Pete C wrote:

On Sat, 3 Apr 2004 09:50:47 +0100, "IMM" wrote:


Last week a North London borough said it will fine people who do not
re-cycle.


Any references to this?


On TV an expert was arguing the point that re-cycling as a waste
of time and uneconomical. He said that burning the waste is the best option
all around: landfill, reduces fossil fuel usage, local heating of houses,
etc, and that emissions are well within the regs pointing to the defra web
site. His argument was well reasoned.


I would have thought recycling glass bottles and aluminium cans saves
more energy than created by incinerating them, even recycling paper is
likely to give a net energy saving. Also it's hard to see how
incinerating something can create less landfill than recycling it,
which creates no landfill at all. Did the 'experts' well reasoned
argument cover all this....?


Yes.

The points are broadly these.

(i) It doesn't take a lot of energy to make paper and its overall carbon
neutral when you burn it. Taking it miles on congested highways to
recycling plants is a lot more wasteful of fuel than buring it to heat
hoses where it becomnes 'waste'. Its much easier to process known
quality terees than to procvess a load of assorted much full of god
knows what fillers etc etc and you can't make high grade paper out of
waste paper.

(ii) the transport issues are killers for bottles. Bottles if smashed up
and tossed in teh sea turn into shingle in no time and get recycled
rather well. It takes more energy to take a bottle to a recycling plant
- even to a bottle bank - than it does to bury it nearby.

Nearly all plastics and papers are suitable for high temperature
incineration, and high temperature incinerators are quite easy to make
clean and safe and do localises rubbish disposal. Recycling planst are
by contrast less easy to do locally and need fairly massive investment.
And tehre is always teh cost of transport of the waste to the processing
plant.

The bigger problem is metal waste - ores DO take huge energy to make,
and are often poisonous when buried. Aluminium of course burns fairly
well, and the residue is actually similar in volume to the original
materials.

The really big problem of recycling, is how to break teh materials down
to the cionstituent parts. Nio amount of recycling that doesn't involve
e.g. more energy than making from scratch is going to make a clear glass
bottle from a green one.

Nature is the best recycler in the world. Landfill is a great way to let
nature use the next few millionyears to turn a miuntain of bottles back
into sand again.

The trouble is that all these silly environmentalists think that by
loading up their volvos with a ton of waste paper and using a couple of
gallons of fuel to drive them to the wate paper site, they are
benefitting the eco system.

Wheras if they stuffed them in an incinerator, and compsted teh ahs,
they could get useful energy out of them and heat theior houses, and
leave the volvo in teh garage.







cheers,
Pete.