Plastic Rubbish
Discussion
The Mad Monk said:
g7orge said:
PurpleMoonlight said:
Am I missing something?
Surely the problem is people indiscriminately discarding it, not the plastic itself.
+1Surely the problem is people indiscriminately discarding it, not the plastic itself.
People staring at it and saying "Ooh! Look at that plastic rubbish there that someone has dropped!"
Instead of picking it up and putting it in a bin.
Randy Winkman said:
Like a never-ending unpaid job creation scheme. Half the public drop waste and the other half follow them around picking it up.
Snipers. When I am king there will be snipers - you drop litter, a little red laser dot appears somewhere vital on your anatomy, and then bang! The world would become a better place, quite quickly, I'm sure.AMG Merc said:
Who thinks taking the US approach of getting low level convicts out to clean up the roads and rivers would be a good idea? Probably no do-able due to human rights issues!
I have seen gangs on the verges with "communuty payback" on their hi viz in Somerset so it does already happen. Why not get some of the able bodied on benefits to do their bit? The Mad Monk said:
g7orge said:
PurpleMoonlight said:
Am I missing something?
Surely the problem is people indiscriminately discarding it, not the plastic itself.
+1Surely the problem is people indiscriminately discarding it, not the plastic itself.
People staring at it and saying "Ooh! Look at that plastic rubbish there that someone has dropped!"
Instead of picking it up and putting it in a bin.
I agree that there is an alarming amount of plastic waste littering the planet but the vast majority of plastics are inert and pose more of a threat from just being unsightly rather than killing wildlife although it would be good to avoid .the argument about nano particles,yes they exist but they would exist in another form namely the crude oil and other base products that plastics originate from.
no,for me I am more concerned about the serious decline in the insect population,i work in the countryside and just don't see as many as I used to namely bees and wasps etc,have noticed it over the last 10-15 years,sure pesticides may have a part but I think (tinfoil hat on) the country wide mobile phone network masts are playing a large part in killing them off.
if we lose the insects then we really are in trouble.
no,for me I am more concerned about the serious decline in the insect population,i work in the countryside and just don't see as many as I used to namely bees and wasps etc,have noticed it over the last 10-15 years,sure pesticides may have a part but I think (tinfoil hat on) the country wide mobile phone network masts are playing a large part in killing them off.
if we lose the insects then we really are in trouble.
menousername said:
DapperDanMan said:
Reusable shopping bags have been available for years but the year before the bag charge came in we used 7 BILLION of them. That dropped to 500 MILLION after the introduction.
Don't get me started on Christmas Crackers.
But what have we replaced them with? 7 billion strong yet wafer thin plastic bags replaced with 500 million heavy duty thick “bags for life”. Did plastic usage drop by weight?Don't get me started on Christmas Crackers.
Or should we switch to Paper bags? So we will have global deforestation instead?
The point is - they are reusable and we do reuse them. They previously were used until too shabby for food shopping, at which point they were then reused as bin bags. In my household they would be used as a bin bag for plastic recycling and themselves would go out for the plastic recycling collection. I assume they can be recycled because our intruction is to separate plastic and paper into different coloured bags for recycling. Nobody had informed us olastic bags should not be included.
Now the charge has come in, we need more of the plastic free bin bags the council chucks at your door, and we also have to supplement that bu buying bin bags, which is something we never did before.
I think its important to tackle waste and pollution but it needs to be done at source. My question is, if 100% of my recycling waste goes in the recycling collection, what percentage of it gets recycled, and if any finds its way into a river how and where is that happening?
Edited by menousername on Thursday 11th January 08:54
I don't bother taking bags with me and normally forget to ask for a carrier bag before I've paid, so I generally just stuff what ever I've bought into my pockets. Case in point I've just come back from Superdrug with a a toothbrush, tablets, and razor blades. If they had given me a bag for free i would have taken it, but as I would have to fish around in my pockets for change I didn't bother.
We're never at a loss for plastic bags at home, so we're not buying other bags to compensate. It honestly wouldn't bother me if they just banned the things all together. All it takes is a slight behavior change (1st world problems and all that!)
g7orge said:
PurpleMoonlight said:
Am I missing something?
Surely the problem is people indiscriminately discarding it, not the plastic itself.
+1Surely the problem is people indiscriminately discarding it, not the plastic itself.
We already have made enough PET that if we recycled it all we would NEVER need to make fresh feedstock.
