Posted in portal.gznq.com | edit | March 12th, 2010
It means you have to think about what U R doing all the time. You have to have storage for the things U R recycling or take time to get rid of things right then. You basically make yourself accountable instead of just throwing things out without caring what happens afterwards.It takes money and energy to recycle. I have to rinse out cans and bottles and cartons which all use hot water thereby wasting energy. The council then have it taken to China in freight containers where they dump it all in a land fill.
Save the world? don't make me laugh!recycling costs more money, harder to do, and requires a lot of work.its actually really expensive to do!!!!!!!!Well, depends on what is being recycled, but some things are very expensive to recycle by the time you include the man hours and the facility to do it. Also there was just a piece on Dateline or something about the huge problems with electronics recycling where people take it to a facility, but the facility puts it on a barge and sails it to Asia, where they literally pile it up and disassemble it, making those people working there extremely sick. That's all I can think of.Example in question >
I have been issued with two brown bins for spud peelings etc.
Oh, I am all for re-cycling & do my bit, but
The local council have bought a new £20,000 green truck, and employ four fine folks to collect spud peelings.
I am also dismayed that despite seperating paper & plastic, it all gets compressed into the other truck.
All this on my council tax ?
There's a disadvantage for you !Nothing! I personally think that when I started recycling everything in life got so much better! I have real friends, my personality has gotten better, I've started my own save the world campaign,and I am now in the head group of my recycling team! Well it isn't exactly mine but I'm still in the head group!The oil/energy companies make less money due to selling less raw materials to either manufacture the virgin article or fuel it's production.
...probably why the USA is still a long way behind many other industrial nations when it comes to recycling it's waste.
Only 5% of the energy is needed to remanufacture aluminium drinks cans from recycled cans than is required to newly manufacture them from raw unrefined bauxite.
Of course recycling uses energy and it varies depending on what you are recycling but the whole point is it's still less than it would be to use raw materials.Very few, but there is the energy used to haul the waste from the home to the recyling facility, plus the energy used to make the waste usable for public consumption once more. Not to mention getting the recycled contents out to market once more.
I miss the era of glass bottles. Instead of the current practice of melting down plastic bottles and making new ones from them, one needed only to wash the bottles, sterilize them, and use them again. It takes more energy to melt 1 plastic bottle than it does to clean and sterilize 1 glass bottle.
Recycling is a win-win, but there are ways to improve on the current practices. It's good to see that recycled paper is gaining popularity. Paper from new material feels hard when I write on it with a ballpoint pen. Also, papers made from bamboo and reeds seem to be more receptive to the pen than wood pulp papers.
In order to recycle effectively people have to expend lots of energy in separating the waste - you need more separate storage bins. You also need a market for the waste otherwise it ends up in expensive storage or landfill.
It doesn't take much to make the recycled waste less useful eg mixing different types of plastics, adding shredded paper to newspaper.
In our area we need to wash our bottles and cans for recycling - this uses water and soapit's a pain in the backside to do. recycling costs more money, harder to do, and requires a lot of work Thing can be recycled three times. need to be done properly. In the right bins.
If you don't recycle properly then your recycling could end up on a landfill, such as recycling plastic with paperFor some things, the energy of recycling results in about no difference between throwing something away and recycling.It's expensive to recycle - what would be the cheaper way and the best way is to reuse bottles and jars. This happens all the time to milk bottles from the milk man. They get returned, washed and then reused. They only get recycled when they are damaged.
If manufacturers all agree on the same shape bottles or jars then the jars could be returned to them where they wash and fill and attach new labels.
This would save on making new bottles and jars and would cut down on the amount of things that have to be recycled which in turn would save the energy used in recycling. Reduce then re-use and lastly recycle.
Reducing the need for packaging in the first place.
Re-use packaging
Then and only, think about recycling.
Recycling is the least 'green' method in the chain. If the 1st two far 'greener' methods were in practice, then we would have a lot less packaging to recycle.
The main disadvantage of recycling is manufacturers are being left off the hook for not reducing the amount of packaging used and not implementing any systems for re-using packaging.
I remember the days when bottles had money back for return and were packaged in plastic crates that were also re-used, In Denmark soft drinks plastic bottles are made stronger and have about 50P money back when returned and get re-used and also are packaged in re-usable plastic crates.
In this instance the Denmark methods just shows how less green our UK recycling system really is. A bit of a cop-out in my opinion. Putting the ownership on the end consumer rather than the producers.I suppose it depends on where you live. in Ireland where i live i cant really think of any disadvantages other than you might have to make an effort to just seperate recycling and non-recycling into two different bins .In some other places they might charge you money ?#If you have any other info about this subject , Please add it free.# |
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