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Boaters please dispose of your rubbish


the barnacle

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Blackrose, what I meant is that recycling is the easiest of the 3 Rs to sell to the people cos it makes us feel good. In reality, there should be a 4th 'R', Refuse.....but in the capitalist system the other 'R's dont help the economy grow. I have also felt that recycling was simply a way of letting us consume without feeling bad about it. Here in Spain, there are huge recycling bins everywhere, separate for glass, paper and plastics...but I have seen plastics and metals simply land-filled because it obviously was not worth selling it cos the price was too low.

In the 90's I worked in the recycling industry in Yorkshire and attempted to do waste exchange. i.e. a fish and chip shop would give their used potato sacks to another business so that they did not have to pay for their disposal, and the other business would not have to buy plastic sacks, just use the potato sacks.

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9 hours ago, Irob said:

Why are you so frigging picky about me ?   Havent you got anything better to discuss or complain about ?  Do I upset you personally in anyway ?  I have a tiny touch sensitive screen and failing eyesight. Would you like to ban me from participating because i,m not up to your exacting standards?   Jeez theres some snobs on here arnt there ?

Before you play the reverse snobbery card, perhaps you might consider whether some other piece of electronic equipment might be more suitable for you?

I was merely saying I find it problematic to read posts where I have to filter out all the noise before I can get to the meaning. It's nothing personal. I had no choice in the schools I attended, and I'n no snob just because I benefited from a decent (state) education. Nobody (except you) is talking about banning anyone. 

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17 hours ago, catweasel said:

Glass bottles/glasses are better from an environmental point of view, but too often used as weapons.

 

I am not sure that statement is right. The carbon footprint of glass bottles is worse than that of Plastic ie doing a lifetime analysis will show more CO2 made with glass bottles. I can dig out the figures if anyone is interested.

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There is a lot of mis-information about plastic recycling on this thread. There are two key issues with plastic recycling, the commercial one and the environmental one.

Commercially up until last year, it was commercially attractive to either land fill or send it to China where they separated it by hand and re-used it. Now that isnt the case. Last year a contractor could sell a mixed polyolefin bale for circa £100/te to China. Now they cant pay people to take it off their hands. The contractors have to therefore find another solution.

Environmentally, you have to look at the whole plastics market. A tonne of virgin polyolefin (polyethylene or polypropylene) costs circa £1000/te but the key point is that you push 2 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere for each million tonnes of plastic made. Recycling plastic is therefore not to just get rid of that plastic......but to use it instead to use it to stop the virgin plastic being made. Waste plastic can easily be burnt to get fuel value with energy recovery (easier than putting it into roads or panels for cheap housing) but all we do then is pump another 2te of CO2 into the atmosphere to make the virgin plastic to make the next car component.

If we can recycle a tonne of plastic – and high quality PP will sell for £500/te- we reduce CO2 emissions which is key for the future of our planet. The car manufacturers are crying out for high purity recycle PP for parcel trays, floor pans, etc, etc, but high purity is not available so they buy virgin PP in for £1000/te.

Why is high purity PP not available? The packaging manufactures insist on making items with multiple types of plastic so contamination of PP with PE is a significant problem. Step one is to not mix plastics. Separation of plastics is not easy but there are new techniques appearing that will make a huge difference.

There is a huge amount of crap information around about recycling. In Wales, the local governments are saying they are recycling 75% of waste. Absolute bollocks!! They are COLLECTING 75% of recycle and use this figure to convince people they are doing a good job. Of that 75% plastic collected, less than 10 % gets recycled. No one advertises this figure. Collection is not the same as recycling.

So where do we go now? Piles of plastic waste are piling up in contractors yards as China is no longer an outlet at £100/te. More and more will find its way into incineration and we will save £100/te in fuel value – ie for each tonne of plastic burnt, we do not need to burn a tonne of gas or coal etc.........but the real goal has to be to collect, separate and re-use ….to stop these obscene CO2 emissions.

You worry about how much your car puts out? The Grangemouth ethylene cracker in grangemouth emitted over 1 million tonnes of CO2 last year. The ethylene cracker at Wilton (Teeside) emmitted more than that. Lets start re-using and cut that amount.

We are all doomed.

  • Greenie 1
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13 minutes ago, Dr Bob said:

There is a lot of mis-information about plastic recycling on this thread. There are two key issues with plastic recycling, the commercial one and the environmental one.

Commercially up until last year, it was commercially attractive to either land fill or send it to China where they separated it by hand and re-used it. Now that isnt the case. Last year a contractor could sell a mixed polyolefin bale for circa £100/te to China. Now they cant pay people to take it off their hands. The contractors have to therefore find another solution.

