First Recycle Day - Tuesday Pickup

I just got a phone call from the city reminding me to take my blue recycle bin out to the curb for my first recycle day. Surprisingly it was a white person on the recording and not an LGBT or minority making the announcement. But then again she was female, so they hit their minority quota for the project.

The recycle bin is full. Surprisingly, I have more trash in the 60 gallon recycle bin, then I've been putting in the 94 gallon regular trash container.

Another Coleman scam.

The Recycling Scam

September 19, 2010 by Dan Mitchell
Jeff Jacoby analyzes the absurd tendency of local governments to coerce residents into costly – and inefficient – recycling programs. As a resident of Fairfascist…oops, I mean Fairfax…County in Virginia, I already am painfully aware of this bureaucratic impulse.

….recyclables will all go into 64-gallon “toters,’’ which will be emptied at curbside on trash day.…Then I start reading the fine print. It turns out that when the town says it is “eliminating sorting,’’ what it means is that glass bottles and jars can be recycled, but not drinking glasses or window glass. It means plastic tubs are OK to toss in the toter, but plastic bags aren’t. It means that while cardboard boxes must be flattened, milk and juice cartons must not be flattened. Reams of office paper are fine, but not the wrappers they came in. Tinfoil should be crushed into balls of 2 inches or larger; tin cans shouldn’t be crushed at all. I don’t think the green police will haul me off in handcuffs if I try to recycle an ice cream carton or a pizza box, but the town has warned that “there will be fines’’ for residents whose “recycling protocols’’ don’t measure up to “basic community standards.’’…To be fair, things could be worse. Clevelanders will soon have to use recycling carts equipped with radio-frequency ID chips, the Plain Dealer reported last month. These will enable the city to remotely monitor residents’ compliance with recycling regulations.“If a chip shows a recyclable cart hasn’t been brought to the curb in weeks, a trash supervisor will sort through the trash for recyclables. Trash carts containing more than 10 percent recyclable material could lead to a $100 fine.’’ In Britain, where a similar system is already in place, fines can reach as high as $1,500.…Does any of this make sense? It certainly isn’t economically rational. Unlike commercial and industrial recycling — a thriving voluntary market that annually salvages tens of millions of tons of metal, paper, glass, and plastic — mandatory household recycling is a money loser. Cost studies show that curbside recycling can cost, on average, 60 percent more per ton than conventional garbage disposal. In 2004, an analysis by New York’s Independent Budget Office concluded, according to the New York Times, that “it cost anywhere from $34 to $48 a ton more to recycle material, than to send it off to landfills or incinerators.’’“There is not a community curbside recycling program in the United States that covers its cost,’’ says Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute and author of a handbook on environmental science. They exist primarily to make people “feel warm and fuzzy about what they are doing for the environment.’’ But if recycling household trash makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, why does it have to be compulsory? Mandatory recycling programs “force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard,’’ writes Clemson University economist Daniel K. Benjamin.“On balance, recycling programs lower our wealth.” Now whose idea of exciting is that?
http://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2010/09/...

Kramers Attorney wrote:

Another Coleman scam.
The Recycling Scam
September 19, 2010 by Dan Mitchell
Jeff Jacoby analyzes the absurd tendency of local governments to coerce residents into costly – and inefficient – recycling programs. As a resident of Fairfascist…oops, I mean Fairfax…County in Virginia, I already am painfully aware of this bureaucratic impulse./

I am well aware of the economics and the use of energy, but I equate recycling with keeping your house clean. Not seeing trash anymore because it's buried somewhere is functionally no different than letting it pile up in your garage because it never decomposes.

I was reading where you can go into a landfill from the Roman Empire and the stuff hasn't decomposed yet because once they bury it, it's in an airtight chamber - it mummifies.

I wouldn't have a problem if they could burn the stuff or if they could get it to decompose, but since they cant I would rather recycle to get rid of it once and for all.

Georgie, are you fricking shitttting me? I recycle, I choose what I want to recycle and what I don't. I have three bins and all are full come recycle day. Having a family of four, sometimes I shake my head when the kids (including my hubby, which I use the term lovingly), throw something in the trash that should be recycled. Please make it more difficult as I become more of a recycle police for the other people that reside here.

