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A Million Bottles a Minute: World's Plastic Binge 'As Dangerous as Climate Change' (theguardian.com)
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports: A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20 percent by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change. New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade. The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised "on the go" culture to China and the Asia Pacific region. More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International's global packaging trends report. Most plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water are made from polyethylene terephthalate (Pet), which is highly recyclable. But as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up.
They fit in my cupholders and they are the cheapest way to buy spring water, assuming you get them on sale. I bought two flats of bottles for $3 and then they went down and I bought two more for $2 each.
I do bring them home and put them into the recycling bin, so to me the solution is to make that work. But I'd be equally happy to pay a few cents more per bottle to get compostable ones.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm pretty sure that some seemingly smart person will propose one day to release bacteria into the oceans that can digest plastic and eat it. Just that person will cause us more trouble than we ever wanted. The reason we use plastic is because it can't be digested by bacteria. If we teach bacteria how to do it efficiently we'll get the bill sooner or later by not being able to continue to use plastic for most of its purposes, like containing food, or to keep the bacteria out from medical equipment (non septic stuff is always packaged inside plastic, that's not for the cool looks), etc.
We live in the over-packaged world - everything that is sold and used comes with packaging that often eclipses the amount of material (and labor) for the product itself. This problem will not solve itself, unfortunately.
FWIW, me and my family have not bought any bottled drinks in at least 10 years. Refillable bottle it is - much cheaper too.
That's great you can recycle them. Just like aluminum cans there's no reason not to do it. Of course the problem is made to seem that no one does, but clearly people do recycle. Hence the scare quotes, large numbers, and references like halfway to the sun. 500 billion bottles sounds large but that's less than 100 per person per year. Or one every three days. Few people are going to think that's a problem.
So educate people to recycle and stop saying stupid shit like it's worse that climate change.
Overpopulation. The planet has 7.5 billion people, all of whom want to live the good life as seen in Hollywood movies and TV. One estimate has us reaching 10 billion by 2050. If there were only a billion, some plastic waste and CO2 emissions might not be such a problem. But the existing 7.5 billion folks are already destroying the biosphere, and that is today, where only a few percent (like the US, Western Europe) are enjoying the wonderful lifestyle. Good luck trying to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop aspiring to own a car and eat steak. It will only get worse. In the long run, however, it will probably be a self-correcting problem, if you know what I mean.
The climate can change. Why can't you?
This sounds like a lot, but in reality it is a small fraction of the oil used per hour by humanity. The average weight of a PET drink bottle is 12.7grams, so a million bottles a minute is about 12.7 metric tonnes of plastic a minute. Assuming 100% conversion efficiency from crude into PET (ie other distillates are utilised for other purposes) that is about 90 barrels a minute or 129600 barrels a day.
World crude oil usage is about 100 million barrels a day. So plastic bottles are about 0.13% of daily oil consumption. Even if we stopped using them altogether, the impact would be trivial. Also, many countries burn plastic waste to generate energy, so removing bottles as fuel will potentially cause an equivalent increase in other fossil fuel usage.
I'm not saying we shouldn't help the environment. Just pointing out that this is not going to be a panacea.
"Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore. The Guardian reports:"
If those naughty islands would only behave properly, maybe this wouldn't be such a problem.
Some states do that. They have a deposit on all plastic bottles. They talked about doing it in other states and 'certain political officials' stated that it would be a burden on the poor. When it was asked why don't they remove the deposit on pop, they reply, "The poor shouldn't be drinking pop, water is better." - So let me get this straight: The poor should buy water which is more expensive then pop. Even though they're owned by the same company. -- Sorry for the tangent but this type of thinking is why many states or even cities don't have appropriate recycling programs.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
So, according to Trump, the Koch brothers, and most of the Republican party, not dangerous at all. Got it.
Fixed that for you.
There are two problems with this. One is that even a thin layer of leaves will keep the plastic bottle safe from UV. The other is that most plastics are made with toxics, they don't magically disappear when they break down in the sunlight.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's our future descendants' power source, after the coal runs out (because nuclear power, like keeping that fork you're holding out of your eye, is simply too much for the human race to handle; and 'renewables' are putting us back at the mercy of the elements...).
You do realise that there is more than one kind of plastic, right?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It breaks down, that's true but it doesn't disappear. You just get hundreds of little shards everywhere, it still floats, gets eaten by fish etc. There are microbes that eat it but as with recycling, the cost is too high to do so.
