Tragic and rather horrible to think we use to use glass an infinity recyclable substance. That if thrown away becomes sand again over time. I was wondering the other day if we used the combined naval forces of our world...how long would it take us to clean us the plastic islands now in both our Oceans? Yesterday watching the news i saw something unexpectedly horrible. A man on the street interview. Around 25 young people out of collage for the day awaiting a bus. the news man got their attention and asked them how many were planing to vote. I swear I sat there looking a bunch of Eloy from the time machine. Not one. Not one was planing to vote. Not one even answered the question. Would you like to live on Mars would seem to be a question they would be more interested in. People use to give answer if only to get on TV. These kids were zoned out. They seemed puzzled that the question was even asked of them. My most discouraging moment of this year.
Using the navies of the world for something useful would be wonderful. They'd be busy for decades, but it would be a welcome action. Maybe danrok is right? I wish it was so, but it's only fair to point at all of us as the "garbagiers" we are. At least here. Maybe Brits are more conscientious with their recycling? Maybe I remember wrong, but I don't remember college as full of voters when I was there, a million years ago. But, "ouch!" that's a disturbing news item.
It's the plastic that's already on the sea floor, in deep valleys, and in the sediment that's going to be very difficult to remove. Scooping it up from the surface is the easy part of the problem.
I should have, but I never thought about what might be sinking below our view. The road we took is sure to have many turns bumps and dead ends. Those who persevere to the end are bound to have very different minds than those who set our course.
I turned 18 in 66. Nixon was trying to kill all my friends as well as myself. You can bet we were politicized and we voted.But that was the collage set. The young and employed might have been very different.
Nixon trying to kill you? Yeah, no BS involved. If only Johnson had the great brass ones required to say "the hell with this war. It's The Great Society for us! Of course Kennedy tried to end our foolish war in Viet-Nam and they killed him because of that. The problem is that you are not permitted to look "weak" in American politics. If you don't support the Military-Industrial-Educational-Corporate machine this means you are "weak." Bulls**t! Democrats have this hurdle to contend with. Republicans are all for war! All of the time! And nearly all of the Democrats are fearfully compelled to agree, such paragons of virtue! Starting our 18th year in Afghanistan? This is what we get for allowing the Democratic big wigs to say "Why, sieg heil yer Majesty!!" to our beyond ridiculous money sucking war machine. Former president Obama and former Secretary of War, oops! Secretary of State Ms Clinton are guilty of this, don't be mislead. What, me opinionated?
The road to hell - in this case, quite literally a fiery, planet-cooking hell, is paved with good intentions. In a lot of cases, the effort we go through to recycle a product actually causes more harm than good. Trying to recycle paper into copier paper results in damage to water courses due to the amount of bleach involved. Recycling glass releases more CO2 per kilo produced than making fresh glass - it's better to grind the stuff down into filler for concrete than to melt it down. Recycling wood into MDF requires heat, pressure and glue. Recycling plastics is only really possible for thermoplastics. Recycling metals, however, is easy, provided you can separate them from all the other materials they're packaged with. Food waste routinely ends up in landfill, where it decays anaerobically, releasing significant methane. At least, for the less squeamish among us, human sewage is now heat treated and put back on the fields where it can do some good. I'm somewhat concerned now that, as politicians, industry and individuals are increasingly pushed to "do something," what we do will actually have the opposite of the desired effect. Much like a lot of the increase in plastic use was introduced because it was a cleaner and safer product for a lot of applications than the wood, paper, glass and fabric it replaced.
Wasters and wastrels, so proud of us we should be! As the completely vicious idiots in charge (here. And elsewhere, sadly) insist that doing all the wrong things is the very BEST course of action all we can do is our best to thwart their simplistic and stoopid desires. And clean up before and after we consume.
... and there's the rub. The very best thing we can do is to consume less, but consuming less will stuff our economic model. So we try artificially creating markets where none existed, like trading carbon as if it's gold, to prop the edifice up a little longer.
