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Do you recycle? I don't even have the option. (Also incentivizing "green" behavior)

spacekungfumanspacekungfuman Poor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERS regular
edited February 2013 in Debate and/or Discourse
I know this sounds like a crazy thread to have in 2012, but I don't recycle at home. It isn't because I don't want to. I can't. I live in a private community that pays for private waste removal, and we don't contract with a recycling company. I know other people in private communities in the same predicament, but I also know people in public communities where they either not collect recycling, or don't collect recycling on a regular basis, which makes it hard for people to recycle. At the same time, as much as I don't want to throw my plastic bottles into garbage cans when I am out, it can be next to impossible to find a recycling bin in many places. Does anyone else face simmiliar problems, or have ideas about what we can be doing as a society to make recycling easier and more efficient?

spacekungfuman on
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Posts

  • DoctorArchDoctorArch Curmudgeon Registered User regular
    edited February 2012
    It sounds like a common action problem in that unless the members of your private community make a stink about it to the management and clearly state that they are willing to pay more for recycling, it's not going to happen because it will always be cheaper to dump our waste in a landfill than to do something responsible (but more costly) with it.

    I'm not faulting you spacekungfuman, but it boils down to money. The more people that hop on the recycling bandwagon, the cheaper it will get (for example, it's dirt cheap in the Pacific Northwest and is included in garbage). The problem is just crossing that initial hump.

    DoctorArch on
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  • ThanatosThanatos Registered User regular
    I... didn't even know places like this still existed.

    Excuse me while I wipe this smudge off the side of my ivory tower.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    We don't have recycling in my complex. I have to pay some insane amount to recycle and have someone come pick it up at my door.

    Everything besides aluminium cans gets trashed.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • VanguardVanguard But now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    My family in New Hampshire doesn't recycle, and they actually pay for trash pick up. (I've explained to them numerous times how it would actually save them ~$400/year). Strangely enough, they do compost.

    I recycle everything I can.

  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    edited February 2012
    I have recycling at home, but not at work.

    It feels really awkward to throw cardboard boxes and old papers away, so I actually load them in my car and bring them home to throw in the paper/cardboard recycling bins.

    There's a recycling place across the street from us, but they don't recycle paper. (WTF?)

    Feral on
    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • SniperGuySniperGuy SniperGuyGaming Registered User regular
    edited February 2012
    I have heard from many places that tons of recycling companies are actually "scams" as well. Aluminum is supposedly the only thing that is actually worth recycling, everything else requires so much energy output it's actually causing more pollution than it saves. I'm sure many companies are good and not evil, but tons are just there to make a buck off of people who think they're being eco friendly.

    Or I've been misled by eco terrorists, but I recommend doing research on any recycling company you choose to go with.

    edit: Went to go factcheck my statement.
    Critics of recycling also cite examples like transporting glass hundreds of miles to be melted down. Of course, there are still some undoubtedly unsustainable practices like this, and we need to develop more localized reprocessing facilities, markets, and uses for all the materials that we recycle, but in fact this is just one of several recycling myths.
    http://www.alternet.org/environment/141777/5_recycling_myths_shattered/
    So just be careful with who/where you recycle. Not all recycling is equal and wonderful.

    SniperGuy on
  • electricitylikesmeelectricitylikesme Registered User regular
    Lately I've been getting frustrated at the continual lack of recycling options. We do paper/plastic/steel cans, but less high-volume but somewhat important things are actually really difficult to dispose of responsibly - for example, CCFL lightbulbs and fluorescent tubes shouldn't really be thrown in the trash since they contain mercury, but they're also very pure products which could be easily recycled (it's not a lot of mercury, but 30 years from now people are going to be cleaning up landfill filled with mercury). Batteries are another one - there's not a lot of services encouraging the collection and responsible disposal of batteries for recycling - even though again, they're basically blocks of fairly pure metals and other compounds.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    SniperGuy wrote:
    I have heard from many places that tons of recycling companies are actually "scams" as well. Aluminum is supposedly the only thing that is actually worth recycling, everything else requires so much energy output it's actually causing more pollution than it saves. I'm sure many companies are good and not evil, but tons are just there to make a buck off of people who think they're being eco friendly.

