Re-cylcing cans
I've been at home for the past couple of weeks looking after my wife and new baby. After millions of years of evolution I would have expected that by now humans would be able to reproduce without hassle. Not so in our case...
Anyway, it has been interesting doing all the household stuff, and seeing what I miss on a daily basis. A few things have really struck me in the past week, firstly how much bread we get through and secondly how quickly the bin fills up with waste packaging materials which aren't obviously re-cyclable.
I am concious when we put the bins out every Thursday that we seem to always have 4 or 5 bin bags full of stuff, and other houses down the road have more or less depending upon whether or not they have children in the house. I've started thinking more carefully about what I put in the bin bags. I don't really know much about what happens to it once it gets taken away - does it go straight to landfill (if so I am deeply worried) or is it sorted before being taken to landfill (in which case I'm less worried).
While I was standing at the sink just now, washing out the dirty cans I wondered whether I was wasting my time, and whether or not they would automatically get extracted from my normal waste bag by big magnets somewhere someplace... While trying to find out I came across SCRIB - the Steel Can Recycling Information Bureau.
http://www.scrib.org/recycling_steel/steel_lifecycle.asp
I'm still none the wiser, but will ask my council to see what they say.
7 comments:
Don't all the plastic bottles ie; milk bottles, pop bottles etc, don't they get shipped off to China?
Hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic and other waste are being exported to China from Britain and the rest of Europe to be picked over in local homes or burnt in huge bonfires.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/04/19/wrubb19.xml
We ask for the materials to be clean and dry for 3 main reasons. Firstly a lot of the material collected is hand sorted and it is not very nice for anybody to have to sort material that is not clean and may be covered in food waste etc. Secondly if the materials are not clean and the items are put loose into the bin it is possible that they could attract flies. Another consideration is that the reprocessors want clean material, not material that is wet and contaminated with food waste as this renders the material unsuitable for recycling. All we ask is that when you are washing up, food tins and cans and plastic bottles etc are rinsed out before letting the washing up water out of the sink.
Jo/Phil,
I just can't help feeling there has to be some way in which what you guys do and what we do at HF can link up...?
Perhaps a chat over a beer sometime would be mutually benficial?
Simon
You'll have to wait a month to have a beer with Phil !
Best you and me have lots of beer then Jo! By the way Lucy is coming to stay this weekend so I'll show her your blog. Simon.
Here in Florida each county is resposible for their own recycling program.
When we built this house 13 years ago, we were given 2 bins to use (in addition to our own trash bin) for recycling. One for paper and cardboard and one for cans, bottles, glass and batteries. (We are asked to rinse the containers, but they are all re-rinsed before being separated for their next step.)
We recycle religiously, but not everyone has their bins out on Mondays with us. And that reminds me... tomorrow is trash day!
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