You can kind of map the push for big companies to recycle/reduce the plastic onto oil prices. During any oil "crisis", suddenly everyone invests in how to make the bottles thinner and smaller.
There are plenty of biodegradable options, it's just too expensive and/or biodegrades in storage.
Just legislate a container deposit to be paid by manufacturers. It's then built into the price that the consumer pays for it. Consumer can either throw away the deposit or claim it back at a collection depot.
In Australia, one state has been doing that for decades. People save their bottles and then cash them in at recycling depots while those less-well off make supplemental income collecting discarded containers. You get 10c per plastic or glass bottle and it even applies to cardboard milk and juice cartons.
It works really well as the recycling rate is supposedly over 90%. The government gets to keep the deposits from containers that are never recycled. When you cross the border into this state one thing that is instantly noticeable is how clean the roadsides are.
For some reason though, drink manufacturers like Coca Cola have fought tooth and nail attempts by other states to introduce similar schemes.
The age old way of dealing with garbage has been to toss it in the river. So it flows downstream. Into the oceans.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Unfortunately, you're the one full of BS. While they might break down with direct exposure to the sun, they do so very slowly, more slowly than you have observed. As they break down they release toxins that never even existed until this material was created into the environment and food chain. It also gets broken down into small bits and pieces that small lifeforms end up consuming. Small fish and even smaller organisms, eat this crap, then larger organisms eat them and so forth. You know, like how mercury builds up going up the food chain. Eating a contaminated shrimp isn't as bad as eating a contaminated tuna which has eaten 100s of pounds of those contaminated shrimp.
No, it doesn't all revert back to good 'ol mother earth, it sits in our environment in ever more microscopic forms for 100s or 1000s of years. The first plastic ever created is still with us. The leaves that fell off the trees last year are completely gone and have returned back to mother earthy. We will be fucked by plastic created today long after our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grand have died, if Earth even makes it that far.
So what the title is saying is that there are a bunch of overblown computer models with varying assumptions and cherry picked and massaged data to point to a plastic garbage problem? Thats a relief because be before I was concern about all of the plastic in the oceans.
The assertions of an executive running a group called "Surfers against sewage" doesn't hold much weight for me. Give me some science showing how much damage this plastic actually does. So far, I don't think it's enough to remotely compare to climate change.
That's why the climate change myth was invented in the first place. Plastic was losing its popularity, and something just had to be done about that.
I tend to rant.
If you ignore your impact on reality, your bottled water isn't a sin.
It breaks down in to more stable forms, but it never breaks down into components like carbon. You have ethylene dust that eventually gets into the ocean. Now the freakout that this is a disaster is what I've got a problem with. We don't have hard evidence that this seriously has a negative impact on life. Plastics recycle well, Polyethylene can be incinerated for power if we like, or we can put it in landfills; and despite the freakout in the late 80s and 90s, we're never really gonna have a major problem with finding landfill space. We'll run out of oil needed to make plastic before that happens.
There's nobody on a deserted island to make use of any plastic bottles that are there.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"toxins" is a pretty nebulous word. In the right quantities, basically everything is a toxin. We don't have much evidence that the "toxins" released as plastics break down seriously harm the food chain. And if we do discover any that are harmful, we can potentially develop alternative formulations that don't release those specific chemicals moving forward.
I have NEVER seen a cheap piece of plastic last for more than a couple years out baking in the sunshine. It disintegrates on it's own. {...} but it all reverts back to good ole mother earth.
Yes, under the sun (and lots of other environmental factors, including mechanical action) a bottle will disintegrates.
But THIS IS NOT reverting back to good old mother earth.
It is just breaking a big plastic object into finer plastic dust.
Which brings its own bunch of problems:
- this plastic dust disperse wide
- this plastic dust has a higher risk of getting ingested by marine animal
- this plastic dust also collects organic compounds more easily
- once ingested by marine animal, due to higher amount of organic compound stuck on the plastic dust, these animal accumulate more pollution.
(There a movie called "A plastic ocean" currently touring festivals that explains this better).
And thus, TFS :
Should you ever travel to one of the many uninhibited islands that dot the most remote reaches of Earth's oceans, chances are you'll find plastic bottles littering the shore.
