Early Risers.

[simontaylor484]

I believe that to recycle.certain plastics they have to be shredded to be able to be recycled due to.the length of the polymer chains. I know plastic bottles can be made into polyester threads that can used in various products such as mattress stuffing Silent night do this the polyester is made into 250kg bales

[jonny777]

2 hours ago, polybear said:

 

As kids it was a real find if we found a pop bottle that we could take back for the deposit.  

 

 

 

So were we; that is until we reached the miserable old git in the shop who demanded we show him our receipt to prove we actually bought the bottle there. Anything to stop him giving money away. 

[Ozexpatriate]

1 minute ago, simontaylor484 said:

I know plastic bottles can be made into polyester threads that can used in various products such as mattress stuffing

It's likely that any fabric advertised as 'stretch' fabric may include post-consumer, recycled plastic bottle-based thread.

 

The sad unintended consequence of plastic-based garments (like polyester-based microfleece which is very popular here) is the dramatic increase in micro-plastics in the water (via laundering such garments).

 

Here in Oregon we have detected such microplastics (tiny fragments of plastic filaments) in wild streams far upstream of any towns. How it gets there I can't explain unless it's now in the rain cycle.

 

I watched a programme last night where the total mass of plastics in the world's oceans is soon anticipated to exceed the total mass of fish.

[Ozexpatriate]

12 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

News from across the pond, yet another mass shooting, this time in Boulder Colorado. As usual nothing much will be done due to American gun culture. The operative word is culture, it will require a massive change in culture before anything is done.

Sadly true I think Phil.

 

In 2017 there were 39,773 gun fatalities in the US. In the same year there were 37,133 motor vehicle fatalities.

 

According to Pew, in the USA in 2017, per 100,000 people, there were 6.9 gun suicides, 4.6 gun murders, and 0.4 other gun deaths (including accidents and officer-involved shootings).

 

60% of gun deaths are suicides, representing 51% of all suicides.

37% of gun deaths are murders representing three quarters of all murders.

 

Perhaps 2.6% of the murders were related to "active shooter" incidents. (I based this on a high-end number of 373 in 2018 from the Gun Violence Archive quoted by Pew.) This would work out to about 0.1 active shooter deaths per 100,000 people.

 

While I am personally in the camp that one gun death is one too many, in a year where the US has seen a cumulative total of 164 deaths per 100,000 people due to CoViD-19 in the year or so since the pandemic began, there will be very little public will to address gun culture.

 

As a comparison, per Google, total murder rate in the UK per 100,000 in 2017 was 1.2. In Australia it was 0.83.

[Ozexpatriate]

3 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

In 2017 there were 39,773 gun fatalities in the US. In the same year there were 37,133 motor vehicle fatalities.

For more recent data, according to the US CDC, in 2019 there were 39,797 gun fatalities (12.1 per 100,000) and 37,595 motor vehicle fatalities (11.5 per 100,000).

[PhilJ W]

Evening all from Estuary-Land. I try to recycle as much as I can and despite my local council having a long list of things that can be recycled if I have any doubts it goes in to the landfill.  Despite that when the nearby secondary school opened after lockdown the amount of litter on the streets increased considerably.

[Erichill16]

Evening All,

Early start this morning but went down to Fox Valley shopping centre and a modeller friend who lives on the way there, was working in his garden so spent a good half hour chatting. Not see him since late summer and he seems to be coping well. His son, who’s on the autistic spectrum, is starting work for Swann Morton and is hoping his son will be able to get him some number 11  blades at the company shop!

Haven’t been around here much today but glad Tony_S  managed ok at the dentist and interesting discussion going on regarding recycling. 
Managed a bit of bookwork while waiting for nephews to come home from school and had a couple of conversations regarding the new build.

Early night as another early morning. Disappointed that I hadn’t heard about the vigil going on tonight.

Goodnight,

Robert

 

 

[Winslow Boy]

1 hour ago, Ian Abel said:

As @Ozexpatriate already noted, generalizations are, at best, wildly inaccurate/incorrect.

