Are you still recycling?

[catherine]

You can buy a Soda Stream machine and make your own soda.

Yes, that's true, Jeppy. After reading that chapter, I asked my family to get me a Soda Stream for my birthday.

[GeorgeParker]

My gut tells me glass has to have less impact than plastic and it's non toxic to dispose of etc., and likely than aluminum as well. So it is heavier to transport, but really it's non-toxic nature has to be worth a lot.

But glass is made from sand, and the world is running out of sand. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...ng-out-of-sand

Most of the sand on earth (desert sand) isn't usable for the things we make from sand, and sand mining is destroying river deltas, eroding river beds and banks, destroying ocean-floor habitats by dredging them to get sand....

All of which just reinforces my previous point: Probably no one knows all the consequences and interconnections, and certainly lay people like us don't know even a fraction of it.

[catherine]

Here's what they say about glass:

• When it's recycled, it starts out by being trucked in, where, from a conveyor belt, metal lids are removed
• It passes through a sensor that sorts it by color
• Glass is crushed into little fragments and heated to 2700 degrees F.
• It's cured and cut into bottle-sized portions and then a machine injects molten glass into molds for bottles etc.
• Producing one ton of glass produces about 2 tons of carbon dioxide. Recycled glass uses 40% less energy in the melting stage.
• So, when you factor in transportation and processing, making one ton of recycled glass still produces over one ton of carbon dioxide. One study shoed that products with 50% recycled glass had only a 28% lower greenhouse gas impact.

Of course these figures come from just one book, but the sources are footnoted. So recycling glass does seem to be less harmful than plastics, but recycling is an energy-intensive endeavor in and of itself.

[BikingLady]

All the amazon cardboard, for sure. I have a tub out full each week for recycle. I became bitter many times over with the process. I can't think of a recycling center near us anymore, reasons always the same, mess and cost. And once again I saw my recycling tossed in the back of the trash truck. Brown bag yard waste I watched the same thing last week.

[jp1]

Our recycling bin definitely gets used. SO loves buying stuff online so there’s lots of cardboard in it. The compost bin also gets used as well. It’s acceptable to put a lot of paper products in it that are not recyclable like pizza boxes and shredder confetti. We typically have only one half-full 13 gallon landfill garbage bag each week.

[iris lilies]

Currently our city recycling dumpsters are being dumped into the landfill trucks and all of them are being hauled away to the same place, landfill.


This is because our city’s trash department is sorely lacking in employees and they just don’t have enough employees to run the separate truck routes, one for recycling and one for landfill.


I’m not motivated enough to save all my recyclables and haul them myself. That is why I paid a private company years ago to come and haul our recycles away. And then the city went into that business and killed the little guys doing recycling pick up.

lose/lose.

Thank you gubmnt efficiency, NOT. And it pains me to write this because I really do like the trash services of my city, it’s one of the few things that I will miss when I moved to Hermann.

[Yppej]

it’s one of the few things that will mess when I moved to Hermann.

Too bad Hermann is messy.

[iris lilies]

Too bad Hermann is messy.

Haha. I will correct it!

[gimmethesimplelife]

This just in from the far NW suburbs - Surprise, Arizona no longer recycles glass and stopped a few plastics. They say there's no market. Rob

[Klunick]

We used to recycle when we were taking our trash to the dump ourselves. Since getting a trash service several years ago, we no longer do because the trash service does not offer that option. I recently switched our cats to Weruva cat food. They offer a recycling program for their food pouches. They send you an envelope to stick all your cleaned out pouches in and can send them back to be recycled. It's small but at least it's something.