That's actually a myth. You're nearly NEVER going to find whole intact plastic bottles in remote places because the above phenomenon.
The reality is actually much grimmer :
- with the naked eye you're not going to see much (again, artificial islands of collect plastic junks are a myth).
- but if you make lab analysis of the environment, you'll see that :
-- most local marine animals have ingested an alarming amount of plastic dust in their bodies
-- and they'll have probably concentrated some polluant at higher dose.
Otherwise the Tennessee River which I grew up on would be totally lined with styrofoam.
It is a *river*. It wont never stay lined with anything for a long time : eventually everything will get carried away by the current and broken down in smaller particles (also some substance like steel *will* degrade (to rust, etc.) while other like glass and plastic are too chemically stable. At least glass will break-down into sand (basically : glass dust)).
Once carried away by the current they will eventually find their way into the seas, then into the ocean, when they'll finally get caught into some current that will keep them in some cycle forever.
Heck, there are some woods, cedar for example, that will last longer than a plastic bottle exposed to the elements.
Actually wood isn't such a bad exemple.
But not for the reasons you think.
(No: it won't last longer than plastic bottle. It will *keep its shape* for a longer time than plastic [that's why life invented it in plants : because it's structurally sturdy]. But eventually, decomposers [bacteria, funghi, etc.] will manage to digest it. It will actually end up back into CO2)
But some eons ago that wasn't the case. It took some time between life inventing wood (somewhere in the Devonian), and bacteria coming up with a way to degrade it.
Of course all this juicy stored chemical energy was going to end-up being used as a food source for some microbes.
The same situation is happening again. We human produce tons of a nearly indestructible component (plastic) but that is still rich in stored chemical energy (the fact that you can actually burn it into CO2 is a sign).
Eventually all this untapped chemical energy is going to attract some bacteria, and in the recent couple of year, scientist have discovered some types of bacteria who have evolved a way to digest and process plastics.
Maybe in a couple of centuries (and maybe with a little bit of help by researchers) Nature will find a way to clean it self of this plastic pollution, by inventing a way to harness its stored chemical energy.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's a plain and simple fact.
The metaarticle is spot on. We are drowning in plastic.
The problem with plastic is, that it is also a very large third world problem, as any sense about protecting the environment often is dimished there more than it is in some parts of the first world.
We need what I would basically call a total ban on garbage, including plastic waste. Direct recycled sturdy standardised bottles can be made out of plastic, but reusing them has to become a standard. s to become a standard.Plastic wrappings should be banned entirely expect for maybe things that need to be kept sterile, like medical equipment or health and hygiene products.
If I were King, I'd push for a ban of 95% of all Garbage (wrappings) we produce including a total ban on one-way plastic bottles.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Styrofoam. That's a trademarked name for a product made from styrene, a very different product.
sure there are, we just haven't heard from them yet because of the latency in transporting messages over the ocean inside plastic bottles.
...without in any way minimizing the seriousness of the situation, let me observe that littering is deeply embedded in human nature, and it was ever thus. The very phrase "throw it away" tells us what we need to know. If we throw it far enough to be out of sight, we feel that it's gone. I'm leading up to a quotation from Owen Wister's 1902 novel, "The Virginian." Wister visited Medicine Bow, Wyoming in 1885 and I think we can take this as accurate observation:
"Sardines were called for, and potted chicken, and devilled ham: a sophisticated nourishment, at first sight, for these sons of the sage-brush. But portable ready-made food plays of necessity a great part in the opening of a new country. These picnic pots and cans were the first of her trophies that Civilization dropped upon Wyomingâ(TM)s virgin soil. The cow-boy is now gone to worlds invisible; the wind has blown away the white ashes of his camp-fires; but the empty sardine box lies rusting over the face of the Western earth."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Water-soluble water bottles? I like it.
It's not like we don't know where they are going. A couple floating recycling plants in the right places in ocean currents and you clean it up. Don't get me wrong, we should be recycling them prior, but as world problems go this one isn't all that high for me.
Or maybe just collect rain water? Our water is from a cistern.
Five cents per bottle here. There are people who survive by collecting them.
5 cents does nothing, I remember when it was 2 cents per bottle and in today's $ that is 0.15. The deposit should be at least 50 cents per bottle, that will reduce the pollution in two ways, stop people from buying bottled water and give incentive for recycling.
