The Book Of THoTH

I am working on a recycling project that will recycle building material's.So many still useable construction material's are just thrown into the landfill before they have actually deteriorate or become trash,a true waste of material.

But in my everyday life I recycle every item I can regardless of what it's composition is.I am proud and very willing to do this if it is actually a benefit.I have run into alot of confusing and conflicting information about the fact's of recycling paper and plastic product's.One board say's good while another say's bad.

I will continue to sort my recycling bin's and visiting the collection site's that prove to be recycling.(This has come under scrutiny in our area since we found that a majority of the bin's designated for recycle have been going straight to the landfill)

But since my conscience is beating it's self up on this issue I would like some feed back that has no personal or economic spin to it.Am I acting responsibly or just one of the flock?

Between a rock and a landfill.Daddio.

This is a tough one Daddio. We do all we can too. Separate all the plastic, glass, paper and metals. Let them take it off to....well, I have no clue where they take it!? They say they are recycling it. Are they!?

I know some people go through the night taking all the plastic and cans. We never see them but in the morning it's all gone before the truck comes in. We assume they are taking it to sell?

Is this all working? I haven't a clue. Is it a ruse to make us think they are trying to clean up and recycle? I dunno? With all these new lightbulbs filled with mercury, the landfills are going to be toxic as hell! If they get into the recycling, all that'll become toxic as hell! Yet they push these toxic lightbulbs.

I think we're damned if we do, damned if we don't.

Then arrested if you try to take copper out from a work site. It's junk, can't do anything with it, but don't take it off the site! You'll be accused of stealing. Makes no sense at all. God forbid you take a few cents from the company. Even though they'll let it sit there for years.

We can only do what is in our reach, and recycling is a straight plus on the personal level, imo.

Every item placed into the recycling processes is negated as a consumer item, so to that extent it reduces our collective drain and load on the environment. Strikes me as a clean win in that it contributes toward offsetting the major problem of population growth.

You seem to be acting more responsibly even than most individual recyclers in that you keep yourself informed enough to select a real recycling operation rather than just blindly trusting "the system".

Any more detail on the construction material recycling project Daddio?

We watch a lot of shows on renovations and DIY and this is one that annoys me to no end. The fools with the big incomes who flip houses (buy old, upgrade, sell for jacked up price) almost always go in and sledgehammer the kitchen cabinets off the walls then toss them as trash... even if those cabinets are perfectly good solid hardwood that is simply too dark a color to be fashionable.

Same attitude with appliances: straight to the landfill, when most of what they pull out in renovations is still perfectly serviceable, just out of style. Abandoned furniture is treated the same way in most cases as well... talk about conspicuous consumption.



Tiger

You really hit one of my pet peeves Tiger! It drives me nuts to watch those shows sometimes, and we do watch them here, too. It's the worst kind of waste.

I always tell OTs_Girl, too, that when people are ready to sell their house, they're told to put in all new carpet, paint the walls white, etc. However, the new owner then goes and changes everything back to the way it was half the time! When I was doing general contracting this happened on more than one job. We'd get to the house that was going to be sold. They'd say something like, "Get rid of the faux-wood flooring, put new carpet on it, and paint all the green and blue walls white." We'd do it, they'd sell the house, and then the new owners would call us and say, "OK, we need you to come get rid of the carpet and put faux-wood floors in, and paint all the walls blue and green."

As for recycling, I had the problem of the trash company not actually recycling it in NY. The trash trucks and recycling trucks were different trucks, and we'd catch the trash people taking all of the bins of recycling and dumping them into their trash trucks at least once a week. I doubt that anything we ever separated there actually got recycled....at least they had some recycling program. No such thing around here in FL. No trash company takes recycling, and there's no where to take recycling without killing the purpose by driving so far.

Back in CO, though, there was a great recycling program. Everywhere in the city everything was separated, they'd take them daily to their plant, and you could go visit any time or day and watch them recycling the stuff. As open as it could get.

WE have come a long way since the 1980s when everything was tossed. We collected beer bottles to recycle & that was it. There were no bins in restaurants & on beaches. If it didn't burn, we buried it. Tin cans were target practise.

