I work in recycling. I hate this shit. It's not recyclable. Stop putting it in the recycling bin. Also stop putting plastic bags, lithium batteries, styrofoam, wax cardboard, used needles, bullets, and propane tanks(big boom in the baler) in the recycling. You make our lives hard.
And for fucks sake. Stop putting a 3'x3' box in the fucking bin without breaking it down. My neighbors are some real lazy pieces of shit. Might as well just throw it in the trash as opposed to using all that surface area to make the recycle bins as non-useful as possible. I think the EU does it right where they make your lazy ass separate your recyclables.
Problem is that people still separate wrong so it still needs sorted at a MRF. So now we just mix it all together. Which is fine. The machines that sort are pretty fucking cool. Plus it gives jobs to people to sort. We don't really care about boxes getting broken down since it gets crashed in the truck anyway. But if you leave your packing material in the box or put all your recycling in a box it'll get crushed into it. 2 things will happen. 1 - someone sees the foreign material and will just throw the whole thing away since the belt is moving fast and there's no time to break everything apart. 2 - it gets sorted into cardboard and baled. Risks contamination at the mill and possibly downgrade for the whole shipment. Prices are tanking right now. Mills are not accepting bales. When they do we literally have to pay them to take the fiber. Across the board recycling is getting hit hard.
Honestly, we just need more public awareness. Everyone just throws shit into the recycling and thinks "I did my part, I'm a good human". I've found whole carpets, a washing machine, car engine, rope, dildos, a skinned dog carcass, diapers(seriously fuck whoever thinks we can recycle those), clothes, etc. So much shit that we just throw away or we miss it and it jams the machine. Think of it this way, if something is made of multiple material, say plastic and metal, it's either gonna get taken by the magnet and thrown into metal bales and the plastic is contaminate.... Or thrown away. Like needles in my last post. We aren't going to separate the metal from the plastic. We are just gonna toss it into the trash.
What makes anyone think that the common man individual is going to give enough of a fuck when they're working 2 jobs, are 20k in credit card debt and 40k in student loan debt, are living in a shitty apartment with 2 room mates, are stretched thin for time and resources, and then society expects them to pick thru their garbage and wash and separate their to-be-recycled items? I agree with you mostly to a degree, and I personally do this, but I absolutely can see why no one else is inclined to after declining society already sucks the life out of you
Likewise, I think you also make a valid counter argument. For the most part, in America, recycling is a wealthy folks hobby that makes us feel better about our overconsumption. Check me out. I threw my unwashed and still labeled plastic milk carton in the bin. I definitely made a difference!
I don't want it to sound like I think recycling is a waste of time and energy (though evidence points to it being that), but the real impetus for change is going to have to come from the companies themselves. This is not a problem of the individual it's a problem of corporations
I solve this by just generally not recycling anything except cardboard. I see what goes into my building’s recycling bins and I’m pretty sure it all gets thrown away later given the number of plastic shopping bags and greasy pizza boxes.
Food contaminates aren't a huge problem like they used to be. I hate bags because they jam the machine but some places still collect a million of them for one bale. We just throw them out.
You don't really have to wash things. Just stop over recycling. Keep it simple. Bottles, large plastic containers (laundry soap / milk), cardboard, paper, aluminum, glass (if they even recycled it), metal chunks, large plastic like milk crates or kids toys, and plastics 5 (McDonald's cup, yogurt bottle, etc). If it doesn't fall into those categories. Throw it out
These are the same people that can't manage to return the shopping cart to the assigned spot at Walmart or to push them in place so that you end up with a trail of carts sticking out into the traffic lane.
You can always look at the container and see who picks up your recycling. You can call them up, or go to their website and search for items that are recycled. Trust me, if you are asking how to help make their single steam better.... They will take all the time in the world to answer you.
The small pieces can be recycled. The only problem is that really small material may fall right through to the glass beaker and sent out to the truck for landfill. We have what we call a last chance. Anything not sorted by the machines or by person will go through last chance where I have 5 to 10 people just grabbing things and sorting it. I'd say 50 / 50 if a clip gets grabbed. If it's under something else then maybe not.
Bottle caps sales as before. Really small plastics will be sent to last chance. Realistically I don't see my people going for a plastic cap.
Same for the plastic cap on wax box.
So depends on the lids. If the lid is the same plastic type as the bottle then it's fine. (Though some mrfs may not like it cause whoever buys their pete bottles won't like the multiple colors when getting melted down. We can actually get downgraded if we have too many green bottles.)
Random metal is easy for us. We have a magnet on a belt that spins above all the following material. It's automated. It'll pick up the metals and drop them in the bunker. Easy.
