Do You Recycle?

YOu know, if there was an actual policy of recyclig at my work, I'd have a tidier desk.

That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

It's also true.

I am somewhere between the first and second option. I take most useful junk down to the charity shop but I have no way of composting or dealing with some waste and I have to restrain myself from accumulating junk so I don't look at freecycle.

xp - Ha! My post starts almost exactly the same as Ed's...

I am between the first and second option. Our council takes paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, tins, glass. We pay £20 a year (on top of the council tax) for a garden/kitchen waste collection. You have to pay a tenner for them to collect big items such as old sofas. The local recycling place is very comprehensive, pretty much everything is recycled, including now big plastic items which I always assumed were pretty un-recyclable.

We have the fortnightly collection system whereby the recycleable stuff is collected one week and the rubbish rubbish is collected the next (along with the garden rubbish in a separate wheelie bin).

I just checked and now the council will now collect up to 3 bulky items for free. Then it's £15 an item. Which is good as we have a knackered old bath that needs to go.

I'm sure there's something you can bury in your garden which you can put cooked food in but I can't find any info about it. Any ideas anyone?

I'm pretty solidly the second option, and feel bad that I'm not doing more. Especially at work.

One of my many petty complaints against the annoying neighbours - since they started dumping their trash in my bin, I've noticed that they don't recycle ANYTHING. There's tins and glass jars just sitting in the trash. That just provoked such a reaction of disgust in me.

But then I realised that we have no way of recycling anything but paper at work. I bought a soda in a tin the other day and suddenly realised that the only way to recycle it would be to take it home! That annoyed me/provoked guilt.

The recycling from home thing is good, though - apart from their weird insistence on not taking any plastic except drinks bottles. It all goes in big orange bags, which are collected at the same time as the trash. Doesn't even have to be sorted. I can't understand how anyone could *not* recycle given how easy they make it.

I voted for the second option but actually I may be somewhere between options 1 & 2.

Outside my block of flats there are recylcing bins for the three colours of glass that aren't blue* and paper, which I use. There is at present no recycling facility for plastic, but there is at work, so I take all my plastic there.

There are also facilties at work for toner catridges and batteries which I will use should the need arise.

* why aren't there recycling facilities for blue glass? Is it coz it is rare cf the other three colours? Is it un-recyclable? or do ppl assume that it looks so nice that ppl will want to keep their blue glass bottles and use them as ornaments (which is what seems to be happening in my girlfriend's garden?)

I can't understand how anyone could *not* recycle given how easy they make it.

The recycling bins on our estate are about 5 metres from the regular bins. Every week there are large cardboard boxes in the regular bins, or stacked up next to them. Laziness? Ignorance? Stupid selfish lazy ignorance?

Even with our slightly complex system (red bag for cardboard/paper , green bag for tins/plastic bottles, green box for glass, brown wheelie for garden) it only takes me about 5 minutes a day to recycle and yet you should have heard the moaning when they started it. The fortnightly collection forces you think about what you're putting in your rubbish bin. A couple of weeks ago in the local rag there was a couple who are gonna pay another hundred pounds+ to get a private contractor to take away their rubbish because the recycling was just too difficult!

best recycling ever - give it up for my mother's local authority, the London Borough of Enfield. Weekly collections of paper, glass, plastic (in a black plastic box) and organic material from garden *and* the kitchen (veg only: I'd imagine they don't take meat coz it spreads disease and attracts vermin) in a green one. And the bins have handles for ease of carrying and hinged lids which don't let the rain in and can't be stolen. They should get an award.

The annoying thing about the recycling bins is that they're normally locked so you can only post stuff through a large slot, which is a pain if you have a large binbag full of stuff. But lots of theses boxes are too big to go in the normal bins anyway, and given that it would take literally zero extra effort to stack them next to the recycling bins, I can only conclude that these people have no idea of the need for, or even the concept of, recycling.

Allegedly around 30% of people wouldn't recycle even if it meant the end of the planet, human race, life as we know it</dodgy statistic>

My council doesn't offer curbside recycling collection for anyone who lives in a block of flats. Which sort of defeats the point, since a block of 25 flats is going to create a bit more waste than a one-family home. So every week I troop down to some big wheelie bins down the road. It's not too bad but I doubt many people do that cause it is a hassle TBH.

I actually heard someone at the recycling place, moaning about having to put his wood in a separate skip say "We never had to do this before Blair got in". I almost said "look just leave it in a pile and I'll do it! I like throwing stuff in big skips...it make nice clanky noise."

I love taking big stuff to the islington dumping place (not my borough but it is more fun), you drive up into the big steel spaceship park up under the orange glow and the get to toss things from a great height into huge steel skips and make booming noises which echo around the concrete cave.

one thing which reduces the amount of recycling that can be done, and it's not easily solved, is rubbish that is a composite of more than one material. For example, envelopes.

Even if you ripped out the window of every window envelope and put it in the plastic recylcing, you still can't put yr envelopes in the paper recycling coz of the glue that holds them together, shut and holds the plastic window in place. Now thanks to my mail (half wanted, half junk mail) I would say that envelopes make up at least 50% of the paper I get. What's the solution? Can they make the gum of a different material? Or make envelopes like the little paper sachets that green tea teabags from the Chinese supermarket come in with interlocking holes and strips and no glue at all (I suspect the latter is impractical coz they come apart too easily, but hey).

xp Ned you so *should* have said that!

