MaxRedline

So Much For Saving The Planet In California

California’s largest operator of recycling redemption centers has shut down and laid off 750 employees. The Mercury News reported Monday that the company, Ontario-based RePlanet, has closed all 284 of its centers.

Advocates are urging the state to reform how it subsidizes recycling centers.

Subsidizing? Why do that? If you have to be subsidized, you've got a bad business model.

We have recycling centers here in Oregon; I just don't see any point in driving for five miles (there and back) to return bottles and cans..."carbon footprint", you know. I didn't mind taking the containers back to the store, but I'm sure not going to drive over to a recycling center and stand in line while the bums unload their stolen shopping carts to redeem one container at a time. Been there, done that, and don't any more. I have to pay for weekly recycling - whether I want to or not - so it's easier (and more "environmentally-friendly") to just dump the containers into the bin.

Whenever government gets involved, they invariably screw things up.

 

Composting

It may soon be legal for the dead to push daisies, or any other flower, in backyard gardens across Washington state.

The state legislature recently passed a bill that, if signed by the governor, allows human bodies to be composted - and used for mulch.

This was once a human. It was stuffed into an 8' by 4' "vessel", along with alfalfa, wood chips, and straw. The end result is compost. It takes about a month, and they end up as roughly one cubic yard of compost.

The Census Bureau, in a 2017 report, predicted a death boom: 1 million more Americans are projected to die in 2037 than they did in 2015. Human composting, its supporters say, is an eco-friendly option that can meet this growing demand. A Seattle-based company called Recompose plans to offer a service called "natural organic reduction" (it has two patents pending) that uses microbes to transform the departed - skin, bones and all.

It's projected to cost families about $5500 - somewhat more than cremation but far less than a traditional burial.

And it produces a product that can grow stuff.

 

Hot Trend

Grocery stores are increasingly eschewing plastic packaging in the produce aisle, opting instead for this:

Yep - banana leaves. Compostable, they don't end up in landfills. Of course, around here, almost every store offers plastic bag recycling bins, so the new trend seems more like a feel-good thing than something that's really needed.

 

Florida Today

APRIL 15--Armed with a water gun filled with his own urine, an elderly Florida Man squirted a woman several times as she walked her dog in front of his residence Saturday evening, according to a complaint affidavit.

Which is to say, the guy invented a water pisstol.

At least the water was recycled....

Avoid these sorts of incidents, people: always pick up after your dog!

 

Break Out The Mayo

PASCO COUNTY, Fla — Sandhill cranes are being hit by speeding cars all over the Tampa Bay area and in some cases, it’s leaving their babies orphaned. Kris Porter of Owl’s Nest Sanctuary for Wildlife said it’s now grabbing the attention of the state. "The impact has been so severe. I cannot tell you how many cranes get hit in a week,” she said. 

They're big birds. Lots of meat on them, and fork-tender along the treadmarks, as I understand it.

Salvaging roadkill is legal in Oregon, but laws vary from state to state.

 

Burn, Baby, Burn

Material supposedly meant to be recycled is piling up now that China has seriously cut back on accepting such materials from the USA. So now a lot of the stuff is simply being landfilled - or burned:

The New York Times reported this weekend the problem has spread across the country. As the costs of handling recycled materials mount, many of them are being burned or thrown in dumps. "Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents' recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy," the Times reported.

Personally, I've never cared much for mandatory recycling programs that have been in vogue among Oregon politicians for years now. I occasionally take bottles and cans to one of those stupid "BottleDrop" locations, but those are a crashing pain: drive for several miles, lug your returnables in, wait until a machine is available, then place the containers in - one at a time. It was much more convenient when the machines were at stores; particularly the ones where you could just dump a sack-full of cans into the hopper. Now, not so much. And what about all the dreaded greenhouse gases you emit as you drive past the stores that used to have deposit return machines as you drive further to a "BottleDrop" place? How "green&sustainable" is that?

 

Plastic Paving, Pothole Prevention

While progressive Portland bans plastic bags and straws because plastic is evil, a guy over in India views the stuff differently: Dr Rajagopalan Vasudevan sees it as a resource.

“Plastic isn’t the problem,” the venerable scientist says in his office in the southern Indian city of Madurai. “We are. Plastic wouldn’t clog our oceans or our landfills if we didn’t throw it there in the first place. And there is so much we can do with it instead.”

“Bitumen, a highly heterogeneous mixture of hydrocarbons is in effect, composed of polymers similar to plastic,” he says. When molten plastic was added to stone and bitumen mix, Dr Vasudevan found that, true to its nature, plastic stuck fast and bound both materials together.

The bitumen-modified plastic improved the tensile strength of the road by making it more durable and flexible. Plastic also prevented pothole formation. When the layer of molten plastic filled the space between the gravel and bitumen it thwarted rain water from seeping in and causing structural defects.

In 2002, he paved a 60-ft road within the campus with plastic-modified bitumen. The road is still intact today. He received a patent for the process in 2006. Since then, almost 16,000km of Indian roads have been paved using his technique.

Plastic bags, straws, utensils, snack-food containers and the like aren't generally recyclable, but for road-building, all of them work well as a binder - and save other resources in the process. If our governments simply melted the stuff into the mix used for paving and pothole repair, not only would the roads be more durable and potholes eliminated, but there'd also be next to nothing going into the landfills.

Naturally, some environmeddlists question the safety, ostensibly worrying that toxic fumes would be released as the shredded plastic is melted. That's not an issue because the plastic is melted at 170 degrees. “Plastic decomposes to release toxic fumes only if it is heated at temperatures above 270C (518F). So there is no question of toxic gases being released.”

Rats! Another manufactured crisis goes down the tubes. If this sort of thing continues, enviros might have to find actual jobs!

 

Crikey

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May announced Wednesday to criminalize the use of all plastic waste by 2042. The ban includes stirrers and cotton swabs, two of the major causes of environmental disaster, according to May.

“Plastic waste is one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world, which is why protecting the marine environment is central to our agenda at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting,” May said in the statement announcing the ban.

Well, if you didn't dump your trash into the ocean, Theresa, then there wouldn't be much of a problem. Apparently, toothbrushes aren't yet included in her ban.

 

There Are Probably Better Ways To Go

(JOHANNESBURG) — Heavy rains triggered the partial collapse of a huge mound of garbage in Mozambique’s capital on Monday, killing 17 people who were buried by debris.

The Hulene garbage dump is the largest such facility in Maputo. People often comb through the garbage, searching for food and items to sell.

I wouldn't call it a "facility".

Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

The idea was to have both boosters return to land at Cape Canaveral, while the main unit was to land on a barge in the Atlantic. The main unit didn't quite make it; clipping the barge and sinking. Still, it's pretty darned impressive.