Popular Mechanics:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/envir...

A study by Morris found that it takes 10.4 million Btu to manufacture products from a ton of recyclables, compared to 23.3 million Btu for virgin materials. In contrast, the total energy for collecting, hauling and processing a ton of recyclables adds up to just 0.9 million Btu. The bottom line: We don't need to worry that recycling trucks are doing more harm than good.

GlitterSucks wrote:

Georgie, are you fricking shitttting me? I recycle, I choose what I want to recycle and what I don't. I have three bins and all are full come recycle day. Having a family of four, sometimes I shake my head when the kids (including my hubby, which I use the term lovingly), throw something in the trash that should be recycled. Please make it more difficult as I become more of a recycle police for the other people that reside here.

http://places.designobserver.com/feature/rome...

PEER REVIEWED: MICHAEL EZBAN

The Trash Heap of History

Monte Testaccio, Rome.[Photo by StefZ]

Standing on the peak of Monte Testaccio, Rome’s ancient landfill, I am 115 feet above the street. The slight undulation of the rooftops to the north registers the city’s original seven hills. Broken shards of terracotta at my feet seem to extend into the mosaic of red roof tiles at the city center. Looking west, across the Tiber River and along the ridge of Janiculum Hill, I can see the terrace of a building designed by McKim, Mead and White — the American Academy — where I stood just a half hour ago. Stationed for three months as a visiting scholar in architecture at the Academy, I will return often to Monte Testaccio, researching its origins, questioning its relevance and making drawings of its history.

Monte Testaccio is a mountain of detritus in a city of storied hills. The seven hills of ancient Rome were formed by the subtractive process of water flowing west to the Tiber River and eroding a plateau of volcanic deposits. The eighth hill, Monte Testaccio, emerged from a process of anthropogenic orogenesis — the accumulation of trash in the Tiber floodplain; it is constructed from the fragments of nearly 25 million clay amphorae, which conveyed olive oil across the Mediterranean Sea from the provinces of Hispania to the heart of the Roman Empire.[1] The most recent fragments are dated to the third century A.D., when Monte Testaccio was among the largest and most highly engineered waste sites in the world; in the centuries since then, the intersection of diverse activities and constituencies has transformed the cultural identity of this historic waste space.

Logistics of Olive Oil and Clay
My stay in Rome coincides with an annual archaeological dig led every September by José Remesal Rodríguez, a professor of ancient history at the University of Barcelona. I am eager to peer down into the heart of the landfill. On my first trip to the top of the hill, walking along ribbons of exposed shards, it’s hard to make sense of the terrain. Full-grown trees, scrub grasses and occasional rabbit scat suggest that I am walking on a thin layer of broken amphorae that covers the surface of a natural landform; but the hollow ring of my footsteps is unlike anything I've heard on a mountain hike. When I reach the archaeologists' work site, I discover the reason for the uncanny acoustics. In the open pits, ten feet deep and braced with wood shoring, I see nothing but tens of thousands of broken clay shards. Nearby, the archaeologists have stacked crates of sorted shards, some with inscription (graffiti), others with painted symbols (tituli picti). These ancient markings — names of olive oil producers, shippers, customs agents, weights of oil and amphora, inspection dates — indicate a complex economic and bureaucratic apparatus of food production and transport.[2]

...

GlitterSucks wrote:

Georgie, are you fricking shitttting me? I recycle, I choose what I want to recycle and what I don't. I have three bins and all are full come recycle day. Having a family of four, sometimes I shake my head when the kids (including my hubby, which I use the term lovingly), throw something in the trash that should be recycled. Please make it more difficult as I become more of a recycle police for the other people that reside here.