Another example is those juice cartons with a plastic spigot fastened onto the top. Totally, 100% unrecyclable. And the plastic spigot = totally, 100% unneccessary.

It all goes in big orange bags, which are collected at the same time as the trash. Doesn't even have to be sorted.

Oh, I wish. Rounds ours any deviation from their policy (which isn't published anywhere) results in them not picking up any of your recycling and putting a sticker on your recycling box telling you they didn't collect it because you didn't comply with the policy.

Some highlights we have managed to work out:

All items must be actually in the box, irrespective of size. If it's propped up next to it, hard lines.
Cardboard is only taken as long as it is just cardboard and doesn't have any labels, sticky tape etc anywhere on it.
Pizza boxes are out, even if they don't have plastic windows.
Paper should be in a bag, in the box, which they leave behind to blow about the street. Loose paper won't be collected.
Bottles, jars, cans are to be spotless and have all labels removed. Ideally you should put them through the dishwasher before you put them out. Glass with any damage at all won't be accepted.
They're supposed to take clothes and things for rags, but they always assume a bag with them in is rubbish, even if it has a label taped to it which says 'clothes' or 'rags'.

I'm sure there's more.

Anyway, I'm between 1 and 2. Council (hypothetically) takes paper, cardboard, cans, glass, clothing, batteries, shoes, foil. Like Ed, I take stuff down the charity shop.

I'm somewhere between 1 and 2 as well. Will get all composty and that when we move to our new house with its lovely big garden. Furniture will be given to charity or thrown in skips. Old clothes are going to charity/recycling places later today! My mum is champion skip-diver and has refurnished the whole of my parents' rented flat in Spain with stuff found lying around in/beside skips.

I like throwing stuff in big skips...it make nice clanky noise

Best clanky noise ever = going to the recycling depot and launching our old washing machine into a skip. CLANK!

xpost Holy shit. I just shove everything in the bin - envelopes, pizza boxes, skanky unwashed jars and bottles, and figure they'll sort it all at the other end. I wonder how much of it they're just chucking?

We make compost. It's kinda fun.

juice cartons (tetrapacks) tend to be laminates anyway and unrecyclable with or without spigots.

i am an option two here. i would be an option 1 but i never throw anything away that freecyclist would want (see boring computer question yesterday 8)

I wonder if anyone who doesn't recycle will actually pop up on this thread and explain why they don't. I'm imagining they're too afraid of being shouted at by hippies. Hah.

I don't know, is it a psychological thing? Like, the unwillingness to touch their own garbage? Because yes, you have to wash it out and put it in a different bag, but how is that really different from washing the dishes? Or is it just the idea of garbage somehow being unclean?

Or, worse yet, the idea that it's something that hippies and left wing commie bastard freaks want you to do, and therefore inherently suspicious? (you know, like, any contemplation of or action on global warming.)

I wonder about the need for washing stuff out, I kind of imagine everything gets industrially scoured at the other end anwyay.

I wash it out because I don't want old beer to dribble down my hand as am posting through the slot.

I wash things out out of consideration for the ppl who have to walk past it and smell it (ergo I don't bother with shampoo and washing up liquid bottles)

I just figure washing stuff makes it less grody for the people that come and pick it up. They seem to sort it by hand.

Number 1 for me. All food waste goes in the worm bin, all garden waste goes up the allotment. We try and use recycled wood for DIY jobs. Most kids clothes come from the charity shop and all our old stuff either goes back there or on eBay. Have started a recycling scheme at work and collect everyone's tins, bottles and batteries. Just about to get everyone recycling their compostables too.

Washing stuff out is good from a hygiene POV, but does decrease the energy efficiency of recycling.

Vegetable peelings etc either get eaten by the kids' guinea pigs or my chickens, or they go on the compost heap.

The compost heap gets all sorts of other stuff too, including the contents of the vacuum cleaner, grass and hedge clippings and shredded up bits of cardboard etc. They all rot down into really good compost.

Most cooked food scraps are wolfed down by the dog. He's like a canine waste disposal unit.

Newspapers are recycled in various ways - some are shredded and mixed in with other pet bedding (and then composted afterwards), some get used as weed-suppressant mulch in the garden, some are shredded/soaked/pressed into "logs" for the wood burner. It's a messy job, but I quite like doing it. I also made myself a deckle and frame, and am experimenting with turning soaked mulch into handmade paper.

Bits of tree are shredded and the wood chippings used to mulch my rose garden.

Glass jars with screw topped lids are always useful and normally end up in either my craft room filled with beads or embellishments, or in the garage with nails and screws in them. The kids always need them refilled with sweets or cookies for the bottle stall at the school christmas and summer fetes too. Or Mr Unruly decants foul smelling chemicals into them as part of his recently-acquired knife making and leather-working hobbies.

I smash up coloured glass bottles, tumble the fragments smooth in my pebble polishing machine, and use them as pretty mulch on top of large flower tubs. Remaining glass gets taken to the recycling point once a week or so.

