h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Great entry, sprout! I love your easy, informative and humourous writing style. "the plastic bag blowing in the wind, [] is not really a long term threat to the survival of our planet"

Anyhoo, I have come to bury you, not to praise you, so here are my nits.

"Of the total waste, 535kg of this is domestic waste" 535kg of what? You is that 535kg of the 1.3 billion, or the 3.5 tonnes? I'm a bit confussed.

The 4% contribution of methane seems small. Should you instead compare the effect of CH4 to CO2 on the greenhouse effect?

"or for the disabled in sheltered workshops" - this could be picked up the wrong way quite easily. Wondering if it is superfluous.

"they were (and are as there are still some around) aided and abetted by regular businesses" --> doesn't read well. Your brackets break up the flow at the wrong time.

Always wanted to know - what is a heavy metal? No jokes please. Way too obvious

What is a furan, and a dioxin for that matter? Footnotes?

Maybe the incineration argument needs more bolstering - we have a huge incineration issue ongoing here locally with campaigners screaming that it will be the end of the world.

One of my takes on landfill is how many of them are sited in coastal areas. And the sea levels are rising. Go figure.

"Don't buy in a bottle what comes out of a tap" - as the recent Dasani scandal showed, you're only buying tapwater anyway.

"the chances are that the CO2 and air pollutant output from your car is outweighing the environmental benefit of recycling the bottles..." - yes, but the bottles still remain. Would you prefer that these then be landfilled?

Goodness gracious, I do seem to have buryed you! Well, they are still just minor nits compared overall to what you have written! It's an excellent entry, and badly needed.

W

*Puts his spade to one side, brushes the last bit of soil off*

More good comments!

I've rewritten the garbled bits - no problem. And I've explained the scientific terms, with all the authority of my GCSE science behind me.

Three points

- sheltered workshop for disabled people - it's a fact that these exist, and that there are many in the re-use/recycling sector. I think they play a very positive role - so why would a reference be a problem?

- Life cycle analysis of a trip to the bottle bank. Alas, the impact of car journeys on the environment is such that if you are driving more than a certain distance, it would be environmentally better to put them in the bin. The env impact of them being picked up by the bin man and then landfilled, is less important than the impact of the extra car journey.

Incinerator stuff - this is often portrayed by greens as incinerators versus recycling. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it is incinerators instead of landfill, and in that case, energy recovery from a modern incinerator is generally the better option. I'll see if there are any accessible studies.

sprout

Nah, you're right. Just me being a bit too bloody PC. Not for me to judge whether others *might* get offended, and I understand better where you are coming from.

As for the trip in the car, well, you could be going to do your shopping at the time, or on another errand of mercy: dropping off the babysitter or the dead body or whatever. Sounds like some verr-ry complex calculations are required here...

Do incinerators not also require landfill?

W

I think it looks fine now.

- JD (trying to kick his pedantic habits)

OK - thanks to you both.

I've slightly rejigged my bottle bank section, so that it doesn't look so negative.

I'm offline now for about a week (moving house) - if someone wants to pick it while I'm away that's fine - if it gets more comments that is also fine.



sprout

I like it!

Until recently, I worked at Allied Waste here in the US; I worked in payroll, though, so I didn't know most of this stuff.

Thanks Lady Brianna!

sprout

Is this still here?

sprout

Still seems to be...

sprout

Was writing it a 'waste' of time?



sprout

Isn't it more of a waste of electrons leaving it here to block up PR, when it could be moved to the EG in order to start being ignored properly?

sprout

Yeah, this one needs to be cleared out from Peer Review and dumped into the Edited Guide. It's been here so long it's beginning to hum...

ROFLMAO! I'd leave it here. Someone may come along and say, "Is this still here? We should pick it!"

Yeah, with the hot weather we're having, this really needs putting down a salt mine or something. Maybe I can find a farmer who wouldn't some extra 'landscaping' material, no questions asked.



sprout

Ps - for those interested and can get BBC - 19:00 BST this evening, programme on illegal waste dumping in the UK. Perfect for accompanying the evening meal

I don't think this is quite ready yet, although it is a good entry. It's a relatively long entry, and in parts it rambles, it goes off on tangents, and there are non-sequiturs, which all make it very hard work to read.