I've seen tons of waste that has gone in to the recycling system only to be dumped or incinerated, which is of course far cheaper for the government when you live on an island.
I thank you K. for dispelling one of my illusions. I first realized how deep the trouble we are in is when I learned that the estrogen in a woman's birth control pills was playing havoc with our coastal fish...seems they use estrogen as well... Our one real and lasting solution is population reduction. Do this or all else can only fail over time. Then to find our first efforts making things worse... I see no easy outs.
Kaitain wrote: "ecycling glass releases more CO2 per kilo produced than making fresh glass - it's better to grind the stuff down into filler for concrete than to melt it down." I was wondering K. Is this dependent on the power source used? I.e. Coal burning, Wind, Sun? Or is it inherent in the process?
It's invariably fired with natural gas, LPG or similar. Coal's a possibility. Electric heating - not so much. The increased CO2 from recycling glass is entirely a product of the need to collect, transport, clean and sort the older glass material, then the added firing time needed while its component properties (amount of iron, manganese, lead etc.) are adjusted. If you have plain, clear bottles of known composition, melting them down and recycling them has no increased requirements. Metals have similar problems, but can be heated electrically, meaning clean sources of energy can be used. Of course, the very best use for glass is just to wash it and refill it. You can do the same with plastics, too - as the reusable soft drink bottles in Germany prove.
No reason for concern. Estrogen is also a coating on cash receipts like those from your grocer. It's not really estrogen, whew! However, our bodies THINK it's estrogen. The water we municipally recycle has many psychiatric drugs in it. Of course, some say we all need a psychiatrist. So no worries, mate! Not to worry, many, many people will be dead from rising sea level and hurricanes from hell. One of them was approaching Portugal and Spain recently, highly unusual. The beyond insane remnant of capitalism simply insists that we all die for its sake. Some of us slowly, some of us more rapidly by the day. Reusing soft plastic helps liberate those lovely BPA's, right into our bodies. The rich and powerful have successfully stolen our voices from us. We're on the Plutocratic/Kleptocratic channel, period. We can do our best to be conscious consumers but does that assuage the pain? We still allow half of our population to suffer and starve, when refusing to support our war machinery would do a great deal to make their lives better. We are so great! Sorry, I shouldn't point my fingers at anyone but myself.
The big joke with the UK was that we started collecting plastic waste for recycling, at a point in time when we had exactly zero facilities available to do the recycling. Where it was recycled, it was shredded, baled, then shipped to China by boat and recycled there. The rest was incinerated. Per kilo, incineration actually worked out greener. I realise I come across as negative in all these posts. What I'm really trying to say is that, to make the changes required in the time currently forecast to be left to us with some contingency, is going to take a significant proportion of the planet's GDP - from people like us that can afford it, to people barely surviving in a good year. If we're going to spend that energy and resource, we need to be right first time. The evidence to date seems to be that we've not been right, yet.
Another interesting and horrid fact from the latest IPPC, that's IPCC, sorry, report is that 100 corporations are responsible for 71 per cent of current pollution. Can I get a "go team?"
To Kaitin: Hard lessons often come with attached harsh comments. your breaking it to us easy, the harshness come from the message, your a cream mint compared to the truth you must put before us.
Port Arthur, Texas is a smog horror. Janis Joplin hailed from there. Good does come from bad, once in a while.
As I noted earlier there is progress being made in the right direction. Sadly not yet universally and not with the sort of focus that motivated the world to eliminate CFC use, for example. We're dealing with a complex system that we've been hacking away at from all sides for the better part of 3 centuries. As well as cutting CO2 emissions, we also need to replace lost carbon sinks. Simply put, the best form of carbon capture available is living organisms (and their dead and molding bodies), which means putting back much of what we've chopped down and paved over. That's almost more important than curtailing emissions - without it, CO2 will stay high, whether we burn fossil fuels or not.
