DailyDirt: Reusing Plastic Instead Of Throwing It All Away...
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Disposable packaging adds up to a lot of trash. Sure, some of it gets recycled, but there's a significant amount that doesn't -- and ends up polluting the environment in mind-boggling ways. In the not-so-distant future, we might have more plastic in the ocean by weight than fish. But it doesn't have to be that way.- Making comfortable running shoes from plastic recycled from old fishing nets retrieved from the coast of Africa isn't the easiest way to recycle, but it might be one of the more fashionable ways. Adidas is only making 50 pairs of shoes made with this kind of recycled plastic, so it's nowhere near a sustainable manufacturing process. However, using more recycled plastics in fashionable items could catch on -- if it can be done economically. [url]
- Do you have any idea what all those plastic recycling numbers mean? A bunch of common plastics that make up everyday containers can also be useful prototyping materials, so check out this brief guide to prototyping materials for which plastics might be suitable for DIY projects. [url]
- Plastic garbage floating on water might be gathered up more easily with a "tractor beam" of small artificial surface waves. It would probably be a bit difficult to overcome the natural waves in the oceans to clean up garbage, but this is analogous to how trash in ocean gyres came about in the first place. [url]
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Filed Under: cleanup, garbage, ocean gyre, plastics, pollution, recycling, tractor beam, waste
Companies: adidas
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Re: The 'numbers' link is ridiculous
Here ya go. All the plastic number codes.I agree that the linked article would be more useful if it echoed the numbers in the link I provided, but since this comment holds both links, all you need do open two windows and swap between them.
And hey, I didn't even snark LMGTFY at you.
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Re:
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The 'numbers' link is ridiculous
Obviously the first is 1, second 2, etc. but jeebus, using a link that says "these are what the numbers mean" without actually labeling the descriptions with the actual numbers?
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Re: The 'numbers' link is ridiculous
I agree that the linked article would be more useful if it echoed the numbers in the link I provided, but since this comment holds both links, all you need do open two windows and swap between them.
And hey, I didn't even snark LMGTFY at you.
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There's a better way!
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Recycling Is A Green Lie
Food packaging is always "comminated." The package commonly has multiple parts, made of different plastics. There is a label or marking, which means ink. There are food residues. Recycling is extremely difficult. The people who talk loudest about recycling plastic are the people who don't want you to be allowed to eat by yourself. They want everyone to eat in something like a school lunchroom, presided over by first-grade teachers, with everyone listening to recorded propaganda messages. They want to force you into their religion. It's a bit like Orwell's New-Speak, which was designed to eliminate the words in which opposition to Big Brother could be expressed. What bugs the recyclers about plastic food packaging is that it enables people to eat alone.
The recent business in which the Seattle garbage-men were going through people's garbage for the benefit of television reporters is a form of this mentality. Garbage-men are threatened with technological unemployment with the spread of the dumpster. Once the mechanics are worked out, a mechanical arm can lift a thousand pounds of garbage at a go, vastly more than a human garbage-man can handle (*). The reaction of the garbage-men is to attempt to re-invent themselves as eco-secret-policemen. This reminds me of a story my father told me about a New England prep school, back in the 1940's. Boys were punished for small misdeeds by being required to come in on Saturday and collect the school garbage. This did not work as planned, however, because, apart from the joys of getting to drive the garbage truck, they were able to inspect the garbage, count the whiskey bottles, and find out which masters drank a lot. Knowledge is power!
(*) Imagine a concrete pocket, built into the sidewalk, big enough to hold a dumpster below street level. There is a heavy lid, weighing maybe five hundred pounds, which people can walk on, which incorporates a conventional permanent trash can, but also a large door, key operated, giving access to a chute down which one can drop a big garbage bag. Local residents are given keys. A robot arm on the garbage truck lifts the lid, takes out the dumpster, empties it, puts it back, and closes the lid again. Something like this could be readily installed in a dense urban setting, where there are not parking lots associated with buildings.
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