    Or I've been misled by eco terrorists, but I recommend doing research on any recycling company you choose to go with.

    Ah you watched Penn & Teller too? It's mostly the collection of the goods because it eats away at the gas. If we were really hard pressed for paper/cardboard/glass I would absolutely agree. Seems it'd be better to just throw away those and recycle metals.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • electricitylikesmeelectricitylikesme Registered User regular
    SniperGuy wrote:
    I have heard from many places that tons of recycling companies are actually "scams" as well. Aluminum is supposedly the only thing that is actually worth recycling, everything else requires so much energy output it's actually causing more pollution than it saves. I'm sure many companies are good and not evil, but tons are just there to make a buck off of people who think they're being eco friendly.

    Or I've been misled by eco terrorists, but I recommend doing research on any recycling company you choose to go with.

    eWaste is the big one, in the sense of "not helping poison 3rd World children".

    It's not so much recycling I care about as reponsible disposal. If something isn't worth recycling at the moment, it still seems idiotic to just dump it in landfill. It has to be broken down and either stored appropriately, recycled or destroyed.

    If all someone was doing to recycle old batteries was separating out the metals and acids and storing them in scrap piles with run-off control, I'd be ok with that. That's the sort of thing we should subsidize and fund, because it prevents them becoming a bigger problem, and we can figure out what to do with them later.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Lately I've been getting frustrated at the continual lack of recycling options. We do paper/plastic/steel cans, but less high-volume but somewhat important things are actually really difficult to dispose of responsibly - for example, CCFL lightbulbs and fluorescent tubes shouldn't really be thrown in the trash since they contain mercury, but they're also very pure products which could be easily recycled (it's not a lot of mercury, but 30 years from now people are going to be cleaning up landfill filled with mercury). Batteries are another one - there's not a lot of services encouraging the collection and responsible disposal of batteries for recycling - even though again, they're basically blocks of fairly pure metals and other compounds.

    It's mostly a cost thing. My county decided to tax TV disposal. It costs $70 to throw away a TV. Any TV.

    Batteries? If I bring batteries and not save them all year for the yearly free one that occurs in a narrow window of 4 hours, I have to pay something like $25 per lb or something insane like that. TVs too.

    It's gotten to the point now where people drive randomly to people's parking lots and just dump old TVs in the middle of them. Glass everyfuckingwhere. And the businesses have to pay that $70 to get rid of it now. The semi-local grocery store here (Wegmans) actually has TV collections a few times a year for free, and they put up a big container to drop used batteries into too. At least my local one does anyways.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • ArchArch Neat-o, mosquito! Registered User regular
    I am going to be a little bit snarky and say that I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who say 'Oh, but they don't pick up recycling in my apartment complex! I wouuuuld recycle, but it is just so difficult!"

    Guys, I am going to graduate school, I regularly run 14 hour+ days, and they don't pick recycling up at my apartment complex.

    I have three buckets in a closet in my house to sort my recyclables, along with a bunch of bags. I clean out all my cans and plastic bottles etc and sort them. When those bags and buckets get full I drive to a different town to recycle them.

    My point here isn't "I am so much better than you environmentalistsmug.gif"

    My point is that I don't want to hear about how you can't seem to find a recycling bin that is convenient. Does your town not have a recycling facility? That is something to complain about, not that it doesn't get picked up at your house.

    If you really cared you would pre-sort at home and make a weekly or bi-weekly trip to the recycling center. Both places where I have worked (admittedly one was a hospital and one was a university) also had recycling facilities, or at least bins, on campus. If I couldn't make my weekly recycling run I would take what I could carry to work and recycle it there.

    I know this sounds like a crazy thread to have in 2012, but I don't recycle at home. It isn't because I don't want to. I can't. I live in a private community that pays for private waste removal, and we don't contract with a recycling company. I know other people in private communities in the same predicament, but I also know people in public communities where they either not collect recycling, or don't collect recycling on a regular basis, which makes it hard for people to recycle
    We don't have recycling in my complex. I have to pay some insane amount to recycle and have someone come pick it up at my door.

    Everything besides aluminium cans gets trashed.

