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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.

bilgriss wrote: ↑Tue Feb 25, 2025 4:17 am 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!

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

Saltbush Bill wrote: ↑Tue Feb 25, 2025 12:04 pm 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.

Ya know , back in the day everything was in glass and it all got recycled, most of the bottles got washed out sanitised and reused, the bags were all paper but mostly we got our stuff in boxes which a trolley boy would help stack, then take it out to ya jalopy and even load it in ya car if ya wanted. Then the Government thinks we need regulation on all this so dreams up the EPA and the first thing they decide is we been doing bottling wrong for the last 200 years, turns out washing and reusing bottles is bad news so that gets banned. Sorting glass, crushing it melting it down and blowing it isn't cost effective so everything that can does go plastic.
Paper bags are super bad as they got to cut down trees next thing plastic bags- biodegradable of cause because nothing says saving the planet like micro-plastics polluting everything everywhere. So much better than the old bags that took 400 years to degrade ( read pollute).
Anyways so after 25 or so years they discovered what any dumb 7 year old could work out that this might not be ideal so they banned all that and brought in paper bags and encouraged shops to make boxes available and putting a recycle deposit on drinks making glass a more attractive option, sure glad we got the EPA to show us all the error of our ways

Croweater, I understand. You used to be able to work on your car, get you hands dirty, get stinky. Hell, i could race tune the Lotus engine in my Cortina with a screwdriver and be off in short order. Now a days I stay nice’n clean, no sweat, ‘cause I can’t find most of the stuff on my motor and what I can find I can’t get to. Yeah, progress. White suited mechanic tole me i should be glad I didn’t try to change my dead battery ‘cause theres no telling how much damage I’da caused to the electronics. At least I can still work on my li’l still without a computer an a degree.

thecroweater wrote: ↑Fri Mar 14, 2025 2:37 am Ya know , back in the day everything was inlimbss and it all got recycled, most of the bottles got washed out sanitised and reused, the bags were all paper but mostly we got our stuff in boxes which a trolley boy would help stack, then take it out to ya jalopy and even load it in ya car if ya wanted. Then the Government thinks we need regulation on all this so dreams up the EPA and the first thing they decide is we been doing bottling wrong for the last 200 years, turns out washing and reusing bottles is bad news so that gets banned. Sorting glass, crushing it melting it down and blowing it isn't cost effective so everything that can does go plastic.

It's a nice story but don't kid yourself. The manufacturers all switched to plastic bottles because they were cheaper to make, use and transport. Capitalism is by nature a race to the lowest common denominator. Bottle deposits worked as a nice way to leverage capitalism to encourage reuse and recycling.

Of course in the good ole days we had eight year olds working in glass factories with the prospect of one day becoming an apprentice and learning the craft of glass blowing (assuming they survived to adulthood with a full set of limbs!).

All this talk of bottles and stuff . Today I gathered up all my 10c bottles, cans, glass and cardboard tetra pacs and headed around to the recycling hole in the wall . Cashed all that in and walked away with $27.50 .

Not bad for 20min work . But it got me thinking about Croweaters post . Back in the 70s as a Young’n in NZ , we would walk the streets and end up head first down a rubbish bin ( trash can) reaching for the 4c gold at the bottom .

Back then it was 4c for a little bottle and 8c for a big one .
Stepping back further . The local beverage company made soft drink . They sold it in glass bottles . Every bottle you took back to a Dairy ( Thats a Milk bar for the Aussies ….. and God knows what you ‘mericans called a corner store) , the’d take those bottles and give you cash .
Now , 4 cents was good money back then , and darn , 8 cents for the bign’s was worth dangling your feet out the top of a bin and hoping someone would pull you out .

A kid could buy a lot of Lollies for a bit of bin grovelling .

But those bottles as Crow reconded, went straight back to the local soft drink factory and they cleaned them and refilled them .

Funny thing was Beer bottles , you only got 1c for a stubby and 2c for a Long neck . That always puzzled us kids .Could never figure out why Soft drink bottles fetched better price .
And best place to find beer bottles was up at the railway station …. Don’t ask me why

Now this was around when Coke and Fanta hit the streets and we still got 4c for a little bottle and 8c for a big one . But I never until now ever considered what ever happened to them .


Anyway , today at the recycling centre , it struck me that 50 years later , I’m still getting the same price per bottle.

In the US, back in the 70's we also had returnables, and I basically funded my comic book collection by finding bottles people threw out of their cars roadside. It was a pretty good 'job' for a kid with no marketable skills.

Years later (now) I recently recycled a bunch of old datacenter computing hardware that cost over a quarter of a million dollars new, which had reached end of life, and got about $50. Wiring does much better (copper).

Just read NorthwoodsAb's post on a coppers visit to his hous while running. Made me think back aways.

In Covid lockdown people reached out to me for help. I never sold and shared product only with inner circle. I did help with know how, building and running.

When I had to meet someone it was in public or at their house. But one guy phone regularly and after a while I invited him to pick up some copper fittings from me.

Low and behold, he stopped in my drive way in a police truck. He is about 2x my size, but I told him so bad. After that we became good friends.

Finally building up some reserve. The oldest is a bit over three years.

I'm getting a little misty seeing that!
Sweet.

Nice work , subbrew, there is nothing like having good quality of aged booze.
It gives you the time to start experimenting with all of those other ideas that you have over the years and also to start tweeking the recipes that you already like

Yeah i need to lift my game, got empty barrels here , empty barrels just hurt my heart

thecroweater wrote: ↑Thu Mar 27, 2025 2:39 am empty barrels just hurt my heart

I thought that was the after effect of having emptied them last night.

Steve Broady wrote: ↑Thu Mar 27, 2025 5:02 am

thecroweater wrote: ↑Thu Mar 27, 2025 2:39 am empty barrels just hurt my heart

I thought that was the after effect of having emptied them last night.

Hurt head or hurt heart , both work in that situation .
About time you started filling yours back up again Crow

Yummyrum wrote: ↑Thu Mar 27, 2025 1:03 pm [quote=About time you started filling yours back up again Crow

Yeah for five long years I've had to pause. The children came in to my care and even though the risks associated with this hobby are low they just weren't risks i was willing to take or more to the point take on behalf of the kids. That is i had people looking at any angle to get me in trouble with family services and there was no way in hell i was going to risk my kids going to the state or foster care but that risk has to a great abated now so onward and upward, the crow is uncaged

Glad to see you back Crow. You certainly did the right thing, family first of all earthly things.

thecroweater wrote: ↑Wed Apr 02, 2025 6:13 pm

Yummyrum wrote: ↑Thu Mar 27, 2025 1:03 pm [quote=About time you started filling yours back up again Crow

Yeah for five long years I've had to pause. The children came in to my care and even though the risks associated with this hobby are low they just weren't risks i was willing to take or more to the point take on behalf of the kids. That is i had people looking at any angle to get me in trouble with family services and there was no way in hell i was going to risk my kids going to the state or foster care but that risk has to a great abated now so onward and upward, the crow is uncaged

You Sir, are a true carer . Not many would have made that sacrifice . I question my own resilience .