Our biggest issue is demand for plastic, not the discard. Why plastic straws? Why Micro beading plastics in cosmetics, why Zip ties in product packaging. Why put plastic containers in plastic bags ?
If you are worried about sea levels rising, why have an estimated 5 trillion tonnes of plastic in the oceans.
Plastic is getting into the food chain, no good can come of it.
The Mad Monk said:
The point that I was endeavouring to make in my gentle fashion was:-
Instead of just moaning about it, how long would it take for each town in the UK that has a beach to have ten volunteers pick up the rubbish from their beach? Then each week a couple of worthy individuals could walk the length of the beach and pick up any fresh plastic that has arrived - it wouldn't take long because there wouldn't be very much fresh stuff. Because the rubbish is plastic it doesn't degrade or decompose, so we are looking at the same rubbish all the time!
Don't keep moaning about it and getting the BBC down to film it, put that effort into picking it up!
There would always be lots of fresh stuff. Every tide would bring more. Instead of just moaning about it, how long would it take for each town in the UK that has a beach to have ten volunteers pick up the rubbish from their beach? Then each week a couple of worthy individuals could walk the length of the beach and pick up any fresh plastic that has arrived - it wouldn't take long because there wouldn't be very much fresh stuff. Because the rubbish is plastic it doesn't degrade or decompose, so we are looking at the same rubbish all the time!
Don't keep moaning about it and getting the BBC down to film it, put that effort into picking it up!
B17NNS said:
Christ almighty - if that wasn't satire, it was awful! I had a lot of respect for P&T, but that was literally garbage, from top to bottom. USA, anti government, short-termist right wing, populist tabloid ranting drivel....Incredible!!. Overall, it's America. Recyclers are just hand wringing libtard anti capitalists, undermining the all american dream. Keep the gubmint out of our godd*m lives & make profit. Er, why? Because that worked so well in the healthcare market? What about the Nordic model of a society that promotes welfare, care, the environment & longer term circular, consequential thinking? Ah, that'll be proto stalinism & we don't want that around here thanks very much.
They say things like:
1) "$8bn a year wasted" Is THAT all? So what? Says who anyway? $8bn wouldn't keep Trump in hair spray for a single Presidential term & what defines "wasted"? The definitions & choices are a 100% political decision. Wasted versus what? Policing at abortion clinics? Books for primary schools? Drug rehab? Roads? Missiles?
2) "it comes out of your local budget". Again so what? Whats the alternative? You have to pay somewhere, whether it's the producer, the user, consumer or the re-processor. Surely you should pay more if you create more?
3) "it's wasting resources" Again, how? So what? Compared to what? What's the alternative? Do we have a spare planet lying around somewhere? Matter is neither created nor destroyed, merely changed form one state to another, so what else do we do - just keep buying stuff without a thought to the consequences?
4) Landfill - yep go ahead, dig holes everywhere. It's not like there's extreme weather or earthquakes are there? And of course whatever precautions you've taken to protect the water table, or the local environment will be absolutely, utterly infallible, and every possible scenario will be budget & planned for. Just like Banking & Economics then. And when you do eventually run out of unoccupied territories, then what? That's ok because it's someone else's problem & I don't need their votes ta.
5) "More people recycle than vote" Says who? Again, so they bl**dy well should do.
6) Yep, throw in a bit of casual racism by mocking some Japanese efficiency stereotype. Problem is, Japanese recycled material is held to be the best/finest/.cleanest quality available in the world. Might be helpful to ask why, eh boys? (I genuinely don't know WHY Japanese material is so good, mind)
7) "It's cheaper to make everything new from scratch". Well, yes it is, until you run out of, y'know, everything & then it suddenly isn't. Even a wealthy american short-termist comic magician could grasp that. It's probably also cheaper to ban, unions, workers rights, healthcare, safety boots, minimum wages & re-introduce slavery & child labour, so why stop at recycling?
8) what the stuttering f*ck is wrong about growing more trees? They absorb carbon dioxide FFS! You can use them to make things & they sometimes grow things to feed people. Creatures live in them. Jesus wept...
9) Recycling jobs are fake jobs? Ok we get it, you want 0 taxation, the government to shut down & the entire concept of the public sector to be expunged from history. In civilised countries however, things are a little different Over here, the hand sorting/fork lift/stacking jobs are 99.9% eastern european, unskilled, minimum wage, zero hours workers. The good news is that this means they'll probably cost a lot more when our friends go home in a couple of years & we have to find another demographic to help out. So that's all good then...