    Again, for both of these- if your complex doesn't have recycling, and you really want to recycle there are options guys. Don't just give up so easily and then complain about how you really want to recycle but just can't.
    At the same time, as much as I don't want to throw my plastic bottles into garbage cans when I am out, it can be next to impossible to find a recycling bin in many places.

    This is a slightly different problem, but one that I don't think is going to get fixed. See, my campus tried to green itself by having recycling bins next to the trash cans, but it turns out that people wouldn't pay attention and would throw whatever they felt like in either bin, and if your recycling is too dirty or full of gross things, they just end up tossing it out at the plant.

    Again, lack of apartment recycling pickup and lack of easy recycling bins does not mean it is impossible to recycle.

    Check with your local recycling facilities to find out their hours, how they want you to handle the materials you bring them, and ask them what you can do about getting other options for recycling collection that may be more convenient.

    And if there isn't a more convenient option? Either suck it up and make a trek to a recycling facility, or stop saying that you really want to recycle but just can't.

    Sorry if I am sounding like an asshole, but I really hate this excuse. Which is what it is.

  • HeirHeir Ausitn, TXRegistered User regular
    I had a discussion with a friend of mine over this. His argument was that other than recycling metals (aluminum, copper, electronics with rare elements in them), recycling wasn't worth it. His main point had to do with paper, and how it's not worth it to recycle. I really didn't have a rebuttal to that assertion.

    I guess I'm a bit uneducated on this subject. I argued plastic should be recycled if nothing else because it lowers our dependency on foreign oil, but he didn't seem to be buying it. Then again, we went off on a tangent about Peak Oil (him saying technology would prevent or delay it almost indefinitely, me saying that we haven't had a large deposit discovery in 30-40 years).

    Educate me oh PA forums.

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  • SniperGuySniperGuy SniperGuyGaming Registered User regular
    Well if you're driving to a different town to recycle, you may be doing more harm than good.

  • VeeveeVeevee WisconsinRegistered User regular
    edited February 2012
    Did you know you can take your own recyclables to a recycling center, and they'll give you a small (incredibly small) amount of money for it?

    Edit: It's also incredibly easy to recycle your own paper if you feel like it

    Veevee on
  • BobCescaBobCesca Is a girl Birmingham, UKRegistered User regular
    edited February 2012
    Birmingham City Council (UK) picks up recycling every week with garden waste one week and paper/plastic/glass/tin cans the next. We have wee boxes the council provides for free that just go out on the curb, which is pretty awesome. The Council also have a deal with a composting firm thing so we got a massive composter for the garden with over 50% off and free delivery, which was nice.

    Batteries are a pain to recycle, though. I have to remember to take them into Uni where there's a box by the grocery store. Anything else, like clothes or shoes or whatever, there's a bunch of recycling skip things at the local shops (a couple of minutes walk away).

    http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/recycling

    BobCesca on
  • adytumadytum The Inevitable Rise And FallRegistered User regular
    Again, something something collective action problem.

    Locally, we have curbside pickup for normal recycling (cardboard, plastic, metal) and the dump has a recycling area where you can get rid of just about anything, including used motor oil, car batteries, and miscellaneous toxic chemicals. For free!

    Sure, it means property taxes are higher, but I'd rather have higher taxes than a watershed devoid of life.

  • SniperGuySniperGuy SniperGuyGaming Registered User regular
    adytum wrote:
    Again, something something collective action problem.

    Locally, we have curbside pickup for normal recycling (cardboard, plastic, metal) and the dump has a recycling area where you can get rid of just about anything, including used motor oil, car batteries, and miscellaneous toxic chemicals. For free!

    Sure, it means property taxes are higher, but I'd rather have higher taxes than a watershed devoid of life.

    Why do you hate our freedoms? Clearly, you're an evil communist.

  • ArchArch Neat-o, mosquito! Registered User regular
    SniperGuy wrote:
    Well if you're driving to a different town to recycle, you may be doing more harm than good.

    The recycling center is next to a grocery store, so I take the recycling when I get groceries.

    Shoulda said that.



  • CanadianWolverineCanadianWolverine Registered User regular
    Other than putting political pressure on your various levels of government to do something collectively, I think as a household if you make the effort to at least learn composting, even if you don't garden, you are doing the best you can with the cards you were dealt. The soil you make may one day safe your life in return is my thought process.