I can only address my location/state (Minneapolis and Minnesota), and won't go into historical details, but simply explain that, IN FACT, we recycle a significant amount of items and have done so for many years (15-20). We had curbside recycling pickup even when my brother in Oxford and then Lewes was "optionally" taking bottles and paper to bottle-banks etc., for recycling and therefore, deemed it too much trouble to haul the stuff all over town and just chucked it away!

 

Here, all locales have household recycling bin(s), some separate glass/paper/metal at pickup point, some separate at the recycle location, our metro area even has compostable recycling, both for households and commercial locations. Many of the food services/restaurants now use compostable containers for food to add to the recycling possibilities.

We recycle "everything possible" including plastic bags, a separate category, with a specific pickup service.

 

Our household, as a result, has a very small garbage/rubbish amount each week, as more than probably 70% of what we dispose of is recycled in one category or another.

I CANNOT attest to how well the recycle plants actually process what they receive, that's way beyond my pay-grade, but in terms of what we "seem" to be able to recycle, the local area I'm in does an extremely good job of providing for the ability to separate garbage from recyclables of all types.

Many thanks for fellow ER's for supplying a very comprehensive response and I will certain plead guilty to making a generalisation about recycling. I think the interesting point that comes out from all the comments is that efforts are being made to recycle but the point I was trying to get across was that the shear scale of the problem means that without a fundamental change in everyone's behaviour then its only going to get worse. There's no point in having exceptional high rates of recycling if we are still consuming too much. It boils down to the three R's. Reduce-Reuse-Recyle.

[Barry O]

Goodnight all!

Baz

[Ozexpatriate]

17 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

There's no point in having exceptional high rates of recycling if we are still consuming too much. It boils down to the three R's. Reduce-Reuse-Recyle.

I agree completely. 

 

Much that is put out for recycling collection is either not recyclable, or not economically recyclable. People think they are doing the 'right' thing, but often, they're not. As @Ian Abel noted, there is very little transparency about what happens after the recycling is collected.

 

Edited March 23, 2021 by Ozexpatriate

[tigerburnie]

G'night all

[laurenceb]

Night awl

[simontaylor484]

A lot of what is recyclable is not viable to be commercially recycled at the moment.

One of the most common recyclable that is not able to go in the recycle bin in our area is the tetra pak type carton (the first example that came to mind)

Edited March 23, 2021 by simontaylor484
Edited for clarity of answer

[Winslow Boy]

15 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

I agree completely. 

 

Much that is put out for recycling collection is either not recyclable, or not economically recyclable. People think they are doing the 'right' thing, but often, they're not. As @Ian Abel noted, there is very little transparency about what happens after the recycling is collected.

 

Exactly. Kerb side recycling Is to put it simply built on a massive con. It makes the individual believe that they can do some good when in actual fact it does nothing to address the basic problem that is to reduce the amount of materials we use. The other thing it does is to shift the cost from the manufacturer onto the consumer. An interesting point is that manufactures/retailers in the UK pay less than 30 % of the cost of 'clearing' up the waste they create.

[PhilJ W]

Goodnight all.

[The Stationmaster]

8 hours ago, simontaylor484 said:

Would it be worth trying a dpf cleaning service such as Terraclean ?

That idea (of trying a clean) had struck me thanks - although not in the form of a company that can do it so that is a big help thanks.  And they have a company locally who do it so that'll be worth a try.

Edited March 23, 2021 by The Stationmaster

[BSW01]

Good evening everyone 

 

Well I never got to do any gardening this afternoon, it started to get very windy, so I gave it a miss. But the good news is that the final section of wall got its first  oat of tanking slurry, it’ll get its final coat tomorrow. There was always a damp patch in front of the door, between the concrete floor and the stone door step. So I put some left over slurry down a few weeks ago, just to see if it would cure it. Cure it did, ever since then there has been no more damp there. Today again, there was once more a small amount left over, so that was put on the floor on top of the first coat in front, giving that area a second coat. I bought 2 - 25kg buckets of tanking solution when I did the office in 2019 and I’ve almost finished come to the end of it, it’s been well worth the £80 odd I spent on it.

 

I recycle as much as I can, even to the extent that I’ll remove the paper labels from tin cans and plastic bottles etc. I think if the cost of recycling was placed in the hands of the manufacturers, there wouldn’t be as much waste as there currently is. But the political clout these companies currently have, that isn’t going to happen. 

