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

"That's as maybe but the cold hard fact is that we are running out/have run out of suitable big holes to put our waste into. That combined with big fines (paid from your council tax) from Europe for every extra tonne of waste that goes to landfill over an ever-decreasing allowance, means that recycling is not and cannot be a temporary fad. It's here to stay. Though, hopefully in better thought out and consistent ways."
but, it doesn't work, at least why it isn't done in clearly thought out, logical ways, and waste can be burnt.
Recycling is, in fact, near here, seriously endangering peoples lives; as we have to walk on to what was, (at one point at least), teh most poluted (and therefore really very busy) raod, to avoid the upwards of six bins, in front of each flat, which makes the pavements nearly impassible, I can't understand the lack of logic; I recieve letters telling me I have to recycle, and other letters telling me I can't leave the bins on the pavement; I don't ahve a garden, no shed, no garage, so, where exactly am I meant to put them?: In my case, I've recycled the recycling boxes; and used them for sstorage in my loft. Other recycling boxes, get tipped empty, and used as improvised seats by teh druggies and alcos and down-and-outs, in the area, which must be nice for them. Recycling in this area has increased traffic, as there are now bin collections 6 out of 7 days a week, no doubt a great saving in greenhouse gasses and emissions. When I've had vast amoutns of recyclible matterial, such as cardboard, I'm told that I can't recycle it, and have to pay for it to be removed and put into landfill, clever... I can't see any logic in it; collection points for batterys and lightbulbs etc., used to be in town; now several miles outside town, only accessible by, and if one has, a car. No doubt this fits into the towns traffic reduction plans on which they spend a fortune.. Illogical, doesn't work, end of.

2legs if you think that's dangerous you should take a walk down any shanty town in India and see how dangerous recycling is.
Most of our recycling gets sent to countries like India where a pittance is earned under the most horrendous of H&S situations by the poorest people,children included.

Not true that most of our recycling goes to India, and even less true that it is handled under those conditions.

I worked on this quite a bit, criminal waste export exists, but most recycling is clean.

sprout

Can you say what percentage goes where then?

And have the documentaries I've seen on the BBC got it all wrong then and precisely how have you worked on it?

2-legs; you shouldn't look at local difficulties in your neighbourhood and extrapolate that to the entire country. Recycling works just fine in my neighbourhood thanks. We can all follow the calendar of which bins to put out when quite easily and the pavements are wide enough not to cause any difficulty. I've lived 3 or 4 different places since recycling became the norm and found the above to mostly apply, except for one narrow street, where people had to use the in-built manoeuvrability they were born with to walk/wheel around the obstruction

It's the (thankfully becoming rarer) 'don't like change/it's too complicated/it's a waste of time, blah blah' attitude that's the real problem. Happily, attitudes can change very quickly. Most people I knew including myself, happily chucked everything from paper and glass to paint pots, batteries, whatever, into one bin most of our lives. Now after a few years 'training' I positively find it abhorant and totally counter-intuitive to put a bottle or newspaper in with general waste. If I'm staying somewhere that doesn't have recycling, I put the stuff in the car boot and drop it off next time I'm passing a recycling point.

It's not that hard, it just isn't.

Anyway, to paraphrase an advert ; 'every little helps'. I don't recycle everything I could, always. Sometimes it's too much effort or uses more energy to prepare than is saved by recycling; for example peanut butter jars. Takes loads of hot soapy water and effort to clean the things, so they do end up in general waste. But as long as some or most recyclables are recycled by most people, then, in my opinion, things are heading in the right direction and it makes a difference.

Anyhoo.... water

On a road as b busy as a duel carrageway, even at 2 or 3 AM, you can't just walk round the bins, as the pavements are too narrow to start with.
With all the good recycling can clearly do, but on narrow margins, the precise way its d done and the effectiveness of it can I imagine make such a big differnce as to nulify any benafit, like the increased bin lorry traffic the recycling has, here at least seem to necessitate; plus the extra car journeys out of town that would be necessary, for me to recycle matterial not recycled at the door (which is actually the bulk of y waste for recycling)..

I've just never been convinced by any of the 'logic' behind most of these 'green things', as all the information on it is useually so utterly biased from one side or the other, as to make finding any 'truth' amongst it all hard if not impossible to find. Things like my recalling vaguely how only a few things that are recycled actually make sense from an energy point of view, as regards recycling them instead of making new And the obvious answer is still not to create the rubbish in the first place; why's my milk in a plastic tub, not reusable glass, or biodegradible cardboard? Why do Tescos use ten times more carrier bags than they need to when packing my grocerys? Why is it only the market stall who take the (duck) egg boxes back, when I've used all the eggs in it up?