This should make anyone who pays property taxes furious:

Cost studies show that curbside recycling can cost, on average, 60 percent more per ton than conventional garbage disposal. In 2004, an analysis by New York’s Independent Budget Office concluded, according to the New York Times, that “it cost anywhere from $34 to $48 a ton more to recycle material, than to send it off to landfills or incinerators.’’“There is not a community curbside recycling program in the United States that covers its cost,’’ says Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute

Kramers Attorney wrote:

<quoted text>This should make anyone who pays property taxes furious:
Cost studies show that curbside recycling can cost, on average, 60 percent more per ton than conventional garbage disposal. In 2004, an analysis by New York’s Independent Budget Office concluded, according to the New York Times, that “it cost anywhere from $34 to $48 a ton more to recycle material, than to send it off to landfills or incinerators.’’“There is not a community curbside recycling program in the United States that covers its cost,’’ says Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute

Cost isn't always everything, my dear. A car wash costs $5 to $10 but you pay it because you don't want to drive around in a dirty car. Bottled water is more expensive than tap water, because of the percieved taste/health attributes. People pay more money for organics for the same reasons.

Likewise, it is reasonable to pay more so that you don't end up with a permanent pile of crap somewhere.(See below).

==========

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb: Landfill and Biodegradation
Archeology and paleontology are not always glamorous jobs. There’s very little Indiana Jones, for instance, to excavating middens – ancient heaps of trash left behind by ancient peoples in ancient holes (or by ancient animals, such as packrats, in ancient holes.) Yet, despite the fact that it’s basically time-lapse dumpster-diving, you can find a lot of neat stuff in middens. Stone tools, metal artifacts, and shards of pottery. Oyster shells and the preserved bones of, say, a Great Auk. And bits of plants.

Bits of plants? Yes. Because one of the many interesting facts that middens demonstrate is that biodegradation, although it seems like a powerful and immutable law of nature, is surprisingly easy to thwart. Lack of oxygen and sunlight, the wrong temperature, or the absence of suitable microbes can slow it to a crawl. Thus prehistoric packrats, who had never even heard of a time capsule or a paleontologist and probably wouldn’t care if you told them, were able to preserve grains of pollen, leaves and stems in such conditions that they eventually fossilized rather than breaking down into the soil and can be identified to the species level today.

Modern landfills have come a long way from the old principle of digging a hole and tipping the waste in. For perfectly good reasons like keeping toxic sludge out of the surrounding air, water, and soil, today’s landfills are sealed up far tighter than any packrat could ever dream of. In addition, they are compacted using heavy machinery, which results in still darker, drier, more anaerobic conditions on the inside.

The results are startling: University of Arizona researchers excavated landfills in three states, and discovered well-preserved 25-year-old hot dogs, half-eaten steaks and even grapes as well as 40-year-old newspapers that could still be read; they estimated that food refuse in the landfills they excavated decomposed by only about 50% every twenty years. Meanwhile, that fifty percent that does decompose doesn’t just disappear innocuously; it produces quantities of methane, which has been implicated in global warming, and liquids appetizingly known as leachate. Leachate can be contaminated with almost anything that the indiscriminant mingling of decades of household wastes might bring to the party – heavy metals, PCBs, dioxins and more.

Enzyte Bob wrote:

<quoted text>
I would rather recycle to get rid of it once and for all.

And you have been recycling for how long? Me, 13 years. I know you haven't, so if it's so important to you, why haven't you been?

Have fun folding your tin foil and rinsing containers to fulfill your environmental duty which you just discovered is important.

You're making my azz tired today.

Enzyte Bob wrote:

<quoted text>
Cost isn't always everything, my dear.

Georgie is your dear now?

GlitterSucks wrote:

<quoted text>
And you have been recycling for how long? Me, 13 years. I know you haven't, so if it's so important to you, why haven't you been?
Have fun folding your tin foil and rinsing containers to fulfill your environmental duty which you just discovered is important.
You're making my azz tired today.

I don't give a rats ass about my environmental duty, I care about easy. The city just made it easy for me, so I'll play along.

In a Landfill, How Long Does Trash Really Last?
By: Brie Cadman (View Profile)

We’ve all been there—at the beach, empty beer bottle in hand, a trash can, but no recycling bin in sight. So we dump the bottle in the normal trash, perhaps feeling guilty we weren’t able to recycle it, perhaps not. Most likely, we rapidly forget about it—out of sight, out of mind, and onto the next beer.

The bottle, like the rest of our trash, may slip easily from our hands and minds, but it doesn’t leave our collective refuse piles so quickly. Landfills, which are lined with clay and plastic, layered with soil, and capped, are not extremely hospitable when it comes to microbial degradation. The three necessary components for decomposition—sunlight, moisture, oxygen—are hard to come by in a landfill; items are more likely to mummify than to break down.

