Pete C wrote:

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.



I din;t think that they do require more effort. There is little
difference between smashing up a tree and shredding waste paper.

It requires very similar effort.

In general, tress happening to grow in one place and mills and paper
planst being located close, it takes less effort to transport, and then
usually over purpose made raods pf low grade that do not interfere with
other traffic.


Once made into paper, its bulk transport to paper suppliers. Not
thousands of little journeys to collect. Its bad enough that all this
papaer has to be dispersed to every man woman and child in the country -
lets not repeat the mistake of collecting it all up again and bringing
it back to the one or two paper mills.

It is agreed that bog rolls etc can use recycled paper, but the fact
that this is as expensive as ordinary paper reflects the fact that the
actual costs of using the free material do not differ markedly from the
free trees that are grown and cut down to make ordinary paper.

Most paper is grown from trees grown specifically for the purpose
harvested on very marginal land that is bugger all use for anything
else. E.g. Scandinavia. No irrecplaceable tropical rain firests are used.



(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.


I agree. What is needed is a household bottle smasher that reduces them
to sharp sand. I could use that. In fact for my garden a finely ground
mixture of bottle sand, shredded wood and paper, and a bit of organic
muck like potato peelings, would be the best of all possible mulches.

I was only pointing out that bottles are not especially hard to deal
with. They degrade gracefully into sand.




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.



Yes, but to be economic in a micro scale they are large and infrequent.
Thus the cost of getting materials to them - borne by the taxpayer - is
large.

Whereas local incinerators powering small generating sets and maybe
heting shools, hostpitals and colleges, would be much better.

Only metals are worth recycling IMHO. And only toxic metals - Lead,
Cadmium, etc - are really bad news to bury.






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.


Not if you look at the locations and economies of scale of waste
re-processing plants - which I did, briefly, once.





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


So someone has to sort them out. More expense.




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.


Actually the whole of teh east coast is falling into teh sea. Onefeels
that a few million tonnes of bottles dumped around there might actually
stop it.

The provblems of waste disoposal are not being addressed properly, but
the eco knee jerk 'recycle everything' is typical of the facile one
dimesnional thinking of most political correctness.



My basic thesis is to rediuce the distance the waste has to travel as
far as possible, and not pussy foot around.

(i)plastic gets burnt in CHP.

(ii) Organic materials either get burnt as above, or shredded for
composting. That includes wood, paper, domestic and commercial food
waste etc.

(iii) Metals get recycled as they are valuable enough and in some cases
dangerous enough to make landfill not a good idea.

(v) Glass gets ground up into sand.




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.


Asssuming you actually go there in the first place.

I am looking fowradd to teh time when Tesco Direct or Waitrose Direct
bring the stuff in, and the bin men remove the residue. Ehy should I
actually need to get in a car at all?




cheers,
Pete.