Posted on 01/19/2023 7:44:12 AM PST by grundle
I remember being a kid in the 50s and almost no consumer product came in plastic packaging. Toothpaste was in nice metal tubes that stayed rolled up. My dad’s “Veto” deodorant came in little glass tubs. Groceries were brought home in brown paper bags. Milk came in glass bottles. There were no plastic baggies with “ziplock” tops for storing things. Gasoline cans for the mower were steel. I remember we derided all the cheap plastic products coming out of post-war Japan. You couldn’t find a single plastic part in a car. Ground coffee was put in the percolator and no plastic K-Cup pods went to waste. You just dumped the wet grounds in the garbage.
In that era, landfills didn’t receive a single plastic package. It’s hard to believe that, somehow, we managed to live our lives without plastic.
Is NPR saying the 1950s was the high point in American civilization and society?
They lie. We sell it to China and what we don’t goes to the ocean (a selected area). Then they ban straws, as if it’s Joe bloes fault. Recycling is no more than a way to keep folks busy, while feeling ‘good’ about saving something. Like slapping a flag on your profile pic. It does nothing, but you appear virtuous to the nitwits.
I miss glass bottles. My water, soda pop et al didn’t taste like plastic and I got candy money as a kid from returning them.
My hilarious recycling story is from my pre retirement days.
I worked in an office tower in a mid sized city.
We had recycle bins even twenty feet or so around the office.
One of my co-workers who lived in the city decided that it would be amusing to follow the garbage contractor for the building and see what they did with the recycle bin materials.
First they put them in huge recycle bins and brought the bins down the service elevator.
Outside at the ground level my “spy” friend watched them to see what happened next.
They took everything in the recycle bins and dumped it into the regular garbage bins before loading it on to trucks.
There were no separate recycle trucks at all.
We all had a big laugh about that....
Stories on that theme were not uncommon in 1950s "pulp" science fiction. They never ended well ...
Finally!!!!
Sweet vindication.
I have been saying this for DECADES..
recycling is a scam, and the end user is the one that pays.
That little blue or green tub you have to put your stuff into?
You get charged for having it...
Go back to glass containers. Or are all of those factories shut down now or making plastic bottles and such and re-tooling would be too costly? Last time I looked SAND was plentiful - but Mother Government will now close all sand pits, LOL!
Have you ever seen a country such as ours, where ‘progress’ is anything BUT?!?!?
Our Cow Town of less than 300 people (and a few thousand cows) just GOT recycling containers three years ago. I’ll bet you a 6-pack (in plastic) that it’s still ALL going to the same dumpsite.
More ‘progress!’ *SNORT*
Recycling plastics and paper has always been a big scam. I was the Public Works Director in county that operated a reginal landfill, which of course has a recycling program. My staff & I knew it was a loser, but the public wanted it to feel good about themselves. It wasn’t until the bottom fell out completely when the Chinese publicly announced it would no longer accept plastic. Once that happened the County Commissioners canned the recycle program.
That being said, why is it that we can recycle metal products to make new metal product, but plastic cannot be recycled to make new plastic products? We’ve all seen someone throw a plastic bottle into a fire and watch it melt.
The other possibility is to heat it until it outgasses, then recover the gasses and use them to synthesize new polymers.
Then you don’t have to worry about depolymerization which can happen if you shoot the polymer through a screw extruder too many times.
I’m not a chemical engineer so I don’t know the details but we covered this in packaging engineering.
There have been ways to make this stuff into oil for decades.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/anything-into-oil-03
Here’s another great video on this subject. The guy used airtags to track the plastic that Tesco said they were “recycling”.
I work with folks at WM.
Off the record, they confided to me that recycling programs are nearly all a scam. They participate in them because their contracts with the various municipalities say they must. Buried in or omitted from those contracts is what must be done with the collected recycled materials. Most of the time they are “sold” to overseas “processors” who do absolutely nothing with them.
They said that a much more effective way to deal with recyclables would be for entrepreneurs to come up with unique ways for people to recycle materials at home. You can see this beginning with the newer home composting machines on the market, but they are suggesting machines that break down plastic and feed it into 3D printers to make many house hold products is what is really needed.
You buy your gallon of milk and, when empty, you clean it, take off the label, and feed it into your plastic processor. It grinds it and separates it by type. Ditto your plastic peanut butter jar, your grocery bags, your old credit cards, whatever.
Your smart 3d printer knows what mix of plastic is best suited to create what you want to make. Let’s say you need a plastic fork. You need rigid, strong plastic so it mixes from the different types it has on hand to “print” a rigid, strong plastic fork. It could print cups, storage containers, toys, certain tools, thousands of things. When done with the item, you can feed it back into the processor to be made into something else.
According to my friend the manager at WM, the technology exists for this now. It is being kept off the market by...the environmentalists.
You see, like the race hustlers who need racism to keep their jobs, environmentalists need problems, not solutions. You can’t fundraise off a clean ocean. Besides, this solution does not get rid of plastics - which they have been calling evil for years - but instead embraces them. That would mean they were wrong and they just can’t have that.
I had community service in my wild and reckless days. We picked up the recyclables and sent them straight to the dump.
Not as easy as you say. We had a trash incinerator in our town for years, with scrubbers, and the water and soil are extremely contanimated. Unless you can find a low cost, high heat, and cleaner way, burning is not the way to go.
Another “conspiracy theory” proved true.
That is exactly where my trash and most plastic goes in southern NH and eastern MA. Mine goes to Wheelabrator Technologies in NH. They burn the trash, make steam, turn a turbine, sell electricity back to the grid. This is because most landfill space here has been used up. So, they save that for construction debris and other things that can no be burned.
However, cardboard, tin cans(steel), aluminum and glass all is recyclable because the cost/ton to get rid of that is cheaper than the cost to haul it to where they burn it. In fact you get PAID for ALUMINUM and STEEL, depending on the value of scrap. At times ALUMINUM is worth a lot of money. About ten years ago a compacted 25’ dumpster of aluminum was worth $25K.
FYI, we do not have a bottle(deposit $.05) on bottles and cans like all the other northeastern states.
Have some fun—follow that recycle truck around town to its final destination.
Take pictures if it is proven fake.
In a small town like yours you can have an amazing impact.
About eight years ago, my neighborhood had a recycling program linked to a company called RecycleBank. The bins each had an RFID tag which residents could register online, and the trucks had a mechanism for weighing the bins prior to emptying. This built up points in a bin user's account, which points could then be redeemed by requesting gift cards (there was a list of local retailers that participated).
It was mostly a token gesture to get people to be more diligent about recycling (or to consider doing it at all...) - until my employer had a large amount of old glass containers that it wanted cleared out of a facility and disposed of. I volunteered for that, sifting it away through the RecycleBank bin over two months. Lots of recycling weight, lots of points earned. Used the gift cards at Dick's Sporting Goods (back before they went Full Retard) to buy ammo!
Today, RecycleBank has moved on from my neighborhood... but they no longer have good options for points use, anyway. Kale smoothies and such, blech.
“The solution is the development of easily degradable plastic.
Also, we should be using less single-use plastic. We spew out too much garbage.
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