I do not buy bottled water and I think at least in most of the first world it is no different than tap water (yes there are areas where it is needed, Flint anyone). But I see nothing changing in this regard
Some 90% of the plastic in the Pacific has been traced to Asia, specifically China and Viet nam. Now, the poster of this tries to lay the blame on the west claiming that our selling bottled water is to blame. This is no different than those that blame America for China's gov choosing to build new coals plants and continue using more than 85%coal for electricity. Now, the Chinese and Viet nam gov continue to throw their garbage out because it is cheaper and easier. Since both gov are communist/totalitarian, Both gov could order their citizens to clean up. But neither does.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When Ocean Spray Cran Grape switched from glass to plastic, the flavor went to shit. I don't feel overpopulated, but I can tell when packaging affects flavor. Down with plastic, back to glass.
If your neighbors take a cholera shit, the microbial life in the soil will compost it and break it down to harmless base nutrients. I doubt your neighbors are taking a heavy metal enema twice a day, but if they are, no big deal, the soil is an extremely fine grained filter with slow percolation. By the time the water makes its way down into your well, most contamination like that would be left behind in the upper layers of soil.
How deep you drill is up to you. As you go deeper, you have more and more filter material that dirty surface water must pass through before becoming your clean well water. Of course, the trade off is higher energy expense to lift water from deeper wells. Test the water as you drill and decide if it's clean enough or drill further.
Dirty water dumped by industrial neighbors in the next state over? Not likely to matter much at all. How much contamination from your neighboring state do you think is going to get into your well water when it would have to pass through literally MILES of filter material in a mostly horizontal direction? Gravity does not favor horizontal movement of such contaminates. You would have to be pumping an absolutely EPIC amount of water (and dirt) to be able to get anything to move from a neighboring state into your well.
A common misconception about water wells is what the "water table" looks like. "Water table" makes it sound like if you go deep underground, suddenly the soil ends and free flowing water like a river or lake begins, resting on top of a table of impermeable earth. A layer of pure water sandwiched between layers of dirt. That's completely baloney and ridiculous. There is no "table" where one material ends and the other begins.
Think of a wet sponge that's been sitting around for a while. The top is generally dry due to evaporation and as you go downwards, the sponge is more fully saturated with water due to gravity pulling water downwards. If you drill a hole into the earth (the sponge), soil around your borehole will start oozing water into your hole because pressure from the weight of all materials above are squeezing water out like when you squeeze a wet sponge.
Even if some neighbor drills a hole down to the "water table" and dumps contaminated materials straight down their hole, you've still got many feet of spongy filter material between your well and theirs filtering out contaminates. The water is not free flowing between wells. Any water moving between wells must pass through highly compacted soil/sand/etc that exists between the two holes.
Conflating climate and pollution. It's all propaganda.
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Rain water can be indeed excellent. It is essentially distilled water, the purest water there is.
But rain is unpredictable. Rainwater is sometimes contaminated by bird droppings, dust, critters, etc. Maybe you can build enough water storage to get you through an extended drought, but then again, are you sure it will be enough?
I would suggest that a well is more reliable and sustainable. Waste water can be recycled in a never ending circle. The water you wash with and flush down the drain today may well be the clean/filtered water that you pump back out of the ground several months from now. This does not require rain occurring regularly. This does not require massive amounts of water storage containment.
Here in Sweden it is 45-50 cents per 1.5L bottle and 10-15 cents for a 0.5L bottle.
The problem is that you have to bring them all back to the store and that is a hassle if you don't have a car.... Would be great if i could just drop them off at the local recycling room we have in the house and let the money go to the Red-Cross / UHCF or similar.
Good luck trying to convince all 7.5+ billion people to stop aspiring to own a car and eat steak
Do you think convincing 0.5 billion people would be any less futile?
Yes overpopulation is a problem and a multiplier. But convincing them to not use any of the many pervasive modern conveniences of the 21st century that happen to also be or cause environmental pollution (yes I'm including green house gas)... I've said this for years and i'll keep saying it because I've never failed to come to the same conclusion:
These problems need to be fixed at the source, you can't expect people to not drive it's just not possible for too many people, and likewise you can't expect people to spend so much of their time sorting trash... We need to make things that are inherantly safe to the environment, especially when it's bought by the millions everyday and is disposable (plastic containers), those need to be biodegradable.