I don't use much in the way of tinned food, but any empty cans are washed out and used by Mr C J in his workshop as paint or varnish tins, then eventually taken to the recycling point.

Children's clothes do a circuit around all my friends who have kids of varying ages - we always swap amongst ourselves as soon as anything has been outgrown. Anything left over gets taken to the charity shop, and anything too worn out gets stripped of the useful bits like zips and buttons, and the material is either used as rags for cleaning Mr C J's motorbike or the windows or can sometimes be used to stuff beanbag type bedding for the dog.

I hardly have any domestic waste to throw out at all - I can easily go three weeks without needing to put the dustbin out for collection.

haha koogs :( non-spigoted milk/juice cartons i have gleefully thrown in the recycling for years, naively imagining they'd be plowed back into the future carton supply

i just checked and things are looking up (used to be once place in scotland that did them)

http://www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk/04.htm#map

lots of gotchas and exemptions to this stuff, no wonder people can't be bothered (and people trying and getting it wrong (polystyrene and yoghurt pots in the orange sacks) annoy me more than people who don't bother).

at work there are two recycling bins but i'm told that they just get emptied into the general rubbish by the cleaner because there's nowhere to put them outside.

That Tetrapak recycling scheme is terrible for the southeast, there's like 5% coverage or something and half of that is iffy.

what's super-ridiculous in Hackney is that the only plastic they recycle is plastic BOTTLES. ???? but plastic bottles could be ANY kind of plastic, or indeed multiple kinds in one package! (i.e. squeezy ketchup bottles, which have something like 6 different kinds of plastic in them.) how does Hackney's "only plastic bottles" policy make any kind of practical sense?

innocent drinks website gives an address in somerset for everyone to send their tetrapacks too. which is kinda missing the point, i think but then i hate innocent drinks and their smug ways (even though 'innocent towers'* is 5 minutes from my house)

(* just an anonymous unit on a trading estate in hammersmith)

plastic is usually typed on the bottom, lowest number = easiest. drinks bottles are usually type 1 (pet). milk cartons (and some supermarket carriers) usually type 2 (hdpe). herts council used to handle 1 2 and 3 quite happily but i err on the side of caution here and only recycle 1 and 2 (which is the majority of my waste anyway)

but koogs that makes SENSE (and it's what's done in the US - dumps and pickups are explicit about what they do and don't accept) but in Hackney it's just "plastic bottles only!" - i mean i'm sorry, there are plenty of other plastic products made out of exactly the same crap, and they even have the little numbers on the bottom too

It's only plastic bottles here too. But what's more mysterious is why do my neighbours wash their bottles out, then put them out with the tops screwed back on - do they think that Coca-Cola just refill them?

In here you can recycle paper, cardboard, beverage cartons, glass, bottles, cans, metal, and biowaste through official means, so I do that. I also avoid buying needless crap and throwing things out if you can still use them.

See, if Lambeth actually said "type 1 or type 2" I would be fine. But they say "drinks bottles" so they get milk plastic, soda bottles, juice bottles, soup bottles that have a triangle on them, etc.

Since they need to sort it anyway, I'd rather err on the side of giving them too much rather than not enough.

am experimenting with turning soaked mulch into handmade paper.

great! and I expect the homemade paper is wrinkly and old looking and ideal for X mark the spot pirate treasure maps, arrrr!

Option number 2 for me :

Local council takes : paper/glass/food/aluminium/clothes weekly. They have public bins for cardboard. Some of the food waste could go on the compost, I guess, but I can rarely be arsed to separate it out. Mrs. Dr. C is more diligent about that. Occasionally there's a glass container that isn't useful to keep and is also a bit tricky to clean. I have to confess that I generally try to sneak these into the dustbin, although I get a bit of a ticking off if caught. For example, there was an incident earlier this week with a maple syrup bottle that I had sneaked into the bottom of the kitchen bin! I realise that I will get no sympathy here for this awful behaviour.

Green waste goes on the compost heap, but we have too much garden waste to deal with at the moment, so have ordered a HUGE green-waste bin that will be emptied fortnightly. It was ordered 8 weeks ago, however, and still hasn't turned up. The council managed to take the money instantly though. That reminds me that I need to phone them...

Thanks for the tetrapak tip, I see there's a collection point in the next borough to us and as I go there often I might start putting them in a bag. Also this made me smile...
http://www.tetrapakrecycling.co.uk/images/baglady.jpg

CJ, thinking about your routines, in which everything is neatly summed-up and unwasted, is v satisfying. THAT is an efficient household with someone(s) practical running it! I aspire to my own.

i'd like to think i'm option 1 but realistically i must be somewhere between 1 and 2. i hate throwing *anything* away. hackney is pretty hot for recycling (yes except for the "bottles only" mentalism - my friend l used to be in charge of hackney's recycling scheme and i think i made him splain this to me once but i have forgotten what he said) but yeah, as has already been said, SO many people just chuck everything in the rubbish... i do not understand. how is it more hassle to put it in a box next to a bin rather than in the bin? plus your bin gets full less often. grr.