But how long do things last? These rough estimates, compiled from U.S. National Park Service, United States Composting Council, New Hampshire Department of Environmental Sciences, and the New York City government, give an idea of how long our consumables remain after we’ve kissed them goodbye.

Glass Bottle—One Million Years

Okay, we don’t really know whether a glass bottle takes a million years, two million years, or a million years and one day to degrade since no one has been monitoring them for that long. But suffice it to say, when a glass bottle isn’t recycled, it sticks around for a really, really long time. Glass is primarily of composed of silica—the same material as sand—and doesn’t break down even under the harshest environments. Given the relatively inert conditions of a landfill, it’s likely the bottle of beer our forefathers sipped is still at large.

Plastic Bags—Unknown, Possibly 500+ Years
Plastic bags also have a hard time decomposing; estimates range from ten to twenty years when exposed to air to 500–1,000 years in a landfill. Since microbes don’t recognize polyethylene—the major component of plastic bags—as food, breakdown rates by this means in landfills is virtually nil. Though plastic bags can photodegrade, sunlight in landfills is scarce. Made with petroleum and rarely recycled, many cities have banned them in order to curb consumption and prevent their long-lasting presence in litter (e.g., the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—an island you don’t want to visit).

Plastic Beverage Bottles—Unknown, Possible 500+ years

Bottles face the same problem as plastic bags. Most soda and water bottles are composed of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a petroleum-based product that tends to last a long time in a landfill. Even newer bottles that claim to be biodegradable or photodegradable may take much longer than advertised. According to the Air and Waste Association, biodegradable plastics made with the addition of starch may just simply disintegrate into smaller non-degradable pieces: they don’t break down; they break up.

Enzyte Bob wrote:

<quoted text>
Cost isn't always everything, my dear. A car wash costs $5 to $10 but you pay it because you don't want to drive around in a dirty car. Bottled water is more expensive than tap water, because of the percieved taste/health attributes. People pay more money for organics for the same reasons.
Likewise, it is reasonable to pay more so that you don't end up with a permanent pile of crap somewhere.(See below).
==========
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb: Landfill and Biodegradation
Archeology and paleontology are not always glamorous jobs. There’s very little Indiana Jones, for instance, to excavating middens – ancient heaps of trash left behind by ancient peoples in ancient holes (or by ancient animals, such as packrats, in ancient holes.) Yet, despite the fact that it’s basically time-lapse dumpster-diving, you can find a lot of neat stuff in middens. Stone tools, metal artifacts, and shards of pottery. Oyster shells and the preserved bones of, say, a Great Auk. And bits of plants.
Bits of plants? Yes. Because one of the many interesting facts that middens demonstrate is that biodegradation, although it seems like a powerful and immutable law of nature, is surprisingly easy to thwart. Lack of oxygen and sunlight, the wrong temperature, or the absence of suitable microbes can slow it to a crawl. Thus prehistoric packrats, who had never even heard of a time capsule or a paleontologist and probably wouldn’t care if you told them, were able to preserve grains of pollen, leaves and stems in such conditions that they eventually fossilized rather than breaking down into the soil and can be identified to the species level today.
Modern landfills have come a long way from the old principle of digging a hole and tipping the waste in. For perfectly good reasons like keeping toxic sludge out of the surrounding air, water, and soil, today’s landfills are sealed up far tighter than any packrat could ever dream of. In addition, they are compacted using heavy machinery, which results in still darker, drier, more anaerobic conditions on the inside.
The results are startling: University of Arizona researchers excavated landfills in three states, and discovered well-preserved 25-year-old hot dogs, half-eaten steaks and even grapes as well as 40-year-old newspapers that could still be read; they estimated that food refuse in the landfills they excavated decomposed by only about 50% every twenty years. Meanwhile, that fifty percent that does decompose doesn’t just disappear innocuously; it produces quantities of methane, which has been implicated in global warming, and liquids appetizingly known as leachate. Leachate can be contaminated with almost anything that the indiscriminant mingling of decades of household wastes might bring to the party – heavy metals, PCBs, dioxins and more.

