Plastic waste what to do?...
13 Mar 2017, 3:13 pm
You can sell srap metal here,but now you have to show ID.Tweakers were pulling the copper wire out of unoccupied homes and selling it.There used to be older men that rode around on four wheeler gathering aluminum cans off the road.They each had a milk crate strapped to the wheeler.Most of those old guys have passed away,they really kept the road clean and probably made enough to but some beer.When scrap iron shot up really high people were even stealing old junk cars that were sitting in isolated areas.In away that was kind of a community service.There was one in the creek where it washed off a low water bridge and somehow they winched it out of there and hauled it off.lol My son once picked up enough cans in just a few miles to buy a pair of young turkeys.
Our county picks up the recycle,you just set it out in a bag when the trash runs.Paper and cardboard in one bag,all other stuff together.Most people use old feed sacks or dog food bags.Regular trash goes into a yellow trash bag with the counties name on it,they charge three bucks a bag.Recycle is picked up free.
There used to be several illegal dump sites,all on the edge of a bluff but they started cracking down on that.They would locate them and send someone down in it to look for mail or stuff with people's names.Im glad they did that,it really helped to keep the dumpers from trashing the county.
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Sweetleaf
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Location: Somewhere in Colorado
13 Mar 2017, 3:45 pm
it is a conglomeration of plastic waste that has collected into an almost continent sized mass and scientists have recently scrutinized it, and they wonder why it never gets any bigger.
they took samples of the water about 1000 ft down and they found plastic that had degraded into microscopic pieces.
it seems that there is a new strain of bacteria that actually feeds on the plastic, and break it up into waste products.
i do not know whether any strains of bacteria occur in landfills that can feed on plastic yet.
when you think of it, plastic is made from materials that are completely natural (oil generally) and are not in any way an introduced bulk of material from beyond the earth.
i do sorry about sea life ingesting plastic however.
Hmm that is kind of cool, I wonder if they could somehow introduce the bacteria to landfills....though I imagine it wouldn't be as easy as just collecting some and tossing it onto a landfill, there'd probably be a lot more science involved.
I have also heard of some idea to create plastic collection devices in the ocean, apparently some kid in Scandinavia invented kind of a blueprint for the idea but to my knowledge it hasn't been built yet or anything. But I guess somehow it would draw plastic in it and collect it though I think it's specifically plastic that is floating not sure about any thats sunk....uhh I'll have to find an article with more detail but it certainly seemed like a cool idea and didn't look like it would interfere too much with the living things in the water.
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Sweetleaf
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Joined: 6 Jan 2011
Age: 34
Gender: Female
Posts: 34,470
Location: Somewhere in Colorado
13 Mar 2017, 3:49 pm
Though it's a waste of resources, cause some of those materials can be re-used instead of making more which in turn keeps more profit within the country.
Over here I don't know anyone who just has a normal 'everything' bin anymore, all our local council offices make us recycle. We even have a food waste bin.
This reminds me though, do you have one of those services that collects recyclable materials and pays you for it? Cause the UK & Australia has that and you can make like $20 from just doing a street of can collecting.
There are some places you can take cans and they'll pay you for them....so that is something me and my boyfriend do whenever we get a few bags full.
but yeah regular trash bins aren't uncommon, but it is certainly kind of rare to see recycling bins next to them which I find to be disappointing.
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We won't go back.
15 Mar 2017, 1:35 am
Hmm that is kind of cool, I wonder if they could somehow introduce the bacteria to landfills....though I imagine it wouldn't be as easy as just collecting some and tossing it onto a landfill, there'd probably be a lot more science involved.
that is true, but it is a curious situation that bacteria evolve very rapidly and can eat almost anything, however in landfill sites, there are so many other "nutrients" to feed on that it is unlikely that a strain of bacteria would form that relies solely on plastics for nutrition.
in the ocean, the only waste products in these plastic continents is plastic, and so bacteria have evolved that can feed off it.
bacteria can be harnessed to perform tasks for us that can not otherwise be idealized by human intelligence or imagination. but maybe that is a bit into the future.
the job is too large for any man made machine to make a dent in. if the kid's idea was viable, them maybe it could swallow thousands of tons of plastic per day, but the amount of plastic there is in the 100's of millions of tons.
who knows. i am not really educated in that matter.
i know that plastics can be turned into sludge by the addition of solvents, but the economic requirement to effect that idea may be unrealistic.
i once filled a plastic 1 gallon container with petrol from the service station. and later on that day, i found i lost all the petrol because it had dissolved the container.
then i experimented a bit and poured petrol into a styrofoam cup and it dissolved it in seconds.
i do not know whether that sludge is any more friendly to the environment than the plastic it dissolved, but i guess it is worth researching.
petrol is too precious to "waste" on dissolving plastics i would think in an economic system anyway.
(you call it gasoline)
15 Mar 2017, 12:55 pm
Eat it.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new ... 180958127/
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