[BSW01]

Goodnight all 

[Ozexpatriate]

23 minutes ago, Winslow Boy said:

An interesting point is that manufactures/retailers in the UK pay less than 30 % of the cost of 'clearing' up the waste they create.

The intent of EPR (extended producer responsibility) legislation is to address this, particularly to shift the burden to the package manufacturer.

 

Much of the historical advertising to encourage recycling was actually funded by package manufacturers because it moved responsibility of addressing the end-of-life of their products to consumers and local authorities.

[J. S. Bach]

1 hour ago, simontaylor484 said:

A lot of what is recyclable is not viable to be commercially recycled at the moment.

One of the most common recyclable that is not able to go in the recycle bin in our area is the tetra pak type carton (the first example that came to mind)

Glass is not recycled here as the recycler claims that they were not making enough money on it.

[The Stationmaster]

Our District Council only accept three types of plastic for recycling (codes 1, 2, and 5) and all other plastic has to go in the rubbish bin but there is supposedly a tetrapack collection point via Tesco although I'm not sure if it is always available.  our recycling bin is mixed and the contractor separates it at their premises which was specifically designed to deal with mixed recycled materials.   I usually take the labels off tins and off plastic bottles (if I can shift them - some are not easy) and I always wash and squash the tins to save room in the bin and i cut up cardboard boxes to make sure they don't steal bin space.  All waste food - not that there is much beyond peeling etc goes in the special bin every week (except when teh decent weather arrives when it goes to our own composter that lives at the bottom of the garden) and that goes into a bio-digester which i thnk is also operated by a contractor for the council and it sells electricity into the grid while the garden waste is composted and resold.

 

The best story I've ever heard about US waste disposal was from a couple of chaps from BNFL who came to see me at work w one day to inquire about hiring locos - I ended up selling them some instead.  One of them had been involved in nuclear waste clean up contracting and he'd visited a site in the US where they had waste that needed to be dealt with.  As the initial meeting progressed it became increasing clear that the 'waste' involved large amounts of contaminated equipment including such things as bulldozers and not just small items.  They asked where it was stored and the chap they were visiting took then to the office window and pointed through it at the desert.  The BNFL chaps couldn't see any sort of storage building so asked where the stuff was only to be told 'Out there, dumped in the desert, for miles out into the desert.'

 

They declined going for that contract and were in some respects hard put to work out which was the worst - dumped Russian nuclear submarines (which were at least sealed - after a fashion) or what they had seen on the US.   They decided both were too dangerous to bid for.

[andyram]

Evening one and all.  Very late on parade today. The day began with an escape from the house after a 7am DPD alert announcing a shop delivery between 8.10 and 9.10. An early morning run up to the shop got me there just five minutes before the delivery arrived. No need to wait around so no issues with parking today. 
 

 On the subject of parking, the complaint email has been dispatched to the council this evening. I expect no positive response. 
 
 The rest of the day was again spent in a brain fog. It appears my brain never really caught up with the rushed start to the day. Marking was completed before Amber was collected from school. A small amount of modelling was then achieved. 
 

 News was mainly full of the lockdown anniversary. Thoughts go out to all who lost loved ones to this dreadful pandemic. Thoughts likewise with those impacted by the terrible events in the USA. 

 

 Night all. 
 

Andy

[Ozexpatriate]

7 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

One of them had been involved in nuclear waste clean up contracting and he'd visited a site in the US where they had waste that needed to be dealt with.

I'm sure there's lots of those stories. Not far from here* is the Hanford reserve - the site of the first plutonium reactors used to develop the "Fat Man" weapon used in Nagasaki. It's an environmental nightmare, situated on the banks of the largest river in the Pacific Northwest.

 

* About 180 miles in a straight line.

 

Then of course there are locations where atmospheric testing took place. Similarly there is Maralinga in Australia where the UK conducted atmospheric tests in the 1950s. The McClelland Royal Commission in 1985 determined that significant radiation hazards still existed there at that time.

[The Stationmaster]

G'night all

[J. S. Bach]

Night Owl from the Piedmont.