    Here is something I keep bookmarked: http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/home/apartment-compost-guide.htm

    steam_sig.png
  • ArchArch Neat-o, mosquito! Registered User regular
    Veevee wrote:
    Did you know you can take your own recyclables to a recycling center, and they'll give you a small (incredibly small) amount of money for it?

    Edit: It's also incredibly easy to recycle your own paper if you feel like it

    Not all places give you money for it, but I agree with your sentiment.

    As to "what" we should recycle- paper is problematic, it is true. I would still think we should recycle, as well as buy recycled paper materials more often due to the way that most paper is harvested.

    Energy cost be damned, plastics, electronics, and metals should definitely be recycled. They can't biodegrade, they generally leach toxins, and they are finite resources.

  • ArchArch Neat-o, mosquito! Registered User regular
    This thread should also note this-

    BUY RECYCLED GOODS

    Make a conscious effort to pick up recycled plastic bottles, recycled paper, basically anything made of post-consumer materials.

    Yes yes, it is part of the huge "go green" marketing trend these days...but if you don't buy recycled products, there is no reason for recycling to exist in the first place.

  • TehSpectreTehSpectre Registered User regular
    I don't have the option to have recycling picked up at my residence, but that does mean I don't recycle.

    Many schools, grocery stores, Wal-marts, etc etc have recycling dumpsters outside of their buildings. Just haul your stuff there every so often and there you go.

    It doesn't need to be picked up at your doorstep.

    9u72nmv0y64e.jpg
  • ArchArch Neat-o, mosquito! Registered User regular
    Again, sorry to be a jackass in this thread, the OP is just horribly misleading and an old environmentalist canard.

    Spacekungfuman, you most likely do have the option to recycle, you just don't have the option to recycle from the comfort of your own home.

    PM the city where you live, and I can summarize the options available to you, or just post it in the thread if you feel comfortable with that.

  • adytumadytum The Inevitable Rise And FallRegistered User regular
    TehSpectre wrote:
    It doesn't need to be picked up at your doorstep.

    Look, you can get calluses from handling all that recycling. What do you want my neighbors to think, that I'm a manual laborer?

  • fugacityfugacity Registered User regular
    Whatever happened to Thermal Depolymerization? Chuck your plastics in there, bury the paper, and recycle the metals.

  • VeeveeVeevee WisconsinRegistered User regular
    TehSpectre wrote:
    Many schools, grocery stores, Wal-marts, etc etc have recycling dumpsters outside of their buildings. Just haul your stuff there every so often and there you go.

    Don't do this unless it is actually designated as a public dumpster. It is a crime to dump trash and recycling in a business's dumpster without their permission

  • SanderJKSanderJK Crocodylus Pontifex Sinterklasicus Madrid, 3000 ADRegistered User regular
    edited February 2012
    There isn't a huge benefit to recycling apart from metals / getting toxic crap out of the environment (Batteries and other electronics mainly, that stuff is bad if it ends up in the open in large amounts) though especially in urban areas collecting paper, glass and plastic can be worthwhile both economically and environmentally. Collecting biowaste (foodstuffs and plantmaterial from gardening) is probably best done by turning it into compost locally.

    It also depends on how you deal with your trash otherwise. In our extremely densely populated country we burn most of our trash for electricity / heat and since those plants are already in place there are actually some issues where if were to sort out all the burnable bits out of the trash, we'd lose the relatively cheap/clean energy (Note the relative there) and would instead have to store the 'wet' waste at higher cost.

    Most people can probably do a whole lot more environmentally good with their time/money in general. Isolating their houses, being smart with electricity, what and how they drive where and especially what they eat (beef and cheese = bad!) all have potentially much bigger impacts.

    SanderJK on
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  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Yeah actually I'm not driving 50 miles to recycle, sorry.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • VanguardVanguard But now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERS regular
    To be fair, private community associations are usually awful when it comes to green initiatives like recycling, drying your clothing, or composting. When I used to run the environmental organization in my early days at college, the biggest push back we got were from those private communities.

    spacekungfumar, you could partner with some semi-local organizations to get this changed. It won't be easy, but working with them to coordinate presentations to the housing community board would be the first step.

