Materials and Waste

46 Ingenious Uses for Water Bottles | Survival Sullivan

|

46 Ingenious Uses for Water Bottles | Survival Sullivan

very year, people around the world throw away SIXTY MILLION water bottles PER DAY! That’s 22 BILLION water bottles annually. Only about 20 percent (1/5) of water bottles are recycled. The rest find their way into landfills, ditches, creeks, ponds, lakes, rivers, and finally, the oceans.

So much so, that there is a massive floating island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean that is about the size of the state of Texas. This island is aptly named “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”. This is a fine testament to the human creature and our ingenuity (in case you couldn’t tell, that last sentence was sarcasm).

When most people finish drinking from a water bottle, they simply toss it in the recycling or trash. After all, what can you really do with an empty plastic bottle? Well, it can actually serve multiple, extremely important purposes- especially in a survival scenario where supplies will be difficult to come by.

Pennsylvania DEP approves permits for large new landfill on brownfield site | Waste Dive

|

Pennsylvania DEP approves permits for large new landfill on brownfield site | Waste Dive

Pennsylvania is among the more landfill-friendly states and was once described as having the second-most landfills per capita in the country after Nevada. But tensions over Camp Hope Run have been ongoing since 2006, as locals and county officials have questioned the need for a new landfill.

Per DEP data, some of the nearest landfills include the Greentree Landfill operated by Advanced Disposal Services and the Wayne Township Landfill owned by the Clinton County Solid Waste Authority. A new landfill would offer a closer option for waste disposal for neighboring areas like Centre County, which has no landfills of its own.

PA Waste is a limited liability company headed by Robert Rovner, a former state senator, and Ramsey Dilibero, a landfill developer. In 2013, a technical review portion of the application process found 71 deficiencies, ultimately leading to the application's rejection in 2015. For its latest attempt at gaining approval, the company submitted its Phase 1 application in July 2017 and Phase II application in February 2018.

Officials with Boggs Township declined to comment on the landfill to Waste Dive. But during a July 2018 DEP public meeting, more than 30 people objected to the site's construction. They expressed concerns over truck traffic, the possible termination of free recycling services and issues with the area's rattlesnake population. The reptiles live in that area and residents worry a disturbance could send them toward residential properties.

My mail box is full of trash again

|

My mail box is full of trash again.📪

I get tired of coming home every night to find my mail box stacked full of circulars, advertisements and other junk. Time Warner Cable, as they have done for 12 plus years now, continues to send me more advertising fliers to sign up. Sometimes it’s so full of trash that the poor mail man has to smash it into my mail box, especially those bigger newspaper style circulars.

While I will glance at some of it, most of it goes straight to my paper trash milk crate where I collect up my paper trash to dump in the recycling dumpster at the Park and Ride. While not all of my paper trash is unwanted fliers — a fewer pieces are legitimate non-confidential mail and food boxes and other paper packaging — it’s still such an enormous waste of wood fiber to be filling up my trash can so quickly.

After only a week and a half, my paper trash was full enough that I had to compact it down with my boot the other day.

It’s just absurd how much trash there really is. While I do “recycle it”, when you toss it in the recycling dumpster and it goes to paper mill, “trash doesn’t just disappear”. Some of the fiber is recovered and used to make cardboard and paper, some might even get bleached and turned into medium-grade office paper. But a significant portion becomes pulp and paper waste, and is ultimately ends up in the Colonie Landfill.

In the summer months, I use some of the waste paper to start fires while camping, but even that can be overwhelming, as paper doesn’t burn that well unless it’s dry newspaper or crumbled up well. The newspaper type waste paper can probably eventually be used for starting woodstoves or livestock bedding when I own my own land, with rest just burned for disposal, but having so much paper is just obnoxious to dispose of whether you live in the city — as I do now — or use some of it in the future when I live out in the country.

7 Reasons Recycling Isn’t Working in New York City – The New York Times

|

7 Reasons Recycling Isn’t Working in New York City – The New York Times

If you are a New Yorker and sort your recycling at home, as city law mandates, you probably wonder, as you rinse bottles and stack junk mail and scrub yogurt containers: Does all this effort make a difference?

Well, yes, but not nearly as much as it could. New York City recycles only about a fifth of its garbage — 18 percent of trash from homes and about 25 percent from businesses — according to the city’s Department of Sanitation.

Yet seven years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg vowed to double the residential recycling rate to 30 percent by 2017.

The numbers fall far short of New York’s potential. If everything recyclable were sorted and recycled, some 68 percent of residential trash and 75 percent of commercial trash could be kept out of landfills, according to the Sanitation Department. And while city leaders have sought to improve recycling for decades, New York still lags behind major cities like Seattle and San Francisco, which recycle more than half of their waste — numbers attained over decades of policies that include stronger requirements than New York’s.