We recycle plastic, cans, paper/cardboard and glass at the curb with the garbage.

I also keep glass jars for other uses and the dogs get most of the scraps. Wood/branches are chipped for mulch. When we have lots of big cardboard we take it the hippie recycling station downtown. Also, old clothes and books go to charity.

And I am a pack rat. I keep styrofoam and stuff from packaging for "crafts" (which means they're all piled up in my sewing room waiting for me to find a use for them.)

the hippie recycling station

So that's what happens to them.

The recycling programs in Chicago are horrible. Shameful for a a large city. So I do not recycle. To do so, I'd have to rent a car to drop off at recycling center. That is just not possible.

Also kind of defeats the purpose.

I think that ppl who throw everything in the rubbish will only be changed by carrots and/or sticks and at the moment there doesn't seem to be much of either.

I've only recently moved somewhere with recycling and haven't got round to doing it yet, mainly because the recycling boxes are full of yuck and there's plenty of other things that need doing around the place before I clean those out.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the point of it. I read somewhere the recycling process has a big carbon footprint and therefore is actually worse for the environment than just chucking everything in a big hole, but I forget where the article was so could be right-wing bias or something.

It seems our neighborhood is pretty good at curbside recycling. If for nothing else than the garbage bins cost money every month but your recycling bins don't. Therefore there is motivation to fill the recycling ones with your million beer bottles rather than the trash.

I think that ppl who throw everything in the rubbish will only be changed by carrots and/or sticks and at the moment there doesn't seem to be much of either these only exist in Ms Misery's neighbourhood.

best recycling ever - give it up for my mother's local authority, the London Borough of Enfield. Weekly collections of paper, glass, plastic (in a black plastic box) and organic material from garden *and* the kitchen (veg only: I'd imagine they don't take meat coz it spreads disease and attracts vermin) in a green one. And the bins have handles for ease of carrying and hinged lids which don't let the rain in and can't be stolen. They should get an award.

more or less how it happens here. i'm the second type by the way.

I keep styrofoam and stuff from packaging for "crafts" (which means they're all piled up in my sewing room waiting for me to find a use for them.)

Ha! Me too! I'm always tearing out interesting recipes or craft ideas from magazines and stashing them into files and folders but then I start thinking 'ooh, the back page of that magazine is all shiny and pretty, I can use that for a card making idea ....... and then I end up with a box full of paper scraps to keep as well. I'm like a flippin' magpie.

Different kinds of recycling have different overall footprints -- I think the process for glass is actually quite efficient...? Ditto metal, I mean, after all, you're saving all the energy and destruction of SCRABBLING IT OUT OF THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH in tiny pieces that then have to be processed to fuck and back in order to arrive at useful elements.

I've read that plastic, though, is a stickler, and really ultimately not very efficiently recycleable. Best just to use as little of it as possible. Buy things in larger containers, particularly, since ultimately that's less packaging than six smaller containers. Etc etc.

Also, I thought that in NYC, at least, you COULD put your windowed envelopes etc in the paper recycling, because they employ crews of people to sort them. I guess every service has different standards.

Here's an anti-recycling article from the Telegraph a few years ago. I think the tories mentioned here may have changed their tune a bit since then.

There's certainly a debate to be had. The Telegraph is probably not the place to have it though.

What about things like milk? If your choices are plastic and paper carton, which is better, or does it really matter?

Sorry that link don't work. Try this 'un.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/03/02/wrecyc02.xml

Seattle fines people who put recyclables into their garbage. The first time the collector just doesn't pick it up, but later offenses cost $$. Glass, paper/cardboard, plastic bottles w/ shoulders (lids removed), plastic bags (all stuffed into one and securely tied), all dairy containers (w/o lids), empty cans. I have one worm bin for vegetable matter and one for cat poop. We don't have a yard per se, but do container-garden so there's a place for the worm castings from the vegetable bin. 1/4 of our newspapers get shredded for worm bedding. I freecycle, but have only gotten rid of stuff that way - there isn't much we've needed.

Recycled stuff in Seattle is taken to a central collection station and sorted manually by people working on both sides of a long conveyor belt.

Working in the largest industrial landfill in California and seeing the literal mountains of trash that come in every single day has made me much more thoughtful about packaging/consuming/producing garbage.

We don't have that choice any more, it's all plastic (unless you get it from the milkman, then it's glass).

I'm by no means anti-recycling, I just haven't been convinced yet. Laurel's point about the different processes uses is a good one.

Plus, I stubbornly don't like being told I have to recycle. Although as I live in a flat I'm exempt from that anyway.

xpost to Ms Misery re milk packaging!

xxpost

Do the collectors go through the garbage? it isn't tied up in bags or anything?

ah okay. You typically see far less paper cartons at the store anymore. But they're usually the higher organic types. Which maybe gives me my answer right there.

The problem with milk is that storing it in plastic keeps it a lot fresher, doesn't absorb odors from the fridge an' stuff. I prefer it! But I can't buy it in gallons like my family did, and single quarts, which are more my speed, only come in cardboard, so that's the choice made then.

I think glass is the best but only an option in relatively urban, or at least high-population density, areas, and even then it tends to be more expensive than the other options so being able to choose that is a luxury of a sort.