  • Pi-r8Pi-r8 Registered User regular
    SanderJK wrote:
    There isn't a huge benefit to recycling apart from metals / getting toxic crap out of the environment (Batteries and other electronics mainly, that stuff is bad if it ends up in the open in large amounts) though especially in urban areas collecting paper, glass and plastic can be worthwhile both economically and environmentally. Collecting biowaste (foodstuffs and plantmaterial from gardening) is probably best done by turning it into compost locally.

    It also depends on how you deal with your trash otherwise. In our extremely densely populated country we burn most of our trash for electricity / heat and since those plants are already in place there are actually some issues where if were to sort out all the burnable bits out of the trash, we'd lose the relatively cheap/clean energy (Note the relative there) and would instead have to store the 'wet' waste at higher cost.

    Most people can probably do a whole lot more environmentally good with their time/money in general. Isolating their houses, being smart with electricity, what and how they drive where and especially what they eat (beef and cheese = bad!) all have potentially much bigger impacts.
    Yeah, I would agree with this. Recycling is better than nothing, but it's much better to just not buy the stuff in the first place. One thing I've learned recently is that the big stuff tends to massively outweigh the small stuff, in terms of environmental impact. Like, if you spent all year diligently recycling, but also took a plane trip, that one plane trip used up way more energy than you saved in recycling. We need to focus on the big stuff first before worrying too much about the small stuff.

  • DeebaserDeebaser on my way to work in a suit and a tie Ahhhh...come on fucking guyRegistered User regular
    Your complex should just build a Recycling Center.
    They give you +1 to minerals and energy. (Sometimes more depending on the Social Engineering Options your Coop board chooses)

  • DiannaoChongDiannaoChong Registered User regular
    Had a buddy that tried to "properly" dispose of a CRT monitor that was gigantic. The exchange went like this:
    "Hi, do you recycle monitors?" /holding huge CRT
    "Yes, we'ill do it for $75-100."
    "Oh ok, Ill be right back with my checkbook" /sets CRT down, walks out, drives away

    When I worked at radioshack we would recycle batteries for free, we had boxes behind the register we would just bag them and throw them in a box till it was full, then mailed the prepaid box out.

    I remember when living in NOVA in 1993 and having to recycle everything, plastic/glass/cans, and we even had to seperate newspapers. We still do not recycle in SWVA.... in the county or city.

    steam_sig.png
  • BurtletoyBurtletoy Registered User regular
    I know this sounds like a crazy thread to have in 2012, but I don't recycle at home. It isn't because I don't want to. I can't. I live in a private community that pays for private waste removal, and we don't contract with a recycling company. I know other people in private communities in the same predicament, but I also know people in public communities where they either not collect recycling, or don't collect recycling on a regular basis, which makes it hard for people to recycle. At the same time, as much as I don't want to throw my plastic bottles into garbage cans when I am out, it can be next to impossible to find a recycling bin in many places. Does anyone else face simmiliar problems, or have ideas about what we can be doing as a society to make recycling easier and more efficient?

    Go to the public recycling bins that are undoubtedly located all the fuck over every town in america?

  • SaammielSaammiel Registered User regular
    Oh hey, its the subject of my environmental economics paper from about a year ago.

    So the basic version of it is that recycling metals is generally enormously profitable, especially aluminum due to the energy requirements of extracting it from bauxite and the fact that it is easy to seperate impurities in metals.

    Plastics can be recycled, but a big problem is sorting all of the various types of plastics, which must generally be done by hand (there are some technologies in the pipe to attempt to automate this, but IIRC they aren't very good yet). The resulting plastic is generally not that good either. One option is to use it to generate energy though via controlled burn (pyrolisis I believe it is called, all of this is off the top of my head).

    Paper too can be recycled, but again it suffers from huge quality issues since every time you recycle paper the fiber length of the resultant mash is shortened. That is why virtually nothing 'green' uses 100% post-consumer paper. In addition paper is renewable and the US at least does a decent, if not perfect, job of husbanding forests.