There is quite a lot of evidence on the benefits of recycling and on where it goes. On the recycling market, try the environment Agency yearly reports - you find a few dodgy incidents certainty, but you will see that for the majority of recyclable commodities - metals, paper and card, separated plastic (PET), glass, construction and demolition waste flows, you can see quite some take up in UK plants or within the EU.

On the benefits, five years ago we already had fairly conclusive meta-studies on paper (the European Environment Agency looked at approx 50 different life cycle assessments of recycling vs burning paper) and on metals.

Plastics depends on the type of plastic, light mixed plastics are better off incinerated for the energy value, drinks bottle and similar packaging gets very good recycling results nowadays.

Having said that 2legs, you are right that reuse is preferable where it can be organised. Here in Belgium a lot of glass beer bottles, including my standard tipple, are reused. Textiles can be reused, apart from the cheap and nasty stuff that has to go to cloths.

And you were right in a way about the energy issue - glass, for example is not reused for the material saving, but for the energy saving. Aluminium requires several hundred times less energy to recycle than to make from bauxite.

sprout

Good point 2-legs- always reuse or reduce in the first instance; "the waste hierarchy" http://www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk/waste/Trade_Waste/Reducing_waste_work.asp (and a myriad of other sites)

Met a chap at supper tonight who is in the packaging business,
making plastic shopping bags, bread bags, muffin trays, etc.
This is in Nova Scotia.
He says all the plastic we householders are obliged to clean and
separate for recycling around here gets compressed into huge
blocks and shipped in containers to China where it is being
used as fuel.

~jwf~

PS:
He predicts that very soon Chinese Corps will be
buying up all our old landfill sites at bargain
prices and mining them for combustibles.

~jwf~

I read somewhere recently that the human population might level out at 9 billion by 2050.

The biggest concern is the rise of the "middle class" (as defined by the OECD spending 10 to 100$ a day). In 2000 there were 1 billion, by the end of this year there will be 2 billion and in another 20 years time it will go from 2 to 5 billion. They will all want to be good citizens and consume the manufactured trash we ship to them around the world for the sakes of economic growth and monetary circulation. They will want to have swimming pools, and meat, and guns, and barbecues, and cars, and fishing rods, and plasma tvs, and cars, and mobile phones, and fridges, and pet dogs and cats, and real estate, and holiday trips to Australia etc etc. And who are we to deny them.

"all the plastic we householders are obliged to clean and
separate for recycling around here gets compressed into huge
blocks and shipped in containers to China where it is being
used as fuel"

That's actually a good thing. It's using mined oil twice; once for plastic and once for fuel. It saves more oil being dug up to burn. The buzz fraze is 'Energy from waste'.

Well I'm noticing some topic drift here and we're entering the recycling debate so I'll run with that for the moment.

My local municipal authority is very very proactive in recycling and value adding. I wont bore you with statistics but just how they go about it here.

We have three bins, one really big one(green lid), one big one(yellow lid) and a much smaller one(red lid).

Green is for anything organic so all our food scraps which we wrap in the daily broadsheet(we still have one)go in there over the course of a week and Sunday evening I fill the remaining space in the bin with every available bit of greenery/off cuts/lawn clippings/branches/dead flowers/palm fronds (I'm guessing these aren't thick on the ground in blighty)old plants etc etc. That bin is collected weekly and the yellow and red bins collected bi-weekly.

Yellow one is for absolutely anything that can be recycled and it's always full to overflowing after two weeks and the red bin is for non organic, non recyclable rubbish and it's usually about half full after two weeks.

The green waste is turned into mulch and it's turned into worm food in an enormous industrial scale worm farm where the worm castings are sold to farmers for 'broad-acre' soil enrichment, i.e natural composted fertiliser / soil enhancer and also sold back to me and thousands of other rate payers and we use it in our vegie gardens and on our lawns and normal landscaped gardens.

It's a wonderful wonderful thing and I fully support it as I do the subsidisation of water tanks and water pumps used in domestic water harvesting.

Water harvesting is the way of the future, it's a way to secure water independence for your average urban dweller/corporate entity.

Many new shopping centres/civic buildings etc etc now have huge areas excavated and set aside underneath them for 'enormous industrial bladders' that store mind boggling amounts of stormwater that never has to be chemically treated as it's used in toilet flushing/lawn watering/garden watering/ and fire sprinklers...so simple when you think about it.