Bob, did you even read that nonsense?
"Meanwhile, that fifty percent that does decompose doesn’t just disappear innocuously; it produces quantities of methane, which has been implicated in global warming,"
Al Gore is loving every minute of that crap.

Continued ...

Aluminum Can—Eighty to 200 Years

According to the Container Recycling Institute, we sent 55 billion aluminum cans to the landfills in 2004, an amount that has increased by 760 percent since 1972.



Cigarette Butt—One to Five Years

The Ocean Conservancy found that during coastal cleanups, cigarette filters and butts were the number one source of litter. While certainly they’re better off in a landfill than underfoot at the shore, their composition makes them particularly resistant to breakdown both in nature and in a landfill. Though the filters look like cotton, almost all are made of cellulose acetate, which is slow to degrade.

Newspaper—Two to Four Weeks or Longer

Paper, including newspaper, seems like one of those items that although recyclable, would also break down quite nicely when mixed in a landfill. Theoretically it can, but because microbial decomposition is so stifled in landfills, paper takes much longer to decompose there than under normal conditions. Or so discovered William Rathje, a professor of archeology at the University of Arizona, who started the Garbage Project—digging through landfills to find clues about consumer behavior. While there, his team found legible newspapers more than fifteen years old, indicating decomposition in landfills doesn’t occur as it would in a compost heap. They also discovered that newspapers made up the largest single item by weight and volume in the landfills studied.

Apple Core—One to Two Months or Longer

If tossed in a composting bin or outside, an apple core might take weeks or months to break down. However, the Garbage Project discovered easily identifiable food and yard waste that were years old. They estimate that food in landfills does degrade, but at a very slow rate—about 50 percent every twenty years. Even yard waste, by definition biodegradable, was found intact years later.

So what does it all matter if stuff stays in landfills indefinitely? Limited space, for one thing—finding a suitable spot for a landfill can be difficult, especially since they are a classic case of NIMBY (Not in My Backyard). Though they can be covered and made into something else—both John F. Kennedy and La Guardia Airports were built on landfills—the process is long and fairly expensive. Perhaps most importantly, reducing the amount of stuff we consume, reusing what we already have, and of course, recycling, doesn’t just mean less trash, it also means less primary resources—oil, trees, water, etc.—that have to be used in the first place. But while most of us are familiar with recycling programs, the EPA estimates that the bulk of our garbage is made up of items that can be recycled or composted—40 percent of it is paper, 17 percent is yard waste, 8 percent is plastics, and 7 percent is food waste. Seems like something ain’t working. Perhaps to be truly effective, recycling won’t just mean more places to put your beer bottles, it’ll mean making the trash can the alternative, rather than the norm.

Enzyte Bob wrote:

<quoted text>
I don't give a rats ass about my environmental duty, I care about easy. The city just made it easy for me, so I'll play along.

How easy it is for you. When we had another thread regarding this issue you were telling me you were trying to figure out the rules as to what can be recycled, how it had to be presented, etc. I can open up my garage door throw it in there, no issues, for $33.00 a quarter.

Dam, go get an ATB or go to an MD to get that pulsating boil on your azz taking care of.

Kramers Attorney wrote:

<quoted text>Bob, did you even read that nonsense?
"Meanwhile, that fifty percent that does decompose doesn’t just disappear innocuously; it produces quantities of methane, which has been implicated in global warming,"
Al Gore is loving every minute of that crap.

I obviously don't agree with that paragraph. I did read it, and I edited that out. My point is that a 2,000 year Mount Trashmore in Italy is a bit troubling to me, especially given how high our landfills are along I-71. It's a waste, no pun intended. I'm okay with burning it, I just don't like the idea of trash sitting there in a pile forever ... and in the scheme of things 2,000 years is forever.

GlitterSucks wrote:

<quoted text>How easy it is for you. When we had another thread regarding this issue you were telling me you were trying to figure out the rules as to what can be recycled, how it had to be presented, etc. I can open up my garage door throw it in there, no issues, for $33.00 a quarter.
Dam, go get an ATB or go to an MD to get that pulsating boil on your azz taking care of.

I figured it out. My bin is full.

Just so you can see where the brands come from:

http://gaynorcommunications.com/jmc-pdf/pub_t...