Green Living: personal landfill sites - saving for the future?

1 to 13 of 13

- CommentAuthorludite
- CommentTimeJun 25th 2008
On an old thread a while back someone made a comment that has been niggling at me.

I'm sick of the dustbin men refusing to take our bins because grandma forgot that plastic bags go in the green bin and not the blue one. . . .or whatever. . . . .

I'm sick of the fact we put 'supposed recyclables' all mixed up together in the blue bin. They'll take a plastic bottle, but they won't take a yoghurt pot. They'll take a baked bean tin, but not a length of rusty cast iron drain pipe. . . . . .

We've already touched on the concept that our present landfill sites may well end up our resource of the future - all that recyclable plastic just lying there waiting to be reused. . . . . .

So, my question is. . . . . . if you had enough land, what rubbish of the present could you chuck in and cover over, ready to harvest when we run out of fossil fuels??
- CommentAuthorjoe.e
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2008 edited
Interesting idea... Although I suppose that in the future, when oil is scarce, if the sorting and recycling technologies are sorted out then plastics will be fairly available anyway, and if they're not then your plastic won't be much use either. How about building a deep storage vault, and filling it up with ingots of solid plastic, as a long-term investment?
My aunt once had a house in Cornwall that had a substantial pigsty with it. This pigsty was built of huge blocks, about a ton each, I was told. They were slag from copper refining, sold to the workers for a penny each in the old days. The extraction techniques were primitive back then, and the slag still contained a substantial amount of copper - maybe a percent or two. So each block contains ten or twenty kilos of copper. There must have been a few hundred blocks in the pigsty - maybe a couple of tons of copper in that one pigsty, at 8 or 9000 dollars a ton now. Cornwall is littered with similar buildings. At some point it will be worthwhile getting it out, but not yet, not by a long way. On a domestic scale, it might be a long time before it's worth digging up your plastic bags.
- CommentAuthorTheDoctor
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2008
the problem with plastics is all the different types in circulation

Something like one wrong pot in a thousand or one in a million and the batch is ruined and un-useable.

there are shampoo bottles made of at least three types of plastic. There is no need
Make ALL bottles and pots from the same plastic, then recycling is easier
make tops and labels from the same plastic (like Ecover) easier recycling

a fancy shape costs nothing (it's just the shape of the mold) so they can still be unique.

put milk, yoghurt, shampoo, water, etc in the SAME container.

Better still would be to use the SAME container for many products, with just the label differentiating it. Re-use then possible across multiple products. This is a step-change too far for the average consumer, though.

mini-landfill

I've always advocated personal or community compost over Council collection.
Council collection serves to remove garden and food waste from landfill - that's it
Community or personal compost keeps all the nutrient in the community, avoids collection, avoids central 'treatment' avoids re-packaging, avoids re-distribution for sale.
If you have a garden, do your own
If you dont, take it along to Mrs Miggins heap, or the local allotments, and therefore reduce fertilizer costs to nothing.

it really is so simple.

I am not an uber-green tied-dyed hemp underpants green warrior, but i can carry my apple cores to the compost bin which is the same distance from the back door as the wheely bin.
- CommentAuthorludite
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2008
Before our veg plot was turned into grass for the sheep I used to spend may happy hours being an archeologist - there was millions of bits of broken pottery - usually delft ware.

We already have 2 black plastic compost bins and a large heap of extra stuff.

I'll happily take scrap metal to the tip - because it would rust if I buried it.

When I start my home brew idea I'll be using a lot of our glass bottle wastage.

It's just the plastic. . . . . . If it doesn't rot away and the councils can't yet recycle it properly - because there are so many different types - I was wondering about my personal landfill.

However, if, as joe.e says, the large blocks of potential copper are still not worth recycling after all these years I'm wondering what the benefit would be. . . . . . . It may only be worth it when they start charging us more to take away our waste.