I could only get glass at a place like Whole Foods which equals $$. I could try buying gallons but I'm afraid it would spoil before I finish it.

the big plus of recycling is that you don't have to take your trash out as often

(all: "ewwwww!")

We only get through a couple of pints a week. I have breakfast at work, so it's only what gets used for cereal/coffee at weekends. We rarely even get through 2 pints before it goes off, but 1 pint is never quite enough.

xpost we have to take our trash out often anyway, cos of stinky cat litter.

Use flushable litter!

Does that exist?!?

Re plastic, I'm experimenting (incidentally) with just buying less of the stuff that COMES in plastic to begin with. As has been discussed at length with Jaq et al on beauty threads, I stopped using commercial exfoliants and switched to baking soda and corn meal alternatives. Hella cheap, available in large quantities, purchaseable in cardobard boxes that last for months, and so on. Plus: taking that little bit of business away from the commercial beauty industry.

Any food that comes in plastic containers becomes my tupperware for work lunches, food storage...with the secondary savings of never having to buy the real thing!

World's Greatest Cat Litter

I'm not sure how widely available this is and I know products like this are prohibited in places like California (apparently the poo gives sea lions toxiplasmosis.) But if you can find a natural product (particularly this one) I highly recommend it.

Here, it's very pricey but worth it. A recent attempt to be cheap in the litter department sent me running back to this.

My question is: what is the toxiplasmosis bacteria (if that's what it is) doing in the seawater in the first place? Shouldn't the heat and/or treatment chemicals at the treatment plant be taking care of that?

I have no idea. I only saw a brief bit about it on a msgboard.

(And am selfishly glad that I can get it here.)

according to the holy heirarchy of green consumerism (REDUCE,
REUSE, RECYCLE), recycling should be a LAST resort!! i.e. "i see recycling centers like hospitals - those cans shouldn't be there in the first place"

my only question is, how come i never got to duce in the first place

Maybe someone would have asked you to duce a long time ago if you were less chalant about it. And more gruntled.

yeah - i am freighted with feck

Colonel Poo - if you only change yr habits in one way, recycle all your beer cans. Recycled aluminium saves 95% of the energy involved in extracting, processing and distributing the virgin product. Apparently recycling one can saves enough energy to power your TV for 3 hours.

This place backs me up on that:
http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/metals.htm

Got lots of good info on there if you're sceptical about the value of recycling.

See, if you could just squash an old beer can and post it into the back of your TV set to make it work for three hours, I'd be a really keen recycler.

So I should buy sodas in tins instead of soda in bottles, on the rare occasions that I buy sodas? So long as I recycle the thing?

Tins are much easier to recycle than plastics, give better energy savings and are worth much more $$$ which sort of ensures that they won't end up in landfill even though you're putting them in your recycling bin. They're also easier to sort out and less likely to be contaminated. Metals can also be reused endless amounts of times obv. I think cans are probably the better bet from that POV, but you have to consider the energy used to create the container in the first place.

I'm impressed with other UK cities' recycling schemes - we once got a small uncloseable bag for paper with no collection date/rota, which was, um, incredibly useful, thanks. The council offers no other collection schemes in our area, but there are centres for paper and bottles dotted around the city. However, we don't drive, so the only way we manage is because my mum lives in the same city, so when she visits she takes stuff with her to put with hers. We sadly don't recycle tins or plastic, because there isn't anywhere that I know of that does them (actually, they might have installed somewhere for tins now, but seeing as our recycling often builds for months it's not that feasible to do it as yet).

multiple xposts: I don't like flushing cat poop/litter because of the high resistance of things like toxoplasmosis (which is a parasite, like giardia) to both chlorination and ozonation (the two forms of finished wastewater to potable water treatment). There isn't any heat used in the potable water treatment process. Some municipalities have considered reverse osmosis, but that's incredibly expensive on a large scale. I don't know of any that have put it into place. Even with worm composting, the castings from feces can not be used for or near anything grown for food, or near a watershed. It's really hazardous waste.

Collectors in Seattle don't open bagged garbage, but if cardboard/glass/yard waste/etc is in there unbagged, they leave the can and then start fining. It's not hard to recycle here. Everything except glass goes into one big container, and everyone with a garbage can is provided with a recycling bin and glass bin. Another program Seattle has is the yard waste collection bin - all kinds of vegetable matter, including vegetable kitchen scraps and greasy paper/cardboard (pizza boxes), can be put in the bin, which is then composted using a high temperature method which sterilizes it. The finished compost is used in city parks and also sold. In the future, meat and dairy refuse will be able to be added to the bins, once some hygiene and safety issues are sorted out.

Reducing consumption of packaging is one of my goals, as is learning as much as I can about the backstory of how something was produced. I try not to let it paralyze me, but still want to be informed about the impact of my decisions/actions. No longer buying CDs/books was a step I took earlier this year. The huge glut of stuff I bought when Tower went out of business pretty much did it for me, looking at this enormous pile of polycarbonate (which is a form of plastic that can't be readily reclaimed).

So basically keeping cats indoors is kind of an ecological nightmare...? Yikes.

