glass you stepped on was just randomly smashed there from the shore.
Glass bottles cost much more to ship to market than plastic, given their significant weight difference. The load is heavier so it uses more fuel to bring it to market and to the recycling center. Plastic is beneficial as far as it’s weight savings, but from what I understand we recycle jast a fraction of recyclable plastics, and that impacts our landfills and enviornment. Have you heard of “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” an area near Hawaii where all of the plastic in the Pacific ocean is drawn to by prevailing currents. It is supposed to be twice the size of Texas, and a vast wasteland of floating plastic debris and particles.
Please recycle whatever you can, for the sake of the enviornment.
Rich
You might want to complain to WM and your town governance about this practice. Your town could be getting paid for the recyclable wast that it produces.
In my town in Japan, we have two different pickup days. One day is for burnable rubbish and one is for non-burnable, which is further divided into three pickups a month for plastics and recycle-ables and one day a month for big non-recycle-able stuff.
We do not have bins provided, everything must be separated, washed and bagged in bags printed by the city and sold at local supermarkets. The price of the bag is the rubbish tax, and they won’t take anything that isn’t in the right bag.
I missed the plastics/recycle day several times due to work and had a lot of garden rubbish so we went to the dump ourselves. Despite having separated glass (by colours) plastic, aluminium, pet bottles, and steel, the man took it off us and chucked it in the same area. They might have come back to deal with it later but I don’t know. Then he told us to go to the actual landfill bit to dump the non burnable stuff and the burnable stuff.
There we nearly had some bags of garden rubbish rejected because there was too much soil clinging to the roots (burnable) but they took it and chucked it into landfill A. Then they took the other bags and chucked them in landfill B.
So, in our city I have seen with my own eyes that burnable stuff is not burned, and that the landfill stuff is all jumbled up together.
It is not a legend-it is simple economics. The trash company is paid to collect recycled materials. So they do. But the worth of the materials is so low that it is cheaper to pay the dumping fee and dump the materials in the landfill. Unless they are prohibited by contract from dumping the materials, they will do so. Simple.
The food waste I recycle into my compost heap results in better vegetables from the garden. Since between 1/4 and 3/4 of our vegees are home grown out back, this is a direct benefit to me.
The aluminum and steel cans I haul to the recycler I exchange for money, which is of benefit to me. I have calculated the cost of driving them there vs. what I get, and it is a net profit for me. Usually worth 1-2 tanks of gas for the car.
Recycling often is cost effective to the households that the OP talks about: for example, we don’t have (public) trash pick up in town, so your options are either contract the one guy who serves the town for $4/bag, or pay $1.25 for town bags and bring stuff to the transfer station yourself. The recycling center takes paper, cardboard, cans, bottles etc and you don’t have to pay anything for that - they don’t go into town bags, if that was unclear.
I wouldn’t use the word “afraid.” It’s a simple fact that the resources on one planet are, for all intents and purposes, finite. It’s certainly not the **only **reason to recycle, and it might be planning in the extreme long-term, but it’s a very, very valid reason to recycle. (In fact, when you come down to it, **all **reasons for recycling ultimately boil down to the finiteness of the planet: if we had infinite resources and infinite space to store discarded items, there would be very few things we’d recycle at all, because most of them are easier to make from raw materials than to process from something that’s been previously used.)
What kind of trash do you mean? I know China is recylcling certain kind of plastics into new fibers to make for example fleece sweaters and pullovers. I haven’t heard of other kind of trash being shipped there.
If you are serious, please stop immediatly. Glass shards are a danger to beach goers and marine live, and glass is valuable for recycling. (Do you not have a deposit system on your bottles, to bring them back, wash and re-use them?)
First, you have to be sure that the paper you throw away instead of recycling is put into a landfill and not burned.
Second, every calculation by enviormental organisations stresses that recycled paper uses less water and less energy than paper made from fresh wood.
Third, better than chopping down full-grown trees only to produce paper and sequester the carbon is to let the trees live, or use the wood for something more substantial, like building purpoises - chopping down Rainforests in Northern US of redwoods to make paper hankies for Japan is a huge waste.
Fourth, you assume that each new paper that is produced also a tree is planted to compensate. This is sadly not the case, a lot of trees cut down are not in plantations, and are not replanted.
There’s still marine life that gets harmed.
The problem is first the sharp shards, that can cut, not the material.
But it harms it another way.
If you do like beachglass so much, make your own at home. Take a PVC pipe, fill with glass shards, some sand and ocean water, build a small wooden stand to hold the pipe, close both ends and connect to a tiny motor, like from an old turntable. Run in the basement for a few days/ weeks, and you have your own beachglass. (You can also use this to polish ordinary stones into shiny pretty looking ones. You start with rough sand and progress to finer-grade over the weeks.)
You mean infinite raw resources, or also infinite energy? To take aluminium as first example, melting it from raw bauxite takes tons of red earth and uses a huge amount of energy; melting already existing aluminium down to make new uses a fraction of that energy.
And composting veggies (waste on farms) correctly to get new earth (our city recycling centers sell now flower earth they make from all the veggies and cut grass collected in our brown bio-trashcans) is more energy-efficient and makes more sense than making fertilizer from oil.
Both.
Yup, that’s why I said “most,” not “all.” There are some things that are cheaper and safer to recycle than to make new; that doesn’t apply to a lot of other materials, however.
These guys are tracking it:
http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/index.php?id=1
I read a news story a few months ago about how a large percentage of recycling in a city (I want to say Washington DC) ended up in the landfill, but my google-fu has failed me. I think the controversy was that it was private haulers making an economic decision when recycling prices were low.
About a year ago there were a series of news stories on recycling. The conclusion is that when the Chinese market for recycled goods dried up so did the Western recycling market. In a few places it still made economic sense to recycle simply because of the high cost of dumping the material in a landfill, but the cost for the recycled material did not cover the cost of collecting it.
here is a cite from the N.Y. Times, free registration may be reqquired:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/business/worldbusiness/12recycle.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=cost%20of%20recycling&st=cse