The Public has been conned again!

[old man emu]

Are you doing your bit to recycle? Not just keeping the drink containers so that you can get you 10 cent deposit back, but putting "recyclables" in one bin and waste in another? Do you think that you are helping the environment by doing so? Well, you've been conned big time by Big Business. Watch this video to find out what the con was.

 

Although the title refers to our close ally, China, this is one time where I can see no wrong in what they did. Once you see the whole video, I think you will agree that it was not the Chinese who conned us, but US Big Business.

 

[Jerry_Atrick]

When I moved to the Tauntone Deane area from Richmond (London), I was shocked at how little they took as recycling. At Richmond, I could put any plastic into the recycling and it was collected - no problems. Basically, if the plastic packaging doesn;t have the recycling logo on it, the council won't take it. We have to take the caps off the plastic drinks bottles, etc. I was aghast, as in the gentrified suburbof Richmond, you could put cling film (glad wrap) in the recycling and they would happily take it..

 

When I discussed this with the the Taunton Deane council, their approach was refreshing, if not reflecting the sadness of the situation; their contractors could process it for a profit and the national government weren't interested in subsidising the recycling effort, so the Taunton Deane council (along with many others) weren'#t interested in hiding the fact, and required everyone to place their unrecyclable plastics in the normal bin.  However, other councils, where botox injected, poodle walkers's sensitivities may be offended, the councils have been less than transparent.

 

At around 2017/2018, there was a big controversy in the press, where this all came to light. It went on for a bit, subsided, and nothing changed. I believe something similar happened in the northern Suburbs of Melbourne, where a recycfling centre went up in smoke and the company went bust; and where the storage was illegal and it was found nothing was being recycled.

 

We are lucky in that we earn enough to allow us a choice.. but many people (especially around here) don't have that luxury, and have to make every penny count. If they have to throw away plastics, well so be it. Just like we don't by Chinese unless we have to or the difference in price but not quality is that compelling, we have reduced our plastic reliance. Even today, we have moved to a Soda Stream (which has other issues) to reduce reliance on plastics for sparking drinks (we rarely do common soft drinks). We buy more and more from gocers and farm shops, where almost everything is loose and you bag them in paper. The quality is also miles ahead of the supermarkets. I shop at my local Southern Cooperative, which, although could do better, has a lot of fresh stuff loose with bio-degradable vege bags, and has shopping bags (5p/pop, which is cheaper than most) that also are biodegradable.. we use those for our kichen waste (councils here also collect kitchen waste separately and sell you back the compost).

 

12 hours ago, old man emu said:

I think you will agree that it was not the Chinese who conned us, but US Big Business.

Yes, I do agree.. As well as the Aussies... My ex-finacee's father owned a packaging business (not too big, but enough to leave him quite well off in retirement).. and the stuff he told me they used to get up to as an industry was truly cringeworthy. BTW, I don't blame China at all... What the vid doesn;t mention is that India is also a big processor of waste - but even they sent back mountains of it from the UK as it was poorly sorted from all sorts of hazardous waste.

 

 

[Yenn]

Our shire has a recycling program. Yellow bins for recyclable and red or green for waste. The tip is close to where I live and rubbish from the city comes out here. In the city you can take recyclable stuff to their transfer station, but I wonder what happens to it, because I cannot take it to the local tip, I can take some recyclable stuff, but have to sort it myself at the tip.

I just wonder what happens to the recyclable stuff at the city.

[willedoo]

My recycle centre is an open top 44 gallon drum and a box of matches. I don't have wheelie bins and you need to take out a mortgage to pay tip fees around here.

[onetrack]

Living in an inner-city suburb in Perth, the local council is down on waste, and keeps trying to get people to minimise it. But manufacturers and retailers do nothing to help in that respect.

Everything comes sealed in a pile of plastic, none more so than food items. There must be a lot more done to ensure wrapping is rapidly biodegradable.  

We have a secondary bin for recyclables, but they're as fussy as, when it comes to what's acceptable.

