On Friday, 24 January 2020 17:01:53 UTC, T i m wrote:
On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 07:18:07 -0800 (PST), tabbypurr wrote:
On Friday, 24 January 2020 12:29:28 UTC, alan_m wrote:
On 24/01/2020 00:05, tabbypurr wrote:
afaik they aren't recyclable. They're plastic & ali & grease, plus who knows what in the odd one.
But according to one green campaigner on TV a few months back you are
meant to wash them out using hot water and detergent! More CO2 to
recycle than to manufacture and distribute in the first place.
more importantly an entirely insane waste of people's time.
Assuming it is as he said, and of course it isn't.
It seems to be disconnection between things that get's people
confused.
Like, if you buy a bag of crisps you are (or should be) taking
responsibility for it, including how you dispose of it.
sure
If there is a
facility that disposes of it in a less environmentally damaging way,
then you should make reasonable efforts to do that.
reasonable is the key word there. A crisp packet is of such low value that spending time washing them is entirely unreasonable.
Burying them in landfill is not damaging, dropping them on the beach is.
You chose to buy / take / eat it, you then have to dispose of it
properly.
Now, if you can't engineer it to say drop a wodge of crisp packets
into a local drop off point, as part of your normal journey then maybe
you shouldn't buy them in the first place.
complete nonsequitur. You're virtue-fying something of near zero value. If everyone took crisp packets to a dedicated recycler the world would be worse off, not better. Time energy & money would have been misspent achieving a purely trivial benefit.
The various governments are now making manufacturers factor the
efficient disposal / recycling into their products and some are
obliged to accept products back when we have finished with them (a
feature we have already paid for of course).
See, for too long (since we were all generally well off) we have been
buying stuff with no regard what will happen to it when we are
finished with it and many have been happy to just 'throw stuff away'
when often there isn't such a place. So that means stuff has to be
stored (tyres / fridges), burned or buried in a hole in the ground,
all of which have come back to haunt us.
very little needs to be stored, nuclear waste is the main example. But even what little of that I produce doesn't need storing. Burned & buried is not haunting us.
What would be better is to not buy the thing in the first place,
repair it if it goes wrong, re-purpose it into something else / useful
or recycle it in it's core components (so it can be recycled more
efficiently).
In many cases sure. Also in many cases not. Society is grossly wasteful, but many things really are not worth repairing, repurposing etc.
And we can consider how recyclable a single use
container might be when we buy something.
Like, you can buy dog food dried in bulk, wet in tins or wet in
plastic pouches. From a quantity and recyclability POV, the plastic
pouches are worse than the tins and large paper sacks.
Cheers, T i m
It's not inherently wrong to bury waste. In many cases it's currently our best option.
Foiled plastic pouches use far less material per 4 pouches than 1 metal tin. And there are other differences that far outweigh that issue.
I'm all for better handling of the waste stream, I think what we do now is lousy, but so many people prioritise trivial waste matters far above their real worth, and that is a pointless cost, not a virtue.
It is so easy to increase recycling rate that with all the talk about it I have to wonder exactly why it's not being done. Does someone have zero brains, or does no-one even care?
NT