I back the high-temp methods; if they can make animal & slaughterhouse waste into methane and perfectly safe fertilizer, they get my vote!

If the methane can be used to generate the temps needed for sterilization of the composted waste, so much the better. Not enough people are working on such completely integrated systems though.

People don't want to hear it, but carnivorous/omnivorous pets (indoor/outdoor, whatever) are an ecological nightmare. Working animals, otoh, not so much.

Think I have said before that my dad's energy business has taken a turn for the greener since he started designing/installing methane digesters -- most of the source material for which is either feces or slaughterhouse waste, both trucked in from local sources. A very carefully staged series of bacterial successions produce enough heat in the process to completely sterilize EVERYTHING. Which is pretty impressive. (Also there is apparently a stage where some helpful agent eats the cell walls of anything else in the mix and dumps their cellular parts into the soup to die.)

Because of the electrically powered turbines needed to keep everything circulating, and the pumps that move the sludge from one digester to another, it doesn't have ZERO footprint, but you do get a clean fuel source made from eternally renewable materials that is ultimately more valuable than the elec you need to produce it.

Obv I find it all very exciting. :D

i hope this means that one day all us eco nightmare cat/dog owners will be able to power our homes with cat/dog poo

like there should be a neighbourhood drop off at which you deposit your bag (which is made of something that breaks down in the heat/energy process) and that bag goes to a central energy farm and there we go

hey and human poo too, why not! poo power, it is the future!

rrobyn, that is very like the vision I have: an apartment community where the garbage chutes drop into a digester, which provides heat and power for the building.

Also, I started using these "plastic" bags made completely of cornstarch - they break down incredibly quickly when exposed to a combination of heat/moisture/soil, and the worms can eat them.

Laurel, the company I'm now working for is producing LNG from the waste gas of landfills. Again, it requires an energy input, but we are currently diverting about 15% of this landfill's exhaust gas (which is currently burned in a flare w/ no attempt at recovering the heat) and producing around 5000 gallons of LNG (99% pure methane) per day. That's the energy equivalent of 8000 gallons of diesel fuel. Very exciting! I'd love to talk to your dad - I joined this company because some of my family are small scale hog farmers, and I wanted to work on something that would potentially help them deal with the waste stream. What we do is too large and industrial for smaller applications.

Yes yes yes! Before the digesters took off he was working w/ turkey plant in MI and a landfill and several other associated jobs to recover methane from landfill(s) there. It got tied up w/ civic bullshit and poor project management, tho, I think -- might still be ongoing. Anyway his engineering co has provided all kinds of energy services over they years -- when he started the company they mostly worked w/ propane, then expanded to designing/installing/consulting on co-gen, now this stuff. It is geek-fest and I wish there WAS some way for you to pow-wow, but he's in MI.

exciting!!
i do i shot not having to be an engineer but working on these projects?? i'm gonna investigate; everyone needs communications people

i like yr waste-powered apartment building idea, jaq - it hurts me to think abt all the reasons such a simple thing does not exist

this might be of interest....

roads? where we're going, we don't need roads

the engineering for waste-heat energy generation has been around for a long time, that was the cause celebre with the engineers who founded my company way back in the late 70s (they've since come to focus more on energy efficiency for all kinds of different systems - to the point that now we're doing almost exclusively is management of large-scale/statewide energy efficiency programs)

Yes the tech has been around for a while, Europe is much better at it so far, but because of the facilities needed and the leccy to put into the project, methane digesters being useful depends on the market demand/price for methane in the first place...which until relatively recently was not high enough in the US to merit a whole industry.

the "waste powered apartment" idea goes way back to, at the very least back to Bucky Fuller in the 40s

(not knocking any of these ideas btw they are all great, but perhaps it is worth noting that the FREE MARKET has not been so great at encouraging or supporting these technologies or even getting them properly developed)

btw San Francisco recently initiated a pet feces recycling/disposal program, but I'm not sure how it works exactly - might be part of the composting program, which, like Seattle's, takes an incredible variety of material and then does the heat-sterilization thing etc.

Something I'd never realized/thought about before - someone owns the mineral/gas rights to landfills. Lots of states/counties/municipalities have sold them off to raise quick cash and have given away much larger resources than they could have imagined because of it.

And, absolutely you don't have to be an engineer to work on projects like this. Apprentice yourself as an electrician, put your SQL programming skills to use (so much data getting generated by this - sheesh!), lobby legislatures, write grants, write user/operations manuals, generate drawings, do document control (another huge, forgotten job), be a safety inspector, run lab tests. There's lots of non-science/non-engineering things that need doing.

xp Maybe because the FREE MARKET made it cheap to DUMP YOUR WASTES in places that couldn't stop you, and also to BUY MORE ENERGY from giant utility companies with corporate interests to protect, both of which are somewhat less convenient these days.

see also: Arcosanti/Paulo Solari.