 

Why is high purity PP not available? The packaging manufactures insist on making items with multiple types of plastic so contamination of PP with PE is a significant problem. Step one is to not mix plastics. Separation of plastics is not easy but there are new techniques appearing that will make a huge difference.

 

A chap in China said he is expecting to go out of business now he cant get our plastic.  Also on the TV a couple of weeks ago a company was making new bottles from recycled ones.

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Well said sir, I totally agree that the figures for recycling are a con. Collection and actual recycling are different and there appears to be no oversight about how much that is collected is actually recycled, so the consumer thinks that what they are doing by sorting their packaging out is good...part of the trick of promoting recycling. As for incineration...in my mind a disaster...it relies on a constant waste stream to make it viable and the planet has finite resources. Plus, look at a doc called Trashed by Jeremy Irons and you will see the affect of incineration in Iceland and in france....scary stuff.

which brings me aback to my original argument...prevention is better than cure...so stop the waste at source and ban all plastics. Lets face it if we need anymore plastics then we have decades worth floating in the sea, canals and rivers

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2 hours ago, Machpoint005 said:

Before you play the reverse snobbery card, perhaps you might consider whether some other piece of electronic equipment might be more suitable for you?

I was merely saying I find it problematic to read posts where I have to filter out all the noise before I can get to the meaning. It's nothing personal. I had no choice in the schools I attended, and I'n no snob just because I benefited from a decent (state) education. Nobody (except you) is talking about banning anyone. 

Please dont bother filtering my noise and we,ll both be happier.

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1 hour ago, Dr Bob said:

I am not sure that statement is right. The carbon footprint of glass bottles is worse than that of Plastic ie doing a lifetime analysis will show more CO2 made with glass bottles. I can dig out the figures if anyone is interested.

Your post and the following one are very interesting. We can only go by the info available at the time, and your explanation puts another spin on things. 

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1 hour ago, Dr Bob said:

I am not sure that statement is right. The carbon footprint of glass bottles is worse than that of Plastic ie doing a lifetime analysis will show more CO2 made with glass bottles. I can dig out the figures if anyone is interested.

Doesn't that rather depend on whether the bottles are recycled or refilled? As I understand it, 'new' bottles are almost entirely made from cullet.

1 hour ago, markeymark said:

stop the waste at source and ban all plastics

:lol:  Meanwhile, back on planet Earth...

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1 hour ago, markeymark said:

Well said sir, I totally agree that the figures for recycling are a con. Collection and actual recycling are different and there appears to be no oversight about how much that is collected is actually recycled, so the consumer thinks that what they are doing by sorting their packaging out is good...part of the trick of promoting recycling. As for incineration...in my mind a disaster...it relies on a constant waste stream to make it viable and the planet has finite resources. Plus, look at a doc called Trashed by Jeremy Irons and you will see the affect of incineration in Iceland and in france....scary stuff.

which brings me aback to my original argument...prevention is better than cure...so stop the waste at source and ban all plastics. Lets face it if we need anymore plastics then we have decades worth floating in the sea, canals and rivers

Banning plastic is a nice thought, but the problem is that we would have to manufacture things from yet another material. The human race tends to shift problems rather than solve them.

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4 hours ago, ditchcrawler said:

A chap in China said he is expecting to go out of business now he cant get our plastic.  Also on the TV a couple of weeks ago a company was making new bottles from recycled ones.

Yes, our waste plastic is worth a lot of money. China bought it for £100/te and separated it by hand (labour is cheap) and hence the separated plastic was worth £500/te ....half the price of virgin plastic which it can replace if you can get the right purity. In the UK, PET bottles (coke, pepsi, irn brew etc) are successfully recycled. Milk bottles are recycled... maybe up to 80% success. It's the rest of the plastic that has not really been addressed to date ....as it has been moved on to China. Now there is no route to getting rid of it, the waste contractors will look for ways to monetise it better. If anyone has a good supply of mixed PE/PP let me know.:).

Edited by Dr Bob
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2 hours ago, catweasel said:

Banning plastic is a nice thought, but the problem is that we would have to manufacture things from yet another material. The human race tends to shift problems rather than solve them.

The trouble is that plastic is such a good material. What would the car manufacturers do without Polypropylene? Most people will not know how much of the average car is now plastic. Door trims, parcel shelves, floor pans, roof linings etc, etc, etc. Most could be made from recycled PP but as purity recycle PP is not available they use virgin plastic. Most piping is now plastic ....miles and miles of irrigation pipes etc. Packaging is a huge issue and that's where we need one plastic per item so it can be collected and reprocessed easily. Plastic is important to our economy but we must use it sensibly and recycle (and that means re-use) it, not just try and get rid of it...which helps no one.

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