It's not all doom+gloom

Our dishwasher in the kitchen who can't speak English and is an imported thing and who we reckon cost us too much money....he he and is known to us at that bloody German(it's a Bosch dishwasher...relax)actually uses five or six times less water than doing the same dishes by hand and if you plumb your house so the grey water is stored separately from the blackwater(sewerage) you can then use that water and disperse it in several useful ways.

Sorry for long post

Interesting Keith.

Questions:
1. Do you mean that you use grey water for the dishwasher?
2. Have you any idea of costs of installing a grey water system: New build vs Retrospective?
3. what do 'you' understand by 'grey water'

- - - -

Further to my post 39, I learned today that Dorty (No1 Daughter) will be installing a water filtration gizmo (until then they're on bought bottled water). They're towards the eastern end - perhaps 3/4 the way, of the route I mentioned and are supplied by (their own) well. A recent bout of whole-family sickness has been ascribed to (most probably) well contamination. Quite a few homesteads in their area have had similar sickness (other adjoining areas, I can't speak for). No-one she knows, there, has had that happen before.

I repeat that until now, we must have been among the luckiest in the 'developed' world, as regards water.
To that I will add that our problems (now) have apparently been caused by lack of forethought by and laxity of the various governing bodies (it says here) - who can blame the farmers? (unless, of course, they chose to ingnore the requests and the warnings).


water

>>..topic drift here and we're entering the recycling debate <<

Must note the overall ironic nature of the fact that
it is the so called 'water cycle' that inspires human
awareness of the possibility that things may be cycled
and even, yeah, re-cycled. The spinning whirled, the
circle of Liff, the holy round-up of reincarnation and
the observation that water always flows downhill begs
the question how did it get back to the top anyway.

Only lately has it occurred to us to realise that such a
system may be infinite but we have polluted the content.

~jwf~

Questions:
1. Do you mean that you use grey water for the dishwasher?
No, sorry for the confusion.
2. Have you any idea of costs of installing a grey water system: New build vs Retrospective?
Hard question to answer Rod. If your building new or replacing existing system on a property that is on a septic system then it's relatively easy to do and cost is commensurate with the type of system chosen.
A grey water system always is a partner of a normal blackwater system.

3. what do 'you' understand by 'grey water'

Grey water is your shower, washing machine, dishwasher, sink water and in a normal older style septic it is mixed with blackwater just as all sewered systems mix both types and then it's up to tertiary sewage treatment plants to cleanse the stuff enough for it to be put back into the river/sea system

Where savings can be made in regard to water use is when stormwater is harvested into holding tanks which are plumbed so that that water is used for toilets and washing machines and possibly dishwashers I'm not certain on the last one.
This should be mandatory practise in all countries as it takes the load of water storage dams. Such a simple thing to do.
The subject is also huge Rod as there are just so many ways you can go about this.

Greywater in a septic system can be used in many ways and distributed in many ways as there are quite a few different ways to set up septic systems from Transpiration trenched systems to aerial sprinkler head systems to reed bed purifier systems for black+grey to dome absorption trenches to chemical treatment tank systems.

There would be quite a few entries there if anyone decided to take up the challenge.

Thanks, Keith.
This question has returned to mind since this thread started, after having been repeatedly postponed.

Oh dammit. Dinner time.

Now... I had it all sorted out - clarity of mind & all that ... start again Rod :

My Qs to Keith (posts 56, 58):
1 Swasher & grey water - 'nuff said.

2. Cost - sidestep that aspect. That wasn't too clever a question.

3 Grey water: Dorty (her own well, 100m or so deep) has a septic tank for the grey plus black waters and a large fenced-off area in the main paddock that's the treatment area.
(the farm next door rents 95% of the land, alternate cattle and greenstuf crops but don't irrigate often.

Having said that, the first suspicion of the cause of that sick spell must fall on their own land . OK, you are allowed to discount what I've said previously but I'll wait a while before voting either way.

Sorry Rod, it's late here on a Friday night and I'm itching for bed and as you do in these situations you go and sit in front of the computer and check your blogs...Doh!

So I'm not actually quite sure about this last bit in your post:

*3 Grey water: Dorty (her own well, 100m or so deep) has a septic tank for the grey plus black waters and a large fenced-off area in the main paddock that's the treatment area.
(the farm next door rents 95% of the land, alternate cattle and greenstuf crops but don't irrigate often.

Having said that, the first suspicion of the cause of that sick spell must fall on their own land . OK, you are allowed to discount what I've said previously but I'll wait a while before voting either way.*

I'm a bit lost to be honest, so can't readily answer