Materials and Waste 📍

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Today is America Recycles Day ♻ …

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Loading Glass At The Recycle Plant

Recycling is a bit of an national obsession and a joke these days. More people recycle in America then vote, it’s looked down upon people who don’t use the proper recycling bins. It’s even gotten to the point where people toss so much crap into recycling bins, that waste disposal and sorting costs at recycling plants has become a major drag on the facilities. People want to do the right thing and feel virtuous.

Now I certainly do recycle my cans and glass in part because I pay $2 a bag to dispose of unrecycled material at the transfer station, and it’s a trip down there that I try to avoid making. Plus I don’t like looking at landfills or thinking about all my crushed debris piled up there indefinably. But I generally don’t have a lot of waste, because I buy in bulk, avoid purchasing material things preferring savings over spending, and don’t eat out — a big source of garbage in a country where people spend more money eating out then eating at home. In the summer months, a lot of my burnable stuff, is used for starting campfires.

But having looked at the actual recycling numbers, very little day-to-day household waste actually gets recycled. Of waste commonly disposed in curbside or transfer station in garbage bags and dumpsters, only 2-3% of it actually is separated out into recyclable materials that have a chance of being sold as scrap and reprocessed into something new. Calling scrapping cars, old washing machines, refrigerators, or composting leaves and wood debris recycling distorts what people actually consider recycling — the stuff put in the blue box or recycling dumpster.

Much common waste, maybe not day to day trash is either landfilled, incinerated or burned, from old computers to mattresses to brick and concrete to broken appliances and headphones. Most of it is mixed in with the ordinary household trash, the banana peals and rotting chicken bones then buried or burned, leaching it’s toxic residue into the air and water. Look around your room — how much of the stuff that you had ten years ago is still around you, and how much of it is now landfill or smoke?

Recycling certainly saves materials and landfill space, although common curbside recycling is kind of a joke. It would do better to reduce material consumption and focus on important recyclables like metals, which have to be mined and can be reprocessed with a large part of the material recycled — although not all as some is always lost as a dross. But I think it’s emphasized too much, and focuses on the wrong kind of things — not the toxic wastes like electronics or the bulk wastes like old appliances and furniture.

Map: Madawaska Flow
Map: Chub And Trout Lake
Map: Shindagin Hollow State Forest Ortho

The Poison Plastic.

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"You know PVC and you don't know PVC: "New car smell? New shower curtain smell? That's the smell of poisonous chemicals off-gassing from the PVC."

Map: Green Mountain National Forest North

Plastics

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You burn plastic, you knuckle-dragging hillbilly, criminal who hates mother earth.

Says the people in the plastic houses with their recycling bins packed full of plastic trash, soon enough to be hauled away in the smoke-bleaching diesel trucks, smashing it in with the tin cans, junk mail, and glass wine bottles. Soon enough to be deposited at the smelly old material recycling facility, with much of the plastics to be only temporarily diverted from the landfill as there is little market for oversees for waste plastics.

Honestly, I don’t care that much as I watch that plastic bottle melt and get all distorted into werid shapes as the bright yellow flames and thickly black smoke floats off into the atmosphere. It’s reality. That said, I don’t exactly enjoy the pollution or smoke, and I do what many recycles don’t do – I try to avoid plastics and packaging to the extent I can. I buy in bulk and shun packaged food as much as possible in favor of basic raw ingredients. Yes, there is inevitably is plastic mulk jugs, yougurt containers and Styrofoam egg containers, and those lightweight plastic bags, but they hardly are what the typical suburban consumer produces.

Outlaw maybe, but then again many backwoods people operate the fringe of legality, mostly living out of the shadow of the law and peering neighbors. But there is so few of such people, that despite all the worries of dioxin and plasticizers, it doesn’t really add up to much and doesn’t impact anyone else. The cowboys and farmers, the rural residents and cabin dwellers. The men of the forest. The letters on the paper board box, charred and blackened and turned back to ash and brown off on the wind.

Now I get not everybody can be a backwoods hillbilly, doing things the old backwards ways frowned upon by urban society, as it cranks out it effulence and makes it’s ego fill full of wokeness. So proud to be washing out those plastic containers, and carefully sorting them out from the other discards on the short or longer trip to the city dump, and growing piles of shit that surround all our cities and rise over the countryside. Still it doesn’t mean I think they’re right.