Nothing under fist size, no plastic wrap, no bottle tops, some containers are not accepted, and everything has to be washed before it goes in the bin.

We have reduced our food waste by employing a couple of worm farms. SWMBO is right into the worms, she loves feeding and playing with them - the upside being their castings and juice makes an amazing difference to plant growth, when applied to the fruit trees and garden ornamentals. 

[red750]

In Victoria, we have 3 wheelie bins, red lid for rubbish - to landfill via a transfer station, yellow lid for recycled stuff, taken by a contractor, to who knows where, and a green lid for garden waste. You pay an extra $65 p.a. on your rates to the council for the garden bin. There was talk of splitting the recycled waste (yellow lid) into glass and plastic, adding a purple lid bin. Some councils may have introduced it, Whitehorse has not done so yet. The Whitehorse transfer station is only a couple of km from home, behind a Bunnings Warehouse. You go in over a weighbridge and pay by the tonne.

 

There were/are a couple of schemes for recycling some forms of plastic. Certain bottle caps were collected and made into plastic filament for 3D printers which made prosthetic hands for amputees. They received so many they couldn't handle them all, and asked people to hold off sending any more. The little bread tags are being collected by another organisation and I'm not sure how they end up, but the profit buys wheelchairs for disabled people in Africa.

[Old Koreelah]

3 hours ago, red750 said:

...The Whitehorse transfer station is only a couple of km from home...

I was impressed with this very neat and well-organized Transfer Station, at Whitehorse, Yukon:

 

[Marty_d]

You should see how they do it in Germany.  Not sure if it's the same all over the country, but in the farm we stayed at in Bavaria there were about 7 bins - steel, aluminium, glass, hard plastic, soft plastic, paper, cardboard.   Might have been even more.

[spacesailor]

That sounds like the way to go,!

All this Recycling is going Downhill as the world goes paperless  and we stop using as many " one use " products.

It will eventually give way to more Cottage industries.

I can,t believe Ithrew out a couple of garden tools just because I,ve got to Lazy to repait them !.

Dam this methonol fuel, three carbies replaced & I couldn't be bothered to do number four.

spacesailor

 

 

[Yenn]

What I find ridiculous is the amount of plastic wrapping with everything. I have bought a drill that came in a plastic case like a tool box, very cleverly designed so that when the handle and other pieces were attached to the drill that the case was of no use. Rubbish rather than what it appeared to be as a carrying case.

Nowadays if I buy tools or electrical goods I unpack them in the store and leave all the packaging for the store to get rid of. if enough of us did that the stores might start to get some sense in packaging.

[willedoo]

I used to buy a certain type of Canon printer. Nowdays I think they only come with half cartridges, but back then, that model came new with full size ink cartridges. A new printer was cheaper than buying a replacement set of cartridges, so I like a lot of people would buy a printer, scrap it when it ran out of ink and replace it with another printer. Around that time it was in news articles about the environmental problem with people doing just that. The amount of tonnage of printers per day in New York being barged over to the dump was mind boggling.

 

Any old printers, I strip them for the servo motors. Big pipe dream of using them in a home built motion simpit one day.

Edited December 25, 2020 by willedoo

[old man emu]

10 hours ago, willedoo said:

Big pipe dream of using them in a home built motion simpit one day.

It's easy to build the hardware for a CNC machine (mill or 3d printer). The fun is making the controller board. I did make a CNC machine controller board back in the day, but my 3D printer came with an Arduino circuit board. 

 

The stepper motors in printers are usually NEMA 17's, which are small. I used NEMA 23's, the next size up.

[willedoo]

I haven't taken the plunge to play with Arduinos as yet. An acquaintance in the U.K. has an ongoing project to use real preserved gauges in the flight sim. A lot of people gut the insides of real gauges and use different gadgets inside them to simulate a real gauge. In this case, he's using the intact original gauge.

 

He uses the open source Flightgear sim, running on Linux Manjaro. A software engineer mate helped him hack the code to output the EGT on USB. An Arduino connects via USB and via pulse width modulation, runs the real gauge. Tricky stuff.