The liar's bench

[bilgriss]

There's plastic everywhere.

One time I was unloading a truckload of spring cleaning into the landfill. My load's slowly decreasing, and at one point I hear the classic "beep beep beep" backup warning of the recycling truck pulling in beside me. As I finish up my load, the truck tips the payload, and an entire truckload of #2 plastic bottles they've collected from local municipalities got dumped out into the heap beside me.

A different company collects plastics now in the nearest city to me. They collect it and bail it, apparently storing it permanently stacked in a field on the north side of town. I guess it keeps it out of the landfill.

[NormandieStill]

There's plastic everywhere.

One time I was unloading a truckload of spring cleaning into the landfill. My load's slowly decreasing, and at one point I hear the classic "beep beep beep" backup warning of the recycling truck pulling in beside me. As I finish up my load, the truck tips the payload, and an entire truckload of #2 plastic bottles they've collected from local municipalities got dumped out into the heap beside me.

A different company collects plastics now in the nearest city to me. They collect it and bail it, apparently storing it permanently stacked in a field on the north side of town. I guess it keeps it out of the landfill.

There's a actually a twisted logic to this which I understand... and hate. In order to recycle stuff you need to collect it, but when you start collecting you don't necessarily have the facilities to process it. But when you make those facilities you want them to run at capacity in order to optimise the costs. So you need to get folks to start sorting and recycling before you have any way to deal with the resulting pile of plastic.

All that's needed then is for some muppet to cancel a project before it gets off the ground, and you find yourself collecting plastics that can never be processed.

I'm a big believer in the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra, but I do think that as a society (with some variance between countries) we're butting up against the limits of what "Personal Effort" can achieve. We are lucky enough to be able to buy a large amount of our food locally from farm shops which has a massive effect on the amount of plastic we have to deal with, but given that Reduction is the most important element in the mantra, it's depressing how rapidly we still fill up the recycle bin!

[Saltbush Bill]

Example here NormandieStill
https://amp-abc-net-au.cdn.ampproject.o ... F101754460

[NormandieStill]

Example here NormandieStill
https://amp-abc-net-au.cdn.ampproject.o ... F101754460

Here in France we get sturdy, rectangular shopping bags made of recycled plastic (and generally bearing the logo of the supermarket that sold them). They cost about 1€50 now but they do last for years. We have a fairly large collection (in no small part because sometimes you forget to put them back in the car and then go shopping! ) and they get used for shopping, moving laundry, passing hand-me-downs to neighbours and in lieu of suitcases when we go on holiday (You can pack them into the boot way better than suitcases / rucksacks!).

That being said, even the beef from the local farm is vacuum-packed! You just can't get away from plastics.