Plastics, they’re kind of everywhere today. 🚮 ♻

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Lately we’ve been learning how much of a scam recycling really is especially with low value, often contaminated scrap like plastic often is. We are learning how most plastic quickly becomes trash shortly after it’s use with no destination but an incinerator, a landfill or a burn barrel.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s all that big of deal because if anything there is a glut of landfill space out there, and if your going to burn natural gas to heat and light the cities and make oil to power the cars, your also going to make plastic. Garbage is well compacted down a landfill, a few hundred acres of dumping grounds can serve a large community for decades. Plastic in a landfill is no less biodegradable than a discarded Salisbury Steak or head of lettuce or a paper bag – it generally isn’t going to rot much – landfills are permanent resting places for waste. The compaction of the waste means there is no aerobic digestion breaking down the waste in landfills and anaerobic digestion is extremely retarded too even if it does produce some methane which is problematic if not captured properly.

Even burning plastic isn’t as bad as it once was. Municipal incinerators break down plastics down to carbon dioxide and water vapor almost entirely, especially the plastics commonly used in food packaging. With the phase out of polyvinyl chloride number 3 plastics in disposable packaging, which one used chlorine as a low cost building block, the toxicity of common plastics incinerated in a low temperature fire like a trash burn barrel on a farm or rural homestead has greatly been reduced. Sure there are plasticizers that soften the plastics and dyes but they’re a small part of the waste stream and worse of them are being phased out. Not much residue or ash is produced from incinerated plastic and if anything common discarded packaging helps the waste burn better. Plastic isn’t destroying the ozone, it contains no CFCs – even Styrofoam hasn’t blown with ozone depleting chemicals in a decade.

Plastics aren’t perfect and litter both accidental and intentional is a big issue. Animals do get sick from eating plastics, especially sea creatures. It is so easy for a plastic bag to blow out a car window and get trapped in the bushes or the trees above. It’s happened to me. Plastic bags caught in trees is a big problem in cities and areas near landfills where most of the discarded ones are ultimately buried but sometimes get caught in the wind are carried by the wind. Plastic, unless it is burned, doesn’t break down in nature – unlike paper or food waste or manure which will rot when exposed to moisture and air.

There are those who want to swap out disposable plastic for metal or glass packaging, claiming the possibility of more industrial recycling of the scrap bottles and cans. But not only are metal and glass heavier and in the case of glass prone to breakage and waste, they’re less recyclable and closed loop as people want to think. Metal and glass they becomes litter or dumped in the woods is much more harmful than common plastic packaging.

Recycling isn’t closed loop. Bimetal cans, which are relatively valued as scrap metal contain coatings and multiple metals which are only partially recovered when melted down at scrap metal facilities – a portion goes up in smoke or is landfilled as draugh. Glass can be melted down and reshaped into new glass unlimited but often its not, because it’s costly to properly separate glass into seperate colors – and again some of that still becomes waste that is skimmed off and landfilled. Because of the cost of sorting glass and contamination a lot is just crushed and used instead of gravel at landfills for roads and other areas needing back fill.

But a bigger problem with glass and metal is unlike paper and plastic it tends to accumulate in the environment more. Paper or plastic often gets burned, metal and glass just breaks up and sticks around forever. Whether it’s a farm dump, a rural homestead, a back country camp or other facility, glass and metal don’t burn so they tend to get dumped in the woods. People may be more responsible today then yesterday, hauling more to the recycling center or municipal landfill but still the vast majority of waste found in the woods dumped is metal or glass. Metal and glass leads to cuts and injury to humans, livestock and other animals. Hardware disease – a cow eats hay that has discarded metal or glass in it – is so deadly that many farmers feed magnets to cows to keep them from cutting their guts open from hunks of metal.

I am not arguing for more plastic, littering or burning of waste. I think urban recycling is important as it provides a good source of raw materials for industry, especially when collected and sorted using dual stream recycling. It also encourages rural residents to keep their ditches free of cans and glass by providing a low cost method of disposal compared to municipal landfill dumping. I think there should be more subsidy for reused milk bottles and reusable packaging but it I’m also not that concerned about it either. But regardless, post consumer recycling has a pretty minimal impact on landfill dumping, it’s oversold as a feel good measure but hardly a way to eliminate the nuisance grounds, as the Canadians call them.

Thematic Map: Black River Watershed
Terrain Map: The Gulf at Partridge Run - LIDAR Digital Surface Model