When this movement started, it seeed an impossible task. I bet if any of us were to be taken from that time & shown what progress we have made, we would be very impressed. It is not at a level we would like to see but it is improving.

If new laws were put in place to prevent dumping of recyclables, there would still be those companies & individuals trying to get around them &/or dumping illegally.

DADDIO, you are part of an exponentially growing flock. Our children & grandchildren are doing these things now without thinking about it. I've seen young ones asking their parents where the recycling bins were. I didn't even know what a recyclable was when I was a child & now it's second nature, a part of our collective thought process.

This is not geared towards making a profit for most. I am fortunate to have the facilities to place all my items. The majority don't so it has to be for the betterment of our environment. Every job I've worked in the last say 15 years has had someone in the group that would collect all the recyclable materials. In the last 5 years, it has been expectant that someone would do this & that is usually one of the first items on the agenda when setting up workplace responsibilities. You keep up your good work & attitude DADDIO. I salute you.

I had an odd thought while considering this topic... decided to toss it out there and see what happens.

Most metals recycle well and have enough value to sustain reclamation businesses. On the other hand, the current big problem is plastics and petrochemicals. These are so difficult to segregate and reclaim that it's not economically feasible on any large scale the ways it's currently done.

Here's the odd notion that came to mind... how about NOT segregating them at all, just accept any plastic or petrochemical (solvents, etc) and grind the plastics fine, make a slurry with the petrochems and inject it into played out oil wells. Let time and pressure turn it all into raw oil again. It would turn revenues from existing well bores and offer a long term renewable oil reserve.

If the whole idea isn't impractical for some technical reason I didn't have smarts enough to think of then it looks like a win/win/win. Cut down on landfill use, make potentially profitable use of existing well bores and wellheads, and dispose of hazardous petrochems without expensive processing or contaminating any land or water tables beyond the level the previously extracted oil would have. Then at some future time I don't know how to compute the resulting naturally cracked product can be pumped out and processed pretty much like any other oil.



Tiger

I am not overly cautious about recycling, yet I noticed that much of my trash was grocery and other bags, both paper and plastic. To take care of this, I bought two large cloth bags with handles. This has almost cut my trash in half.

Two minds think alike Poppy..though in my case it is four cloth bags..!....

Makes sense, Momma; your shopping for two while I'm shopping for one.

Doesn't work here. Without doing a long drive we have one choice here and the United market doesn't allow you to bring your own bags or even to bag your own groceries. We're stuck with the annoyance of endlessly accumulating shopping bags



Tiger

Some stores here in Canada sell the plastic bags at the check out counter when you pay for your groceries. It works to a certain extent but can be confusing.

Gee, in San Francisco you get a nickel or a dime off for bringing your own bag (cloth, paper, plastic, it doesn't matter), and one orgainc food store gives a 5¢ credit for every plastic bag you bring to use for bulk foods or produce. San Francisco is also trying to outlaw plastic grocery bags entirely because they account for so much litter in the streets not to mention clog up the recycling machinery.

Here in our local large DIY store, they don't issue plastic bags at all..

Instead, they have a container at the entrance, where you can dump your unwanted bags and others can use them if needed...

There was a TV programme the other week about recycling, the arguement was that the council just ships containers of recycled plastic and papers to China and the poor people sift through it to find what they can do to recyclem thus contaminating THEIR land with our rubbish that cannot be recycled.

My local council ordered households to seperate our trash so that they can be recycled, then put them all in one lorry to crush - the benefits? No idea! Not only that, they give out plastic bin bags for you to put your seperate recycling trash in. I had enquired about a permanent bins or boxes so that they can be reused time and again, they e-mailed me back saying it wasn't feasible, as many households in Wales are terraced house thus leaving it difficult for owners to drag their bins into the front for the bin people to pick up, or they didn't want people to leave multitudes of bins and boxes in the front street and leave the place unsightly. I would have thought it would be a great idea for semi-detached or detached houses to have those bins and boxes and those living in terraced house have different means. But no, the council's policy is one for all.

