"Pete C" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 08:20:47 +0100, The Natural Philosopher
wrote:


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.

Processing trees into pulp requires far more effort, energy and
transportation than turning waste paper back into pulp. And newsprint
and cardboard packaging do not require high grade paper and so can use
a high proportion of recycled material.

(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.

Transporting bottles to the coast and chucking them in is not really a
sensible way of recycling them, you might as well transport them to a
recycling plant instead.

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.

They don't need investment, the facilities for recycling glass, cans
and paper exists already.

And tehre is always teh cost of transport of the waste to the processing
plant.

Little more than transporting them to landfill or an incinerator.

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.

No, you recycle green glass into green bottles, etc etc

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.

Suitable places for landfill are already in short supply, less
suitable places do exist but there are risks involved.

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.

This is a typical can't do attitude, suprising from someone who calls
themself a natural philosopher. Most supermarkets have collection
points for glass, paper and cans, so there is no need to use extra
fuel taking them there.

Get the big picture. The snotty uni one is saying that re-cycling is a daft
idea to burning it and using the heat.