Jaq is correct - I'm not an engineer by any means

yeah free market was what i was referring to re: reasons why this does not exist - sure it's not a new idea but that we've gotten to the point now where energy production like this may actually have a toe-hold in free market is exciting at least

exciting also b/c it disrupts dystopian visions - i am all for that

I am tired of dystopian visions its true

So another thing I'm doing, which goes more under reuse - bringing the magazines we get into work once we're done with them for other people to read. I started bringing The Economist in, another guy brings the International Herald Tribune, someone else provides National Geographic. Mr. Jaq has decided to be less of a packrat and has given me a pile of New Yorkers and NYRB and Billboard to contribute. After a few months, I recycle them.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Everywhere I've lived (small-ish rural towns) save Boise had NO recycling program in place. There's a big dumpster somewhere in town that takes cans, and another for newspaper, and another for glass. And I don't have a car or the ability to take all my cans/beer bottles over there.

So, I use the newspaper to line the guinea pigs' cages, and I buy 2-liter soda bottles which make less rubbish, and I drink booze instead of beer for the lower number of bottles (mainly because having all those empties around screams ALCOHOLIC LIVES HERE). But I can't recycle really at all w/my current situation. So I actually voted for 3rd to bottom option: will I be alone?

Yeah, you'll be alone.

I'm not driving FWIW. But I am drinking. Yay!

Alone?

I'm between 1 and 2 as well. The council doesn't collect glass, so I have to take that elsewhere. I reuse small bags for sandwiches or freezing single portions of meat/fish and carrier bags for my rubbidge. I write lists on the backs of envelopes and cut up old clothes to use as dusters. Stuff I don't want that can be sold goes to the charity shop and I want to cry when I see my neighbours leave perfectly good furniture out for bulk collection (the council collect for free every Wednesday) rather than send it to a charity.

Freecycle is really fucking annoying. I joined and in two seconds my inbox was swamped, but there's no point in signing up for the digest because by the time you receive it, everything good has gone. So I unsubbed again.

Thing is, most of you people who are saying "ooh, between 1 and 2" are actually 1. I mean, I didn't mean for option 1 to be some crazy freegan The Good Life hippies, it just means people who do go out of their way above and beyond what the standard council offers. If you're dithering, you're probably option 1. The way I see it.

I once cleaned house for a crazy woman who was upset when I haphazardly rinsed some jars and bottles that I'd washed out for recycling, so they had some dish-soap bubbles on them. She had me take them out of the bin and re-rinse them.

This same woman once telephoned me in the evening to tell me that I'd left a dusting rag draped over the back of a kitchen chair.

At my parents' place in France, they can recycle all plastic except for carrier bags, which the leaflet says is not possible. Except my local Tesco has a big carrier bag recycling bin. Oh well, I don't need to use it because I take my shopping home in a crate. Much easier to carry.

xp I hope you poisoned her with Miracle-Gro.

She actually dropped dead at her computer several years ago. I had nothing to do with it. By then I no longer worked for her.

I guess the antidote finally wore off.

in sydney, a few years ago, they got real strict with the recycling to the point where garbage inspectors would be going through your trash at 5am making sure nothing recyclable was in the red bin and nothing unrecyclable was in the yellow bin and nothing but biodegradable waste was in the green bin. one time we screwed up somehow (even though we were all for recycling) so the city stopped picking up our trash until we wrote them a letter of apology.

now here in the united states, where noone seems to care whether you recycle or not, the recycle guy drops and leaves a bunch of our paper/plastic/aluminum on the street every week, which makes me want to not recycle because im sick of cleaning up after him. now I want a letter of apology from the city.

There's a pretty horrifying news clip on Yahoo right now about bottle water. I couldn't paste the link.

bottled

I keep the same water bottles going all summer. They get filthy. I'm probably ingesting all sorts of healthy soil organisms and backwash bacteria.

My boss at the nursery buys cases of 10 oz spring water and unapologetically crumples the empties and lobs them into the trash. Very bad. But it was me who told him DON'T DRINK THE TAP WATER HERE!!!!! Decades of chemical fertilizer, fungicides, insecticides and growth regulators seeping into the groundwater. Nurseries are little Chernobyls.

> they got real strict with the recycling

we've had a note through our door saying that we'd left the recycling out on the wrong day and don't do it again etc. only what had really happened was that the recycling people had come around earlier than usual, 7:30 or so, so the people leaving stuff out when they left for work an hour later were too late. leaflets were delivered in the afternoon. rassen frassen.

(and lots of carrier bags are now hdpe, the same as milk cartons. more trouble because they are thinner but...)

these are great uses for corrugated cardboard btw:
http://www.leokempf.com/furniture/
http://www.netropolitan.org/gehry/chair2.html

2 with occasional attempts toward 1. Curbside recycling in my city is available on a subscription basis (you pay for it) and there is a waiting list to subscribe. Luckily I live a few blocks from a drop-off point, so I usually just wait until I have filled a couple of paper bags full of recyclables, throw them and the kid into a wagon, and take a walk. They take all numbered plastics except for #6, steel and aluminum, and all glass but blue (they say it contaminates the other kinds?). Oh and paper/cardboard of course. So, most everything.

This is kind of an interesting link on my city's site on how they sort out comingled recyclables: http://stlouis.missouri.org/citygov/recycle/processing%20commingled.html

My husband used to bitch at me for recycling, he hates clutter and fears bug infestations from old food and soda. Now that I can turn over small amounts quickly, though, he seems cool.