I think it is a good idea WhiteTiger about shredding those plastic things and put them into a disused oil well. At least we can see if that works while we reduce our plastic consumptions.

Supermarkets or shops should be banned from doling out plastic carrier bags forcing people to find alternative, it seems mind boggling that people have rucksacks on their back yet hold a can of pop and a few things in a plastic bag, or just a loaf of bread.

Batty

Personally, I disfavor the idea of banning things. I'm more in favor of placing a deposit charge on things like plastic pop bottles and plastic bags.

If Coke had to pay the state 5 cents per plastic bottle and the retailer had to pay the same, then the total of 10 cents per bottle could be reclaimed by anyone who picked up the empty and returned it to a reclamation site.

When I was a kid, there was a deposit on all the glass drink bottles, and many was the day I and my siblings walked the roads picking them up so we could afford a cold soda of our own. It was also common to see hobos and other homeless, jobless sorts walking the roads and streets with a sack collecting bottles and lost hubcaps... both could be readily redeemed for hard cash.

And you know what? There just wasn't the junk piled everywhere that there is now... there were ample numbers of people voluntarily cleaning the roads and fields of it.

Imo container deposit is a double benefit. It raises the cost of the goods in the throw away containers and makes the mindless litterers pay for their convenience plus it offers both incentive for cleanup of the litter and a source of income for those on the bottom of the social pile.



Tiger

I remember the days of deposits on coke bottles, etc. too and it did seem to work well- I remember seeing stacks of bottles in grocery stores that people had returned.

Now that everything is plastic, it does make sense to somehow turn it back into the oil it came from. It's such a good idea that it'll probably never happen! The conversion process back to oil would have to be cheap enought for the oil industry to profit from it ultimately and I have no idea if this is possible.

Until yesterday I always thought that the environmentally responsible thing to do (other than cloth bags) was to use paper bags instead of plastic. Many grocery stores in the U.S. went from all plastic to a choice of "paper or plastic" several years ago and the implication was that paper is better. But in a grocery store yesterday I saw a sign informing us that it is more environmentally responsible to pick plastic bags over paper because plastic bags are easier to transport and therefore cause less carbon emissions or whatever it is that trucks emit. Who knows what they'll say next!?

Well, that's one of the things about the idea... industries pay high disposal fees to get rid of no longer useable petrochemicals, and landfills cost money to operate so if they had a ready place to dispose of the large quantities of plastics for a nominal fee it could be worth their while to sell the stuff to such a recycling firm.

Between the two that would give the funds to operate this very low cost setup at a profit. The only real expense would be the up front purchase price of the shredding machinery to macerate the plastics.


One of the problems landfills have is that the synthetics and organics tend to break down into toxic oils and vapors. It's not uncommon to see older landfill sites with stacks topped by open flames where they are having to burn off the flamable gasses generated in the piles of buried crud.

Even old tires could be processed for well injection. There was a scandal in the pacific northwest a few years back because in places where tires had been used as bulk fill in roadbeds the tires were breaking down and oil was oozing out of the ground, and then the built up roadbeds were collapsing.



Tiger

San Francisco recently put forth the idea of charging 17¢ per plastic bag at each grocery store, but representatives and activists from the poor neighborhoods protested, saying the charge hit disproportionately hard those who could afford it the least. That idea disappeared pretty quickly, to be replaced by the outright ban on plastic bags (which would affect only large grocery stores and chain pharmacies, however).

In California, the refund value for beverage bottles and cans just got raised a few months ago as an incentive to increase recycling. It's now 5¢ for smaller containers and 10¢ for larger ones.

Mr Neb and I always recycle but we now also bring in our containers to redeem them. I wonder if that shifts us lower toward the "bottom of the social pile"?

They only charged 5 cents per bag but it did make some people think twice. The thing was trying to figure out how many bags you need when you have a shopping cart full of groceries.

The only retailer I recall having a bottle deposit was The Pop Shoppe. Beer bottles were the only thing besides that until recycling became the norm. In Newfoundland, we are more or less, forced to recycle. For every recyclable item we pay twice the refund. If we get a 5 cent refund, we have to pay a 10 cent deposit. Was it like that in the past?

