Does anyone still recycle?

Free bags@94. These are also in China, so one accepts gift while out walking. Only problem arises when you don't (or under-) prepare for a shopping trip. Bag purchase option then appeals.

 

we keep enough reusable bags in each car so to never get caught short. and we put them by the door to the garage so we'll remember to take them back to the car.
but we also get enough brown paper bags to use two a week for rubbish.

 

I have one politician in the family (magistrate judge, formerly DA), and he claims that there are a numerous good politicians at the local level. Most certainly not all of them, but reasonably many.

But the honest ones are stuck at that local level. To move up, they must lie. The higher they want to go (county, state, federal), the more they must lie. And of course, the climbers often start at the local level too.

The DA position was a partisan office. He left it in part because he couldn't stomach the partisan territory. Judicial positions are technically non-partisan.

 

"To move up, they must lie"

Dang.

So strange is US' politic. Here is told bottom-up hitting something like an influence wall. Top-down needs entrancing voters including 'low-information' voters. As much as many idolize US' politics, holding it above other systems strictly requires demonstration that thisaway yields better results than all other thataways.

Even that is not enough. We'd do better to wonder how countries of any size transfer effectively will of (and benefit to) PEOPLE. I could never ask for more than that. Don't fear that any such could hamper ++ rich in their efforts to become +++ rich because those efforts are going very well. It is only those many others who we might wonder about.

So 'political'; so separate from recycling which is our assignment here.

 

Two large and strange aspects of recycling involve electronic waste and ship-breaking. Both happen mostly in low-income countries and with little concern for externalities.

These are quite different from household recycling; our main topic here. Latter is driven by local governmental attempts to do good, or market value downstream, or individual goals to be better.

People make lots of things, not all of which have any purpose beyond directing marketing or purchase decisions. Plastics (it is so hard for me to use that uninformative term) are 380 million tons per year. I dare to say total 'single-use' production is 1 billion tons per year.

All that is handled, more or less, according to market forces. Disputing original thread thesis, I see no evidence that people are walking away from recycling. But if we are underperforming, cures can only come from production becoming better attuned to economic reuse.

Or, if current recycling is best we can do, then 2050 brings more people, more economic activity, and perhaps twice current 'waste' burial.

Hope y'all got a lot of holes.

 

The term plastic does cover a large range of materials. Which is why it might be better long term to throw the lot into a pressure vessel without sorting, and convert them all into a syncrude.

Nearly all the plastic in a car is not recyclable; specially the soft stuff reviewers rave about. Switching from petroleum to a renewable source for it doesn't automatically mean the stuff isn't going to stick around for far longer than it was in use in the car. Much of that biobased plastic is mixed into the petro material.

 

let's concentrate our space efforts on shipping the waste out of our galaxy. 'spaceexit'

 

We are already working on that.

 

That's an interesting idea until the communications and navigation and METOC satellites start crapping out.....
It might also be valuable in the next few decades to continue to develop technologies that will allow us to nudge a planet-killing asteroid off course enough to pass us by......

Craters happen.....about 100-percent of the time if our neighbors are an accurate sampling.

YMMV.

 

let the asteroid hit us and put us out of our misery.

 

Global warming will likely do it for us.

 

i'd rather freeze to death.

 

There's a waste management plant about ten or so miles from here that burns solid waste to power a 45 megawatt generator.

 

Or even our own surface, where the normally rapid erosion hasn't managed to erase all of them.

 

^^^misquote^^^

 

Yeah, unintentional mess up by @fuzzy1? It was @ETC(SS) said that.

 

Oops, not sure what happened, and it is too late to fix it. (Dang 12 hour limit!) That would happen if I was initially going to reply to multiple items, then mis-edited while paring it down.

But I was earlier going to reply to Bisco at #108, then abandoned it before going out for the day. Maybe the header was still in my edit field when starting the later reply, and I suffered a multitasking error. If so, it reinforces that I shouldn't be trying to squeeze in a reply while other folks and animals are trying to get my attention.

 

No worries, i’m The asteroid, ‘take one for the team’ guy.