By the way doctor. So glad to hear you don't wear hemp underwear - sounds a bit scratchy to me
- CommentAuthorTheDoctor
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2008
so i hear!
- CommentAuthorjoe.e
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2008
The other thing is just to concentrate on re-use, and on not buying too much that comes in plastic containers. Work out what the council can reliably take and avoid the rest, if that's practical. Brands like Ecover tend to use easily recycled or re-used packaging. Then the small amount that you end up with can go to landfill and await technological developments. If there was a huge quantity of the copper blocks in one place, it might have been worth processing them by now; likewise, a big landfill site full of plastic is easier to deal with than if it's in little piles spread around the countryside. Another anecdote: some years ago there was a piece of derelict land next to Cardiff train station. It had been used as a dump by the train company a hundred years before, and it was full of the substandard coal rejected by the company back then. A clever developer bought it, having realised that what steam engineers in 1890 rejected counts as high quality house-coal nowadays; he had it dug up and bagged, sold it off, then built on the site for a double profit. What counts as rubbish changes over time...
Hemp clothing is actually quite soft, similar to linen. I haven't seen any underwear, but I used to have a nice pair of hemp jeans - I think the original 19th century Levi's were made out of hemp.
- CommentAuthorludite
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2008
With you on the reuse idea joe.e

I'm growing pepper plants and globe artichokes at the moment in plastic pots that are on about their 10th use. Hoping to sell of my spare plants at the kids summer school fair soon. When I've used them all up, I'll be going on to yoghurt pots etc.

It's the concept of rubbish of the past that becomes useful for the future which is my point. I understand that a large landfill will make more sense, but I was wondering what I could save myself, now, that my kids may get benefit from in the future. eg. I heard a story a few years ago that the little wires in old lightbulbs are made of a special metal that we will run out of in about 10 years. . . . . I got to wondering if, before I chucked the dead bulb out, I should open it up and remove the wire?

As for hemp clothing - nothing beats cotton pants in my opinion. Forget silk sheets. Slept on them once in Hong Kong and kept sliding off the bed. VERY annoying
- CommentAuthorgreenman
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2008
On the subject of plastics, recycling, and charging for refuse collection - when/if they start charging us according to the amount we leave out for collection, supposedly as an incentive for us all to recycle more, how is that going to be justified when currently no two councils offer the same recycling facilities (some will recycle several types of plastic, others virtually none), and none of them will recycle all types? Many of us I'm sure would happily recycle the lot if only someone out there would process the waste!

(incidentally if all products used the same shaped plastic bottles then they'd at least have to have their contents embossed with braille descriptions, so they couldn't all come from the same mould - a minor point which in no way changes the argument for some form of statnardisation of materials used)

Standardising the types of plastic used would of course help to solve the problem. Why are there so many types in use?!?! They all come from the same raw materials, and although there are plastics in use in specialist applications, I can't see that there is any need for more than one type of plastic bottle for use in the shops...

[oh, and by the way - no hemp underware, as far as I'm aware!]
- CommentAuthorludite
- CommentTimeJun 26th 2008
Greenman. You don't do this site 'commando' then, like Judith Chalmers?
- CommentAuthorCWatters
- CommentTimeJun 27th 2008
The government are asking communities to volunteer to store spent nuclear fuel. Does that count?
- CommentAuthorludite
- CommentTimeJun 27th 2008
having raed a recent link from this forum, and having learnt a bit more about the real cost of GSH and MHRV. . . . . . I'm almost won over by the idea. . . . free heat. . . . . . still on the fence at the moment though.
- CommentAuthorEd Davies
- CommentTimeJun 28th 2008
Posted By: TheDoctorput milk, yoghurt, shampoo, water, etc in the SAME container.

Wouldn't that make your tea taste funny? ;-)
- CommentAuthormrswhitecat
- CommentTimeJun 30th 2008
In France they have a compulsory 'eco-participation tarif' based on what 'eco' damage it's going to cost when the article packs up and needs getting rid of - eg 13 euros from every fridge sold goes into this fund, a microwave is 2 euros. There is also something in the price of batteries and fluorescent tubes + toy electric trains, chainsaws, sewing machines, Nintendo (everything really that can't be composted). The money goes into a pot that funds an outfit whose job it is to see to collection, reuse / recyling ...

1 to 13 of 13

Add your comments



	Site Map \| Home \| View Cart \| Pressroom \| Business \| Links	Contact Us
Logout
© Green Building Press

Green Building Forum

Categories

Feeds

Green Living: personal landfill sites - saving for the future?

Username	Password