In the introduction I think there should be a new paragraph at "Moving on a bit..." since it's quite a jump from dinosaur middens to mediaeval castles.

The second paragraph of the introduction needs a rewrite I think.

"What has changed as Homo sapiens has got older"
Homo sapiens hasn't 'got older', society has changed.

"What has changed as Homo sapiens has got older, is certainly the amount of waste we produce, but above all the impact that that waste has on the environment"
The construction of that sentence is a little odd.

"Despite their willingness to tuck into mouldy meat and manky vegetables, we probably waste less food than our ancestors due to modern production, packaging and refrigeration"
That sentence doesn't really have anything to do with the one that follows it since the following one is talking about waste in general, which is what the entry itself is about. Linking the two together with the "But" gives too much credence and weight to the sentence about food. I would also argue that we actually waste *more* food than our ancestors did because of our affluent and throwaway society - our ancestors, even into the 20th century (apart from the aristocracy) couldn't afford to waste food the way that we do, when we buy food and let it go off, or buy a meal at a caff/restaurant/fast food joint and leave half of it behind. I work at a place that serves food and I see every day how much gets thrown out.

"But the products we waste now are often not biodegradable, and can be hazardous if not treated properly"
Again, that reads rather oddly because of the sentence construction.

How about something like this for the second paragraph:
'As societies have changed and become more industrialised, the amount of waste has increased, as has its impact on the environment. Many of today's waste products are not biodegradable, and some are positively harmful if not treated properly. In some respects we actually produce less waste than our ancestors - refrigeration, modern food processing techniques and improved packaging mean that less food is wasted during production and storage, but what happens to all that packaging once we throw it away?

What follows is an overview of solid waste as an issue'

"It is estimated that 40-45 million tonnes of this contain hazardous substances"
'It is estimated that 40-45 million tonnes of this waste is hazardous'

"However, the large amounts of waste"
'However, the amount of waste'

"If we had plenty of resources to waste, a waste management system that emitted no pollution and plenty of room to put waste for final disposal, one might argue that we could produce as much waste as we want"
'If we had unlimited resources, a waste management system that emitted no pollution and plenty of room to put waste for final disposal, one might argue that we could produce as much waste as we want without any consequences'.

"However, currently the environmental..."
'Currently, however,'

"It's possible to argue that there are two main types of problems with waste"
'two main problems'

"The generation of so much waste means we are using resources inefficiently"
That section then goes on to talk about recycling which is an entirely different subject to the efficient use of resources. To me, using resources efficiently means getting the best out of what you use. Going back to food and our ancestors, they would eat much more of the animal than we now do, although the bits that we now don't eat are fed to other animals in the form of petfood and animal feedstuffs. This is nothing to do with recycling, which is taking products which have already been used and using them again or making something else from them. The soles of shoes from old tyres for instance.

I suggest therefore that there are three problems with waste - the two that you mentioned plus the low level of recycling materials and products that could be used again.

Now, since this is such a long entry, since I've only gotten a fraction of the way through it, and since I've already spent more than half an hour on this one post, I'm going to leave it there and wait for comments on what I've already raised.

I'd completely missed this latest comment - many apologies. I'll have a scan through it straight away.



sprout

OK - I think I've got most of the textual suggestions. I don't know why I'm having difficulty expressing myself on this subject - there were a lot of mangled sentences in the intro.

On the recycling resource efficiency point - I understand what you say, but at the end of the day, waste prevention, re-use and recycling all save resources in the same way.

Imagine I write on one side of A4 paper.

If I reuse the other side, I save the resources needed to make another sheet of paper.

If I put the paper in the recycling bin, I need another sheet of paper, but I save resources in the fabrication of a sheet of paper as well as the raw material used.

If I put the paper in the normal bin and it is then incinerated with energy recovery, energy is made from the paper, resources are saved.

If it goes in a landfill, the resource is lost.

In other words, no matter where the resources are saved, we are always talking about various levels of resource efficiency.

Does that help?

sprout

Did you have anything more, Ooj?

sprout

Or anyone else, for that matter?

sprout

????

sprout