Not in the states TC. Pop bottles had a 5 cent deposit you paid when you bought them and you got 5 cents each when you turned them in. Heh... it was common to see kids standing around inside small stores drinking their pop because then the bottle didn't leave the premises and they didn't have to pay the deposit (which many couldn't afford).
Damn, now I'm getting all nostalgic for "the good ol' days"



Tiger

I'm nostalgic for the good old days when we actually had recycling here!!

These days in New Orleans we're just glad that our trash gets picked up at all- recycling hasn't quite come back yet unfortunately.

it used to be that people would pay 5 cents per gallon for used oil. now it costs $1 per gallon to get rid of used oil.on top ofthat you pay an "environmental fee" on new oil purchases.where i work has a customer that takes the used oil (for free) and filters it, and burns it in his diesel truck.

Here in my part of Scotland the local company called Barrs have always had the bottle deposit/refund scheme. We call/ed them Glass Cheques .

Hey I remember Barrs, they used to deliver bottles of pop to my Nanna's house, Irn Brw and the like, I think they tasted a lot better in glass bottles than the current cans or plastic bottles.

Batty

Good show,fellow BoTonian's!

So far "good" seems to be the line of thinking.To which I am in agreement.Thank you all for grounding me with your honesty,it is the one thing that I appreciate most.

This entire idea of mine was conceived back in the 80's when I was foreman of a framing crew that was rebuilding home's and business's after the hurricane Andrew disaster in the Greater Miami area.A dozer would push the entire neighborhood into a pile,it would then be loaded onto truck's and away it went.

The truth is,that if we had been allowed to reclaim some of the building material's we probably would have save the insurance company's a pile of cash.(Now I am getting into the personal injury and workmans compensation area of business which was in the main reason why we were not allowed to do so)A good part of what was needed to build a structure was sitting right in front of us."Go fight with the insurance outfit's"is what my super told me when I brought it up.My last name is not Bush so I don't tackle the absurd.I know when conflict is pointless.

Now back to the point.I have 12 acre's that is what we call "scrub".Up until a couple of week's ago I had no use for it.Until a neighbor asked if he could use the spot to temporarily keep all his building supply's for an arched ribbed quonset, while his yard site was being prepared for constuction.After his material's were delivered the bell's went off.DING!

So now we have his quonset built and I am going to fence off part of my 12 acre's for the storage of any reclaimed building material's.I am going to start off with only local stuff.(no need to burn gas and time if it is found locally and used locally)I intend to seek,acquire and store these material's over the winter and perhap go full bore come spring.

I have already found customer's that are willing to part with entire building's or have a pile of this and that just sitting around."Come and get it out of the way,and it's your's for free" So that is exactly what I will do.

Then there is the other side of the situation,folk who have suffered a loss of their home's or a part of it,and simply can not afford to rebuild at the price of new material.

I have many friend's in the construction field that I rely on as my consultant's in this,and they all support the idea and have even offered to call me when there is some way that they can contribute to the inventory.

Still going through all the legalese of the matter with my lawyer sister.(the most blunt and direct person I've ever had the pleasure to know)So it is still in the womb ,so to speak.

Tiger,I sure do like your shredded plastic pit idea.Not a complicated process,geothermal element's would have the product juiced in no time.This is a seriously excellent,and simplistic waste saving method.Do you think we could get the EPA to see this as clearly as we do?That is another adventure,maybe next year.

I am pleased to know that I am not the only one that is concerned about the state of our wastefulness,but I already sort of had that impression about our member's here at BoT.

Now off to the plastic bag issue.There are a few community's that have outlawed the use of plastic shopping bag's and I stand and applaud any such action taken by any community at every level.To much effort is never enough.There is a bunch of hemp wearing,granola muncher's that I consort with,that macrame shopping bag's into hammock's,mat's,car cover's and what not's.They twisted and knotted a cozy for a 67 VW Beatle.Very crazy bunch that keep me grounded and human.

Keep up the recycling all,my kid's thank you for it.

From the composter,Daddio.