Recycling

Plastic vs. Glass vs. Aluminum | Earth911.com

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Beverage Container Showdown: Plastic vs. Glass vs. Aluminum | Earth911.com

I am opposed to glass bottles, because they frequently break and leave shards in the woods, potentially for a long period of times. Broken glass easily cuts hands and feet, punctures tires, and lead to severe injury. Not to mention that they are heavy. Aluminum (which is actually plastic coated with BPA or similiar less toxic resin to protect flavor), is probably my second favorite, especially with the bottle deposit laws taking back the cans. Aluminum also stays pretty cold in the coolers and is quite lightweight, although sometimes punctures and can tear and be a safety hazard with sharp edges. Aluminum cans can also last in the woods a long time. Plastic bottles I think get a bit of an unfair reputation -- they don't last as long in the woods as glass or metal, they aren't likely to cause cuts or injury (even if swallowed compared to metal or glass), they can be burned, and they are also recycable. Sure, plastic doesn't work for beer and certain other beverages, but it's the lightest, safest material out there.

NPR

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U.S. Recycling Industry Is Struggling To Figure Out A Future Without China : NPR

John Caturano of Nestle Waters North America, which makes bottled water, said plastic is getting a bad reputation. "The water bottle has in some ways become the mink coat or the pack of cigarettes. It's socially not very acceptable to the young folks, and that scares me," he said during a panel called Life After National Sword.

Sunil Bagaria, who runs recycling company GDB International, took his colleagues to task. "Forever, we have depended on shipping our scrap overseas," he bemoaned. "Let's stop that." European countries, he added, "are recycling 35% to 40% [of their plastic waste]. The U.S. only recycles 10%. How tragic is that?" 

After a couple of days of this, a woman named Kara Pochiro from the Association of Plastic Recyclers stood up and said not to panic. "Plastic recycling isn't dead, and it works, and it's important to protecting our environment, and it's essential to the circular economy," she reassured.

"Circular economy" is now a catchphrase that some say is a way out of the plastic mess. The idea is essentially this: Society needs plastic, but people need to recycle a lot more of it and use it again and again and again. That will eliminate a lot of waste and cut down on the avalanche of new plastic made every year.

The US Recycling System Is Garbage | Sierra Club

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The US Recycling System Is Garbage | Sierra Club

FOR NEARLY THREE DECADES your recycling bin contained a dirty secret: Half the plastic and much of the paper you put into it did not go to your local recycling center. Instead, it was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China. Around 1992, US cities and trash companies started offshoring their most contaminated, least valuable "recyclables" to a China that was desperate for raw materials. There, the dirty bales of mixed paper and plastic were processed under the laxest of environmental controls. Much of it was simply dumped, washing down rivers to feed the crisis of ocean plastic pollution. Meanwhile, America's once-robust capability to sort, clean, and recycle its own waste deteriorated. Why invest in expensive technology and labor when the mess could easily be bundled off to China?

Living with little waste

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Besides generating most of my electricity on site from renewable sources, one of my goals when I own my off-grid home is to manage as much of my waste on site in an environmental sustainable fashion and make less than one trip a year to the transfer station. This would not only save upwards of $400 a year in disposal costs ($33/month), it would keep a lot of waste out of landfill, and save money by avoiding unnecessary products I later have to dispose of on or off the farm.

Full Dumpster

Buy less, avoid unnecessary products

The most important strategy in my book to avoiding waste is avoid buying unnecessary products. There is so many cheap frivolous products but they’re both a drain on finances and the environment.

Apparently The Best Grass Is On The Trail

Feed livestock with food scraps

When I own land I want to be a to produce some of my own food. Producing your own food avoids packaging and you can bury the guts on your own land, feeding the soil. Hogs make good bacon and pork, they can be partially fed from food scraps and garden vegatable waste. Chickens likewise can eat many of those wastes and produce eggs and meat.

Compost Pile

Compost

Most vegetables, leaves, manure and other organic matter can be composted and turned into rich soil. Many of the things good for compost don’t burn well as they have a lot of moisture and it seems a waste to be dumping organic matter into the air with fire or producing unnecessary carbon emissions.

Steel

Scrap metal

Metals don’t burn and they are good to recycle. Separating out aluminum cans and tin cans for a yearly trip to the scrap metal yard or recycling center is an environmentally responsible activity and might even few a bucks. Likewise broken down machinery can be sold for scrap. If I can’t use it, I might as well get a few bucks for it and return it to the vast material industry for scrapping.

Burn Baby Burn

Burn

Almost everything you buy in the store today is packaged in paper, cardboard or plastic. These materials – often linked with plastics – can take a long time to break down in nature unless they are burned. Fortunately as witnessed by the large number of rural households and farms with burn barrels in states without regulations prohibiting them, most ordinary household trash burns. Add some scrap wood, maybe some increased ventilation and you got a hot fire that isn’t particularly noxious. I would keep my burn barrels down wind of my cabin in a place where I can monitor them and have garbage cans to store waste until the weather is safe for burning.

Landfill Fence, Methane Pump

Transfer station

As a last resort there is always a trip to the transfer station for wastes that can’t be reused or disposed on site. My goal would be at my off-grid property to do this less than once a year and really try to use the landfill option as last resort, mostly using it for recycling of glass, e-waste or other materials that lack an environmentally responsible way to dispose of on-site, which can’t be avoided by careful choices when shopping.