221–230 of 293 posts
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very specifically: don't take the plane, don't got to work with your car, and live in high density housing.
If you live rural in a rural area, use solar for electricity, work remotely, and grow your own food you are probably producing a lot less garbage than someone in a high density major metro.
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A remember some stores stopped accepting recyclables after it became a pattern for homeless to scavenge for the good stuff and leave a mess behind.
Most supermarkets have bottle recycling ATMs (outside the entrance) around here in Germany. The homeless scavenging bottles from public bins and returning them are doing just fine. I'm not aware of the lot of mess this causes though, not sure what you are talking about there.
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Since we asked you repeatedly not to do flamewars like this, I've banned this account.
How was that a flamewar? I replied to a person who used 2 words in a discussion where there was no clear relation to the comment being replied to, and suggested they use a full sentence so that I can understand their point coherently.
It makes me wonder if we were ever really recycling, or if "recycling" was a marketing buzzword for "cheaply dumping your trash in China". I seem to remember a lot of controversy over recycling in the 80s and early 90s, with my local town government insisting it was too expensive. Suddenly everything changed in the late 90s, right around the time that globalization took off, and recycle bins took off everywhere. By t…
I assure you that anything metal gets recycled. It's much cheaper to recycle than dig more ore out of the ground. tosses brake rotors in city recycling pickup bucket
tosses brake rotors in city recycling pickup bucket
In Germany you pay a deposit when you buy a bottle and when you bring it back, you get your money back. At least when I lived there the system worked well. there is always a lot of pressure from industry to go one-way though.
We have this in California and it provides a basic income for many homeless people (at least they're doing something positive by picking up the aluminum/plastic bottles).
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In countries with good waste management I assume they are burned if they are not recycled. Other containers such as paper might sometimes even be worse as it will cost more energy to produce them than plastic.
>>In countries with good waste management I assume they are burned if they are not recycled Those countries are so rare that it's almost not worth mentioning. Vast majority of places around the world, including most of the developed world do not have "good waste management" by this definition. Even in countries as rich as UK, Germany and France most waste goes to a landfill, not an incinerator. Sure Sweden shows a go…
Dumping untreated waste into landfills has been illegal in Germany since 2005, so that's not a thing anymore.
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In many ways, China's chief export for the past two decades has been its environmental sink capacity -- that is, absorbing both pollution and extractive environmental disruption.
It hasn't just been China. Pharmaceutical manufacturing in India is an environmental disaster.
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What if all the "progress" was just an illusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants#Plot_summa... "Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market."
I recently have 'converted' to minimalism, after having watched a few documentaries (Minimalism, True Cost, etc.) it made perfect sense to me that since using MORE and recycling MORE is not the solution (especially when 'recycling' it not actual recycling) and now I feel and I do better for me, and the planet's future. I also came across this nice video: The History of Stuff [1] that describes ncely the current produ…
People got caught up in the wave of recycling with the idea that somehow we could actually recycle all these materials with anything approaching reasonable effectiveness. Outside of aluminum, it's basically worthless - and in the cases of recycling paper, it has led to Superfund sites and terrible pollution.
Rainforests are regrowing [0] as at least America has forced companies to actually care about replanting and not just widespread logging with no consequences, but China doesn't give a shit. It's important to note in the blame game that America has done an incredible amount to reverse CO2 pollution, rampant logging, and reverse other environmentally damaging practices in surprisingly quick fashion over the last two decades, but it hardly matters, since industrial Eastern countries have essentially zero environmental regulations.
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rainforests/tropical-rain...
Is there some life cycle assessment (LCA) writeup somewhere on the whole plastics issue? From what it looks "recycling" was big lie due to no accountablity? So all consumer facing regulation in societies with a working waste disposal system is pretty much pointless, if the mess is on the systems top end side. In Germany, I now get everything in single use paper bags as the default, if I don't intervene, which I see a…
Beer bottles do remarkably well in Germany. Mostly because a lot of the beer drank is by major brands who Reuse the bottles, and there are good money incentives for people to bring them back (or give them to homeless so they do). Beer bottles don't get moved very far on trucks burning fossil fuels. That system is one of the best in Germany and the world.
Moral of the story 1: drink beer like Germans.
Moral 2: Even in societies that try really hard to recycle well... they still mostly fail.