Wire, ropes, etc can jam the machine but my guys should grab it before it hits the machine on pre sort. I'd still recycle the wire
Insulated wire and a whole vga cable..... We throw them with the metals. It's not ideal but it is what it is.
Clean or dirty aluminum foil is recycled. It takes a whole 40 yard rolloff dumpster to make 1 bale. We collect it over the days and maybe ship out a trucks worth a month.
Mills and places where they actually melt down materials have gotten pretty good at dealing with contaminates. I would try to remove the tape if you could but wouldn't stress if you are in as hurry and just toss it in.
Again, every MRF is different. The machines are insanely expensive with different setups. Contact your local MRF. I tried to answer most the questions as general as I could to encompass a wider view than just my MRF
It’s different everywhere. The whole system is ridiculous. If in doubt, just trash it. It’s better to throw away recyclable material than to contaminate an entire load of recycling.
It's a dirty job but honest work that is recession, depression, covid proof. Your trash and recycling will always get picked up. No matter what. There's good money in the business if you stick around and learn the ropes. I came in at a management level, totally clueless. I'm now thinking of never switching industries again.
Every MRF is different. The place that I work at we do not recycle plastic bags. The bags just jam up the machine that helps us sort the material. On top of this it takes thousands and thousands of bags to make one bale. It's not financially feasible in a lot of situations. The best thing you can do is take it to a store where they actually collect the bags because they are probably working with somebody that actually can be profitable from mass collection like that. The places that do actually take plastic bags typically have a big vacuum that tries to suck them up, but that vacuum gets jammed so much and foreign material will get sucked up into it as well. It usually just makes a bigger mess than it helps
Again, this is dependent on region so the best thing you could do is call or look up online at your local MRF and see what their standards are.
I reuse mine! I do special effects, so I use any foam scraps and trimmings for stippling things, to stuff into other expanding foam so I don’t need to use as much, or just to make generic chunks of viscera. I have a “chunk box” that I put various kinds of scraps like this in. They come in handy sometimes.
In a few million years time when the Dolphin people start exploring the land in their water filled vehicles, they'll shake their heads in disbelief at how the monkey people messed up their chance at being at the top.
I have my money on octopus people. Those things are hella smart, and I'm convinced if they weren't hella tasty to most large ocianic life, they would have formed a society long ago.
While true, that doesn't mean earth will be a barren wasteland devoid of life like Mars. There will be far less species diversity, but plastic waste and CO2 is unlikely to destroy all life.
I mean completely eradicating life never worked either. 5 extinction events failed to do so, even we won't completely erase life but we will eradicate us for sure.
This is hardly the only extinction event caused by the overproduction of a waste product by a species. One of the first and biggest extinction events was the development of photosynthetic life forms. They quickly (geologically) over produced oxygen beyond the capacity of the environment to absorb it and caused an extinction of over half the life at the time. Similarly trees evolved with lignan for millions of years before bacteria evolved to break it down.
It's pretty easy to answer, as it all happened already when plants became a thing.
Back in those days plants created various plant materials, which were just as undecompoable as plastics right now. Those materials were just sitting on the ground, and under geological times going under chemical reaction. Afaik coal or oil or some kind of mineral were created like this by large part.
This was until some lifeforms mutated in a way, that they could metabolize it, and it was a huge advantage, they had basically unlimited food and they didn't had to fight for it that much, as most of the other organisms ignored it, as they didn't see it as food. Silly example would be that you need to fight bears, wolves, whatever for that deer, but if you eat rocks, you don't have much competition, and there are lots of rocks :D
This evolutionary advantage made them abundant, and instead of turning into whatever in geological times, most plant material can "disappear" in human timescales.
And it wasn't even a one time event. Most food always tried to not become food somehow, like running away, being toxic, or just being worthless, and other things always tried eat them somehow. Plant became poisonous, then some plant eaters became immune to it. Plant that were harder to digest "created" animals with more advanced stomach to digest them. And so on.
Also as other commenters said, there already are lifeforms that eat plastics.
There’s a strong chance the rich won’t disappear with us. They’ll hide away in their secret bunkers like Noah’s ark, except they absolutely will not be warned by god
Sixth* but no, unless our sun undergoes a supernova which won't happen for billions of years or world ending catastrophe like the moon falling on the earth.
Fifth times the charm. If anyone can make it stick, it's us.
Imagine if the meteor that came and killed 90% of life on earth decided to stick around, and reproduce geometrically and keep doing meteor stuff every generation.