Aaannnd breathe......Ok TL:DR. I didn't agree with any of it. At all
Ok I'm slagging what I thought was a one sided slagging, so some slightly more positive observations & thoughts
Yes - when you look at carbon miles, or any other "whole life" measure, shipping rubbish to China to make bottles or boxes cannot possibly work, can it? Well, right now, the figures just aren't known, anywhere near definitively. No one has really published anything widely read & accepted as definitive. I hear that research will emerge "in the next few years" & it will show that it doesn't add up, but what's the alternative?
1) continue to build & consume more, without a thought to waste, disposal & re-use?
2) Burn it! Waste to energy? A good one actually- we are doing more of this, but right now, our power generation infrastructure isn't geared up for it. You can't just shove plastic & paper into a coal, or gas station & crack on. (We currently export several million mt of "SRF (solid refuse fuel) & RDF (refuse derived fuel)" to Europe, as they are a few years ahead, but we are building more refuse fuelled power plants. It takes a while though
3) Packaging design. This HAS to be central, but can you leave it up to the manufacturers & retailers? I'm not sure - they have tried & failed, but I did attend a conference last year where the head of M&S' sustainability program made the point that the one retailer who had scuppered recent attempts to address single sue carbon black food packaging, was back on board & part of the working group to look at the issue.
4) Government direction. I'm naturally reluctant to encourage state ownership & intervention, but really do believe this is an industry that needs it. You cannot have a situation where my waste is collected & treated completely differently to someone less than 5 miles away. How does that make things better?
5) A disruptive technology like an Booking.com, or Uber? It could happen. See https://www.myheru.com/. I know the inventor & it could be a game changer. Use your own waste to heat your home & water?
6) Incentives. The entire basis of human behaviour, but only if you give the right ones for the right things. Somewhere along the line, people need to be rewarded for "doing the right thing". But only the americans get to define what the right thing is obvs...(kidding)
Calm, calm, calm. It's ok, I['m fine now...
Edited by CardinalFang on Thursday 11th January 16:01
Edited by CardinalFang on Friday 12th January 09:34
Edited by CardinalFang on Friday 12th January 09:35
richie99 said:
I used to make use of used carrier bags to put rubbish in. Now I don't have any I buy bin bags (plastic) to put the rubbish in instead. Net change....nothing.
As I asked further up, once you've used the bog roll and kitchen roll, and recycled the tins, bottles and cereal packets, do you honestly need all of the bags that the shopping came in to chuck the rubbish away? I'm sat here with a 'plastic' cup made from starch. Why don't we see more of that? Sure M&S started to make the windows of their sandwich packaging from cellulose. Not sure if this is still the case. Alternatives are available but just don't seem to have hit the mainstream.
Cup from here http://www.biopac.co.uk/
Cup from here http://www.biopac.co.uk/
CardinalFang said:
Christ almighty - if that wasn't satire, it was awful! I had a lot of respect for P&T, but that was literally garbage, from top to bottom. USA, anti government, short-termist right wing, populist tabloid ranting drivel....Incredible!!.
It's certainly a weird stance isn't it.baptistsan said:
I'm sat here with a 'plastic' cup made from starch. Why don't we see more of that? Sure M&S started to make the windows of their sandwich packaging from cellulose. Not sure if this is still the case. Alternatives are available but just don't seem to have hit the mainstream.
Cup from here http://www.biopac.co.uk/
Your right & good for you for taking the step. Just out of interest - where did you get that cup?Cup from here http://www.biopac.co.uk/
It's incentives though. Where are they? Who benefits? Who loses out? How? Look at Pringles tubes - just stupid. Even a simple water or milk bottle, could be 100% re-used, except for the fact that the body & the cap are different polymers. Somebody, somewhere has to separate the two & somebody somewhere has to pay for that.
CardinalFang said:
B17NNS said:
Everything CardinalFang said is spot on!Edited by CardinalFang on Thursday 11th January 16:01
The video is well known amongst the waste community and it was pointed out to me by someone from a major waste management company in the US that some of the more vocal recycling naysayers that feature in it are those who's employment is dependant upon disposal.
Part of the problem is also that plastic is not just protective packaging but is used to seal in the CO2 environment that meat and fruit are packaged in to prevent them going brown and looking less attractive to consumers. Very difficult o achieve the necessary gastightness with cardboard.
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