We need legislation and consumer pressure to force companies not to use plastic, and to create closed systems a la the old milkman bottle system.
Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
131–140 of 154 posts
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current German system is nothing compared to the former East German bottle reuse system. Disclaimer: I grew up in East Germany, and during a summer break when I still was at school I worked in a small local brewery in the bottling facility at various machines for a few weeks, seeing the system in action. In East Germany we only had very few bottle designs that were used throughout the entire country and all firms…
There are no restrictions to returning in larger supermarkets, or the so called "Vollsortimenter" like Edeka, Rewe. Even Aldi(Nord) and Netto take everything. In fact, the only one being picky is Penny and Lidl. Maybe it's a regional thing? Or a function of size like upwards of XXX sqaure meters shopping space you are forced to take in everything?
For one-way returns (= stuff that's shredded locally and recycled as materials) stores over 200 m² have to take everything, but for reused bottles there is no such law.
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can find them at Rewe or Edeka for example. It is a Mehrwegflasche which means they are cleaned and reused instead of being recycled. What is a scuff ring by the way? Is it this ring that tears off from plastic caps at e.g. Coca Cola bottles when opening them?
Here is a photo that shows what I mean: https://images.app.goo.gl/hnbaFiZtWAN7Aj5x5 It looks like the bottles rub against each other at that point, and it indicates the bottle is old/has been used a bunch of times. Is there a German word for it?
Thanks! They are called "Umlaufspuren" (literally ~traces of circulation) according to the german Wikipedia-page for "Mehrwegflaschen."
I will look out for them.
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Milk in returnable bottles exists here. The bottles usually look like this: https://contentpool.wirtschaftsverlag.at/files/uploads/image... From the look it is a half-liter bottle (we usually buy cream like this), there are 1 liter bottles for milk that look almost the same.
In the UK we get milk in those bottles delivered by the milkman. We leave the empty ones out as well to be collected.
Careful about the milkman: https://youtu.be/lZTrb49wi3o?t=30 (scene from James Bond, The Living Daylights)
That movie was the first time I learned about "milkman" being a job. We had glass bottles that we filled ourselves at a self-service station that a farm just outside the city set up.
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no restrictions to returning in larger supermarkets, or the so called "Vollsortimenter" like Edeka, Rewe. Even Aldi(Nord) and Netto take everything. In fact, the only one being picky is Penny and Lidl. Maybe it's a regional thing? Or a function of size like upwards of XXX sqaure meters shopping space you are forced to take in everything?
For one-way returns (= stuff that's shredded locally and recycled as materials) stores over 200 m² have to take everything, but for reused bottles there is no such law.
That may be the case, but in practice i can go into a real,- and drop anything there.
edit: same for the Rewe's i know. edit: err, and Kaufland.
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
You use that machine on better ore.
Or recyclables.
There are places that run their entire waste stream through a recovery plant:
http://waste-technology.co.uk/what-is-a-dirty-mrf-and-why-th...
A substantial portion of the waste stream is just organic material (which is worth very little).
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#137Automated sorting works fine. The newer recycling plants need no human pickers. It's not the robotics startups that are the ones to watch. It's companies like Bulk Handling Systems, from Oregon, which integrates different kinds of machines into a recycling line where mixed junk comes in one end and bales of useful stuff come out the other. They view the robotic grabbers as "automated quality control units". The mecha…
I was part of a software project for BHS several years ago. We were taking the cad models for a entire plant and rendering them in the web with info/marketing media for each module.
The speed that they could sort material at different stages was incredible. I don't remember seeing a single "robotic arm" picking anything. It was all air and mechanical sorting. Very cool stuff.
They should have videos of most their modules on their site for the curious.
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#138Automated sorting works fine. The newer recycling plants need no human pickers. It's not the robotics startups that are the ones to watch. It's companies like Bulk Handling Systems, from Oregon, which integrates different kinds of machines into a recycling line where mixed junk comes in one end and bales of useful stuff come out the other. They view the robotic grabbers as "automated quality control units". The mecha…
Even some metals have to be sorted. For example, you don't want to mix some different aluminum alloys, since the presence of some alloying elements precludes some uses of the recycled metal.
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#139There’s an easy solution: tax landfill by 1,000+%. If consumers had to pay a significant amount for each load of trash removed from their home, you’d see the market for ultra low waste products skyrocket. And then the economic value of recycling—from careful sorting by homeowners to the processing of material by recyclers—would immediately make sense.
This fails because of illegal dumping. Make trash sufficiently expensive and people will just dump it by the side of the road somewhere.
Re: Recycling Rethink: What to Do with Trash Now China Won’t Take It
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first link is a "meta-analysis" where they only found three studies on point with wildly different methods that disagreed in their conclusions. One of the studies said the costs of sorting made the benefits of plastic recycling negligible to iffy, confirming parent's claim that aluminum drives recycling value and plastics are a wash. They shouldn't be allowed to call it a meta-analysis if they just read three stu…
I think you've misread that, they only found three recent economic analysis of recycling that dealt purely with plastic. (Quite possibly because it makes no sense to set up a recycling system for just one output, since the additional cost once you've started is minimal) They also found 20 papers that dealt with the climate change emissions and total energy use and ranked them on those factors as well. The comment I r…
> Is it not possible that the environmental benefits of recycling plastics had actually been considered by governments that brought in legislation?
It is not. the paper you cited (thank you) was written in 2017. But more to the point, governments don’t work that way.
If in fact the reason for recycling is environmental benefit, we (USA anyway) would not be in the situation where we are putting plastics back in landfills, and we would not have been in the prior situation where we dump plastic and ewaste to other countries with no oversight whatsoever on what happens to it once it leaves our shores. the environmental impact is the same, here or there.