    Glass recycling frankly sucks and IMO we should just abandon recycling it. If you can get people to actually bring in the bottles intact for complete re-use it is good, but that is pretty hard nowadays. Recycling it at a center is horrid. You cannot reform glass from disparate glass types without introducing structural weaknesses in the subsequent product. So you have to carefully sort the glass in order to resmelt it. Or else you can just grind it up and use it for things like road beds. Also adding it into single-stream recycling systems means that you need to beef up your safety and handling procedures (read, spend more $$$) to account for breakage. On top of this, glass itself is inert and the raw materials for producing it are abundant so the case for recycling it isn't as strong.

    I think in the end I advocated ending the current subsidy models for recycling and investing more in directed materials research to try and make the end-products of the recycling stream higher quality and less costly to produce by reducing the need for manuar labor.

  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    Deebaser wrote:
    Your complex should just build a Recycling Center.
    They give you +1 to minerals and energy. (Sometimes more depending on the Social Engineering Options your Coop board chooses)

    Truth. As soon as you found a colony on land, you should immediately build a Recycling Center.

    In all seriousness, Saammiel, that was a great post.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • PantsBPantsB Fake Thomas Jefferson Registered User regular
    Vanguard wrote:
    My family in New Hampshire doesn't recycle, and they actually pay for trash pick up. (I've explained to them numerous times how it would actually save them ~$400/year).

    But no taxes mirite!!!1! Stupid NH.

    We recycle about 3 times as much stuff as we through out (compost also but that's a distant third). Its pretty universal on my street, which is a very middle class, middle of the road suburban neighborhood, to have at least as many recycling barrels (or twice as many bins) as trash barrels. Recycling is every other week, trash every week so we still usually have a half full trash barrel each week but we put out 4 bins and usually a few paper bags of recycling, not including deposit bottles/cans which go to the supermarket.

    And I'm pretty damn lazy about stuff like that. It takes nearly zero effort and does an obvious, unalloyed good. The fact that its not universal in the US (hell that trash pickup isn't universal) is proof that people are dumb.

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    QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
  • electricitylikesmeelectricitylikesme Registered User regular
    SanderJK wrote:
    There isn't a huge benefit to recycling apart from metals / getting toxic crap out of the environment (Batteries and other electronics mainly, that stuff is bad if it ends up in the open in large amounts) though especially in urban areas collecting paper, glass and plastic can be worthwhile both economically and environmentally. Collecting biowaste (foodstuffs and plantmaterial from gardening) is probably best done by turning it into compost locally.

    It can lead to surprise economic boons when it suddenly becomes viable to break down your scrap heaps for their components.

    Like I said earlier, I think it's less recycling so much as "safely disposing of" - and sensibly disposing of.

    And it is something which should be handled with taxes because it's very much a long term type of problem. A few pounds of whatever in a landfill probably isn't a disaster, but doing it continuously for 30 years is.

  • OctoparrotOctoparrot Registered User regular
    Uh drive your shit somewhere you CAN recycle it?

  • ThanatosThanatos Registered User regular
    Had a buddy that tried to "properly" dispose of a CRT monitor that was gigantic. The exchange went like this:
    "Hi, do you recycle monitors?" /holding huge CRT
    "Yes, we'ill do it for $75-100."
    "Oh ok, Ill be right back with my checkbook" /sets CRT down, walks out, drives away

    When I worked at radioshack we would recycle batteries for free, we had boxes behind the register we would just bag them and throw them in a box till it was full, then mailed the prepaid box out.

    I remember when living in NOVA in 1993 and having to recycle everything, plastic/glass/cans, and we even had to seperate newspapers. We still do not recycle in SWVA.... in the county or city.
    In California, retailers charge you a fee when they sell you a monitor or TV, and then disposal is free.

    This is really how every state should do it.

  • Pi-r8Pi-r8 Registered User regular
    Octoparrot wrote:
    Uh drive your shit somewhere you CAN recycle it?
    here's the problem: going off these numbers, driving costs about 40 KwH to drive 30 miles (or 15 miles distance round trip). And all of the stuff we use in a day costs only 48KwH. So even with 100% efficient recycling, the energy savings would be minimal. With most stuff that's not aluminum cans, the energy savings are a lot less than 100%. Not to mention that you can also recover some energy by burning the trash in an incinerator.

    So no... don't make an extra car trip for recycling. It's actually better to just throw it away. Except, like ELM mentioned, for the really nasty stuff like electronics that just need to keep out of the soil.

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