Earlier quoted context omitted.
I divide the 10kg sack into a bunch of mason jars and avoid the pests.
Thats the correct way to go about it really. I will do it this way next time.
Buy a canning funnel!
Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
211–219 of 219 posts
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One cannot coercively distort the market with government power and expect that life will not, "uh, uh, find a way." Uh, yes you can. Just look at the different car fleets in Europe (where gasoline taxes are high) vs the US (where gasoline taxes are low.) The first thing I notice when driving from the airport either in Europe when I'm visiting or the US when I'm back is the different composition of cars on the road…
Why many people in the US buy trucks and SUVs over cars is due to a lot of factors. A major one that is not well known is that US auto manufactures have had a high incentive to promote them since a 1964 tax law[1] set a import 25% tax on light trucks. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
Just look at what happened to SUV sales when gas prices went up in the 2000s. https://www.cbtnews.com/the-correlation-between-fuel-prices-...
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#213Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can still get milk delivered in glass bottles here. But everything else I agree is pretty impossible to avoid plastic. Hell, I even saw some fruit, fruit , in plastic containers at the supermarket. I guess to stop it getting bashed. It was peaches.
This drives me bonkers. Tomatoes in little plastic crates, bananas is plastic bags, (bananas come with their own really great packaging! Why the hell do they put them in bags?!) cellophane-wrapped cucumbers. My previous employer got Fresh Direct shipments frequently, and the blackberries, raspberries, etc. came packaged in Russian doll nested plastic crates. Made my head explode.
> cellophane-wrapped cucumbers
That wouldn’t be actually all too bad: Cellulose is made out of wood, cotton, hemp or other natural materials and is fully biodegradable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now you've got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor. Plus the added cost/waste of the RFID tag.
> Now you’ve got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor That’s actually an interesting idea. If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste. It would also have a side effect of making high-waste packaged goods much more expensive than low-waste packaged food, promoting the purchase o…
Well if it was some sort of "bounty" that involves handling it the solution could be more logistically sane. No sense adding in needless shipping. Say that packaging comes with a N cost tax stamp deposit. If it doesn't wind up processed in an acceptable way then it is forfeit.
If anyone reprocesses it in an acceptable way (recycling to a valueable material, trash to steam) the manufacturer gets some portion of the value back and the recycler gets some just to ensure that they do the proper paperwork to ensure the system is working correctly.
A company can also be their own recycler to get a full refund.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#216Why can't we just package more food items in aluminum? Every time I read about the mess that is recycling, I am reassured that aluminum is the absolute best case material. Why are we only using it for soda cans?
Soda can designs have to be under pressure to be strong.
Thanks, that does answer my second question, and implicitly my first - other containers would need to be thicker and more expensive.
What I mean to ask is, why don't we incentivize manufacturers to use more expensive aluminum packaging? It seems reasonable that the cost of manufacturing aluminum may be less than the sum of all costs of using plastic. It also seems that no companies will choose to do this without incentives.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#217nearly everything we acquire ends up in a landfill eventually, plastic or not. Plastic unlike metals can never be restored as good as new. The recycled plastic will always be inferior. Metals do not have that problem.
Interesting, four statements in a row that are obviously false. Can you tell us anything that's true?
Someday you will have to sell an estate then you will understand.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm under the impression glass is worth recycling as well. Prove me wrong.
Earlier this year, Arlington County, Virginia removed glass from their curbside recycling program, "A significant drop in the market value of glass recyclables means it is no longer economically or environmentally sustainable for the County to collect them via single-stream recycling." They have two drop-of locations, where residents can drop off glass "for crushing and reuse as construction and landscaping material.…
The answer, unless you want to check the price of commodities each morning, is to recycle glass and bottles anyway and let the recycler decide if it’s economically efficient to send it to the landfill or to reprocessing.
Re: Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
#219I live in New Haven and saw on our handy recycling flyer [0] that pizza boxes are listed, with no caveat, as being a single stream curbside recyclable item. Which is great, because pizza is a whole thing in this town. We eat a lot of it. So I was surprised to learn, if you go poking around and find the RecycleCT website [1] and hover your mouse over the pizza box, up pops this note. "No food residue. No liner." Never…
This is a common misconception and one which has led to me having many 'conversations' with housemates and neighbours over the years. You might find that greasy, unlaminated cardboard is recyclable in the food/organic waste stream, as it is here in London.
The only food/organic waste stream I've got here is the sewer, curbside pickup has trash and recycling