Channel 4. Dumped. A solution to the recycling problem.
After watching the new eco-program on Channel 4. I noticed that there is a apartnet problem with consumers recylcing habits. This program also highlighted the problem of recycling in the UK, and this is the complete lack of caring / putting in the effort.
In the coming weeks I hope to design a better recycling bin to make this process a lot easier. I hope to build on my EnergyTree project, and will also look into SocialCollecting, to create closer links with neiherbours and statiscal anaylsis of the worse offening non-recylcing streets.
Watch this Space!
Collector
Collector makes use of the community spirit in today’s web 2.0 online societies. The system will be online, and accessed via the touch screen of the EnergyTree. The collector is there to encourage people to recycle and take recycling to the depot to be processed. Once at the depot the collector will get extra green points. Although every person could take there own Re-Tree Bins, not everyone will want to and not every local government can afford to collect and sort the recycling as effective as lots of dedicated collectors.
RECYCLING A WASTE OF TIME, MONEY AND ENERGY FOR NOTHING!!
What a waste to carefully separate our rubbish for recycling just to see much of it dumped into the same bin to go for landfill or worse still exported to China to be ‘Recycled’!! But can’t you all see that much of our ‘post consumer recycling’ is the biggest con of our time!
By the time energy has been used to transport, clean and process our rubbish we might as well have made the stuff from scratch!
Paper recycling does not EVEN save trees (and the de-inking process during recycling produces one million tonnes of toxic sludge per year in the UK which is sent to landfill!) and the current value of one tonne of mixed household paper is just £3!
It is much better to REUSE glassware than to send it halfway round the country to be expensively remelted to make what we had anyway! (is that mad or what!) and we currently have a ‘Green glass mountain’ of wine bottles that cannot even be recycled because we import almost all of our wine. So this glass is being landfilled many miles from where it was collected or sent at our expense abroad.
And there are seven main kinds of plastics that must not be mixed or contaminated if they are to be successfully recycled. (Much plastic recycled is merely being ‘downcycled’ into other products which only really delays its journey to landfill or incineration).
Transporting plastic bottle is like carrying a truck load of balloons around the country.
How many more recycle lorries do we need?
One for glass?
One for paper?
One for plastic?
And even one to collect our compost (can we all not compost our own green waste at home?)
And finally one for our general waste?
I beg you to work it out for yourself.
This kind of recycling does not save energy, does not save resources and is just one giant CON!
Comment by Soldierf — March 10, 2008 @ 3:48 pm