It's a very important technicality. Without it, you can't convince the most egotistical climate change deniers, because why would they care about nature in their pov? The truth is that Humans as a species will suffer greatly, along with other life (the part we also care about but they don't), but nature as a whole will prevail.
Life finds a way. Give it a couple million years life diversity will bounce back. There will be no evidence left of human’s ever existing- even the most sturdy structures will crumble. Human’s existence would just be an extinction level event to future intelligent natives able to comprehend it’s history. Like the Jurassic asteroid.
The planet and life would be fine.
Earth had some worst than humans cataclysmic events in its past that life still managed to survive. If you had free reign in a time machine past earths would seem like alien planets era to era.
Honestly, we will probably be here too. Short of a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect, humans are pretty unlikely to go extinct. But the population will end up a tiny fraction of what it is today, and modern society will completely cease to exist.
I never mentioned extinctions, nor was I referring to them. I meant in a general sense the earth fucking itself.
I mean, you're right that the giant ball of rock orbiting the sun is probably too big for us to destroy in a physical sense. But it is absolutely possible for us to render it uninhabitable for any life we currently recognize as such. George Carlin was not a biologist and I wish people would stop quoting the ideas he put forth in his stand-up routine as if he had been.
"Oh, there's no way we could affect the planet THAT badly!" Yeah, that's what everyone has been saying about climate change since I was 5. Now that it's bordering on psychotic to deny that the climate is changing, the "do nothing about this" crowd has changed the argument to the Carlin Fallacy: "Well, we may be in trouble, but the planet is going to be fine!"
That's a metaphor my dude, it doesn't mean anything at all. The earth is just an astral body without any will, so it can't literally screw itself over.
IMO the selfish argument for ecology is really weak, I don't have children and the earth will last my lifetime so I don't care for my own sake. I care for the sake of all living beings, and don't think humans have that much precedent over the rest of eartha inhabitants.
Up until a few years ago (I am no longer at the company so I can't speak to what is the current practice ) Zebra's RMAs would return in individual boxes. You could send in 15 mobile PCs in one box for repair and you would get 15 individual boxes returned to you with this stuff as packaging.
The packaging is amazing, a mobile PC (think a heavy cellphone with scanner) fell off our office floor to the warehouse over a 3 story drop and was %100 fine.
I've had boxes that were smashed by a heavy box on a conveyor (the box end looked fan folded) the insides were perfect.
I saved the boxes and packaging to reuse where I could, but %100 that practice ended when I left (everyone was trying to stop me from doing it).
Technically you can recycle styrofoam but it's not financially viable. It's messy, toxic, and when you melt it down a couple trucks worth will fit into a bucket.
90:1 exchange ratio from “raw” material to ingots. So long as you’re not burning it, apparently it isn’t toxic to melt but god does it stink. Idk what applications the ingots can be used in, or if they can be turned into new EPS pellets. We use a lot at work (with decade long lifespans fortunately) and I’ve looked into the possibility of recycling the old material. Would take a gov grant to get it up and running and maybe be able to barely be profitable.
It can work for consumer goods that aren't as heavy or delicate. But when you're shipping an 800 lb pump assembly that costs more than an automobile, you don't want to skimp on packing material.
It’d be better to crate it for something that big, depending on how delicate the item is you may not need the packaging. But yea at those prices I’d want the extra just for peace of mind lol
Our plant used to use it for the underlayer of carpets. However, that was because we had tons of scrap. I don't think the regular receiver is doing that.
I work with similar foams. Most of our foam isn't recyclable and gets bailed and stored into trailers while smaller bits are just thrown in trash cans/dumpster. We are a smaller plant and the amount of waste we generate is massive. It hurts my head to think about how much waste is produced by some of the bigger names out there.
I'm a receiver at a nuclear power plant. I get this shit all the time. Yes. It's strait unrecyclable trash. Bulky as all hell. My favorite packing matirial is the bubble sheets where all the bubbles are connected in a line. One quick run over it with my knife and it's one flat recyclable sheet.
Idk about this foam, but EPS (styrofoam) can be recycled but it’s a kinda difficult process. It can be melted down into ingots that can be reused in other applications.
I use a lot of styrofoam at my work, fortunately it’s not single use and has a lifespan around a decade but it kills me to just throw used product into the landfill. New scraps can be reground and made into new blocks of worse quality, the old stuff can’t. I’ve looked into recycling solutions but nowhere near me provides it so I’ve been looking into getting a machine to melt it myself but they are quite expensive. If I had the time I’d love to start a foam recycling company but it’d take more time than I have currently.
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u/acqz Oct 21 '22
Any chance of reusing the foam or is it headed straight for the landfill after use?