One of my fascinations of late has been with toilets and waste water treatment works. This website is a vault of knowledge about all things toilet and how people dispose and recapture the value in all poop and pee of the world!
I was walking a remote section of NY 8 the other day, noticing the various pieces of litter along the road side. Some of it is intentional garbage dumping – the worn out television and recliner, the lamp shade – but a lot of it is packing from go food – plastic water bottles, beer cans, burrito and burger wrappers, french fries holders like you get from many a fast food chain.
Probably very few people litter but many pass by this road, and the occasional burger wrapper and beer can out the window adds up. Probably far more toss the wrapper in their car’s backseat and then put it into a designated garbage can, emptied and hauled to the outskirts of the city to be added to the ever growing mountains of garbage.
Go food might make people happy but it’s a temporary high one quickly consumed and discarded. Often the prices at gas stations and grease pits are far marked up from a sandwich made at home or reusable water or juice container. Money wasted that could be invested towards improving your life and future. Money spent on fatty foods and intoxicating beverages and more generally garbage now littering our roadsides.
There are some who want to replace single use plastics with single use aluminum or glass containers, noting the greater recycablity of both materials. But I think it’s a bad idea:
Glass and metal, once produced last forever in the environment.
A glass or metal object doesn’t just rot, it also doesn’t doesn’t burn. A discarded plastic bottle may be incinerated, burned in a burn barrel or campfire or be destroyed by a wildfire
Plastics, especially outside of a landfill have a much shorter life than metals or glass thanks to the combustible nature of hydrocarbons
Metals and glass discarded can lead to cuts in children and adults when they step on the glass, are working in the woods or swimming in the creek
Metals and glass discarded can puncture car tires both on and off the road
Metals and glass discarded can get into pasture and cause painful death from hardware disease in cows and other livestock
Traditional deposit for recycling programs do increase recycling rates but still don’t eliminate litter or even ensure most of the material is recycled
Recycling is great but even with glass and metal which is said to be 100% recyclable, material is lost when the metals and glass are melted down for reprocessing
Glass and metal makes a lot more sense with true rewash and reuse programs – like milk delivered by a milk man
Milk in glass is colder and purer
As would be other beverages such as soda or beer produced and distributed in reused growlers
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.