Oh and yard waste here goes into special yard waste bins but we rarely have any, we let the grass clippings mulch themselves and don't have much else to worry about. I would like to start a worm bin!

oh jesus and the amount of plastic crap that enters your life when you have a kid! so depressing. the amount of crap, period. Most of the stuff I buy is secondhand, but still.

Worm bins are great! All you need is a biggish lidded plastic container w/ some holes drilled in the sides, a pile of shredded damp newspaper, a pound of red wigglers (the Cadillac of worms), and garbage. You can buy fancy ones, but the worms won't care.

does it smell? mr teeny hates smells.

Our produce-only one smells like dirt, or a damp forest floor, when I open the lid. Unless I put too many lemon rinds in there, those can be a little whiffy if they don't get buried or munched up right away. The worms can eat their weight in garbage every day, but they slow down if it gets too warm or too acidic. They like a nice cool shady place and egg shells to keep the pH balanced, esp if you put lots of coffee grounds in there.

I should take some pics of it.

i really should get a worm composter like that - a bunch of my friends even have them! it's just me, so could i make a half-size one, like with the smaller plastic container (1' x 8")? and just go get worms from someone who has them? i probably could

rrrobyn, you probably want something a bit bigger - maybe a 1.5' cube? That would go for a few years w/o having to sort out the worms from the dirt and start over and is easier to keep cool (more mass). Also, they can eat all your paper scraps too, pretty much. I feed mine shredded receipts and bank statements - extra protection from identity theft :)

And yeah, get worms from an existing bin, they reproduce like crazy with the right conditions (cool temp, humidity, bedding, and food). Ours started with a big yogurt container full of dirt and worms from a friend.

oh okay!
yeah i don't have a lot of space in kitchen/front-hall area - i will suss out sizes
i totally never thought about feeding them receipts and documents! that is kind of brilliant

worms are magic! I would prob keep mine in the detached garage anyway, although maybe it would get too hot? I will do more research. Thanks Jaq!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I want a wormery. But I fear I don't produce enough edible garbage.

Bunch of fucking hippy dippy, green on the outside, red to the core, crustie tree huggers...

jokes, bruv

Well, it makes me glad that someone gives a shit. You know?

x-post if that's a meme that spreads, then I really do give up on ILX. Some things should not be recycled.

:-(

It's heavy irony as raised on the "Politically incorrect guides" thread.

I always thought it was 'bear jokes', teenagers have misled me.

i don't think the council actually 'recycles' anything, but i do put the right stuff in the right bins.

Well, that's one of those Daily Express "They don't recycle it they just send it all off to Nigeria for the credit card number recycling" stories.

i don't read the express. think it was in the guardian?

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/waste/story/0,,1999745,00.html

I've read reports that lots of the co-mingled recyclables are too contaminated to make recycling economically viable. Actual recycling rates of collected material are much higher for places where you sort your own, but participation and total mass collected is higher where it's collected co-mingled.

Kate: you don't need heaps of waste to keep a worm bin going - the levels of worms adjust to the amount of waste you give them. Little amounts of half green food waste/half rough stuff like paper seems to work best.

oh damn got distracted and well whaddaya know, x-post

I've thought about getting something like composting or worms but I worry about rotting stuff attracting insects, as we've had problems with fly infestations (probably due to dead mice under the floor). We only have a small yard but we could stick something in the corner.

What Poo said. I'm really afraid of the worms thing attracting fruit flys/gnats which suck when you get a real infestation going.

Adding garden lime or chalk to reduce the acidity keeps the flies down, as does piling in the rough brown waste e.g. cardboard and fibrous veg. Also with some off-the-shelf bins, you can get covers to keep the rain and the flies out. Having said that, I'm a bit less than diligent when it comes to caring for our worms and consequently our bin is a festering pile of stinky shite that I wouldn't wish on anybody. Getting loads of brown goop out of it for compost though, and the smelly brown worm juice is good for feeding tomatoes.

Maybe bokashi might be a good bet? Never tried it myself mind you, but it's alleged not to whiff or attract flies. Looks a bit expensive to get yourself started with would be my big reservation.

Pricey indeed, that's nearly $200 for me!

Also this just sounds, bleargh:
with handy tap for draining off microbial-rich plant food !

I don't think I'm cut out for worms. Martha Stewart Living had a how-to on under the sink worm composting a few months ago. I found that a bit surprising.

You might be able to find something cheaper in the US, or bodge a homemade version somehow. Can't be difficult - you just need a box with some sort of drainage built in for the lovely brown poop juice.

So my worms will be going to a new home next month when we move. The new place, and apparently all of the Pioneer Square area in Seattle, uses a service called Cleanscape. Apparently, I buy specially marked bags for garbage, compostables, and recyclables, fill them up, leave them in the alley when full, and call or email the service for a pickup. They run 24/7. No more dumpsters in the alleys, no more rush to get things out in time for pickup. Sounds like a great deal, but I will miss the worms :(

lbhf have just made recycling 'compulsory'.

http://www.sextoyrecycling.com/images/5dollars_paper_dildo.gif

http://www.sextoyrecycling.com