1,4-Dioxane: Another forever chemical plagues drinking-water utilities
Materials and Waste
The secret of Linseed oil.
Recyclable Plastic Sunscreen and Glass is Trash ♻
Recyclable Plastic Sunscreen and Glass is Trash ♻
What a crock!
That’s what I had to think about the company I heard on the podcast advertising green cleaning products in glass. Have you ever even looked into glass recycling? While glass may be technically recyclable when segregated by color and material, most of it gets pulverized in compactors and MRF when they get it at best save the glass for building landfill roads – not even ordinary highways. Or more likely landfill cover or just dumped with the rest of the garbage.
Then I put some more sunscreen on and was looking at the sunscreen bottle and it prominently has the recycle logo on the bottle and the number two with HDPE printed on it. Well at least I know when I chuck it in a fire it won’t be stinky super toxic to burn like PVC but I can’t imagine any of those bottles are ever recycled – there just is no market or practical use for HDPE plastic contaminated with beach sand, sunscreen and in a form not easily processed into things like plastic lumber or t-shirt fiber resin. It’s trash.
Toilet Paper! 🚽
Toilet Paper! 🚽
Using toilet paper if you use an outhouse or even a Porta John makes a lot of sense – the carbon helps tie down the nitrogen so that the poop smells less and the waste breaks down into night soil quicker. Bidets aren’t practical in outhouses, they lack running water.
Not sure if it makes as much sense on indoor toilet to use toilet paper. Toilet paper is an enormous waste of paper that is rarely from recycled stock and when it’s flushed down a toilet in a municipal sewer system, it is scraped away as solids in the primary clarifier and usually trucked to a landfill, burned in an incinerator or in some cases processed into farm fertilizer as biosolids. Seems like a waste.
Toilet paper on septic systems usually ends up as solids in a septic tank that needs to pumped occasionally as a lot of it doesn’t break down that quickly. Honestly, it’s probably better to actually keep toilet paper out of the toilet on septic systems to reduce the amount of solids going into the system by keeping a waste basket next to the toilet. That’s common in many third world countries and for thrifty farm families trying to avoid pumping their septic tanks.
Earlier tonight I was looking at an advertisement for trash bags made out of “ocean bound plastic”
Earlier tonight I was looking at an advertisement for trash bags made out of “ocean bound plastic”. The whole concept seems patently absurd — in much of world there isn’t much strategic dumping of waste plastic into the ocean. Recovery from plastics, from the ocean, seems kind of a joke too, as any resin is likely highly contaminated with dirt and debris, to say nothing of the damage to the material from salt and sunlight. All things that video I posted earlier confirms. Like so many green-marketing products these days, it’s pretty much a scam.
Why recycled ocean plastic is (often) a lie
To Burn or Not to Burn?
When I see all those dumpsters and trash cans in front of rural and remote homesteads and farms, I think that is so stupid to be hauling and burying wrappers and papers to a landfills hundreds of miles away when most of that crap can be burned safely on site, with a trip a few times a year to the county transfer station for the cans and glass and a few miscellaneous things. But alas the activists are more interested in punishing rural folk. ♻
Dan Martin Explains Everything is a hilarious channel with his pet deer 🦌 and his earth 🌎 ship homestead and off grid life. Some of his stuff is kind of silly 🤪 but a lot of it is good, down to earth, very good explanations.