The UK government recently forced all supermarkets to charge customers 5p for plastic bags... yet 95% of the time I still forget to take bags when I go shopping, and even if I didn't they still need replacing because they brake or get dirty, it's going to end up in the bin, so the whole "reduce" attitude (which is the same as combining this with the population problem) is pissing in the wind - or in this case more like pissing into a hurricane on Jupiter.
And yet you were able to get to the shop to buy them in the first place.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Yeah, that record-tying high was in Iran, but we don't like Iran, so that's good, and therefore not evidence of climate change.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You have ethylene dust that eventually gets into the ocean
Ethylene is a gas, not dust. And ethylene is biologically active, so it does get turned into carbon again.
It's been years but I still cannot understand this "spring water" craze. Why that instead of refilling with tap water?
One thing to notice is that one if the first players in the still bottled water market was "Evian" - "naive" spelled backwards.
How did they convince you to buy the bottled water? How has that become the new normal? How are they taking all of us for suckers?
But now he'll have to go twice!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you aren't a religious environmentalist, your bottled water isn't a sin.
If you don't care about the environment you live in, then you're no better than a rat or a pig. You shit where (and while!) you eat and then you roll around in the shit, fat and happy.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The deposit should be at least 50 cents per bottle, that will reduce the pollution in two ways, stop people from buying bottled water and give incentive for recycling.
You know how Mexicans responded to large deposits on glass bottles? At least at roadside kiosks, by decanting from the bottle into a plastic bag when serving. The bag can't be recycled, even if you get it clean, because it's not marked for recycling.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Strong container deposit legislation pretty much solves this. E.g. "90% of all PET bottles, 63% of all aluminium cans and 86% of all glass bottles sold in Estonia were returned". Finland says "aluminium cans have a recycling rate of about 94% and PET bottles 92%".
Make the containers worth something, and amazingly they stop being thrown about.
These people don't realize anything. I can't believe we seriously have "plastic deniers" too now. Any excuse to not take responsibility or have to change any tiny aspect of their life for the betterment of the entire world...
Climate change found to only be as dangerous as pollution by plastic.
If you expect people to believe you when you say that some problem is the worst ever, you can't then claim that another problem is also the worst ever. I'm pretty sure that nobody who thinks that this is "as bad as climate change" would be willing to compromise on some climate change measures in order to stop pollution by plastic, even though that's what you do when you think that two problems are equally bad.
Ping statistics for remoteass.island.com:
Packets: Sent = 1, Received = 1, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 3647372827384738917283741937491743987198137492187941ms, Maximum = 3647372827384738917283741937491743987198137492187941ms, Average = 3647372827384738917283741937491743987198137492187941ms
Our neighborhood is going to charge 6 euros for each time they have to empty the grey waste bins. Plastic/metal/cardboard/paper/organic waste is picked up separately and is free of charge. For us, that's a big incentive to separate out all the plastic.
That's a nice solution for you; it's a very fortunate thing for you that you live in a land with an unspoiled, clean underground aquifer.
Some countries, like India, have no clean aquifers anymore; the ground water is infected, so well water must be filtered before drinking it. You can trust the filters in your home to work, but you can't trust that any old source of "drinking water" is properly filtered (there are many schemers about.) So when you're out in public, you buy bottled water. And then you dispose of the bottle - it is recommended you crush it so it can't easily be refilled (by schemers.)
John
You fail history. Not so far back, they had bounties to get rid of vermin like rats and snakes. Do you know what people did? They bred rats and snakes to turn in for the bounties.
When the bounty got canceled, they fine free market advocates doing this dumped the vermin (alive) since it wasn't profitable to kill and dispose of them via the bounty anymore.
Once you get a plastic bottle breeding program going, I think the world is going to have a completely different set of problems than people using them to scam recycling booths.
John
5*5*2 = 50 cubic meters. Or in other words, 1765 cubic ft. A well in a decently moist environment will typically yield water within 50 to 100 feet. That's a heck of a lot less dirt to move, you get filtration and underground storage capacity automatically, and you take up far less surface area (letting you grow more crops, etc).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking rainwater. It's fantastic. If you could catch it up higher, you could gravity feed your house and get free water without ANY energy usage. A small rainwater system for the rainy season could be a wonderful addition to a well for the dry season.
Great, another crusade. Thank god we have people like you to tell us how to live.
We're trying to tell you how not to die. Probably most of us do not actually care about you, I know I don't, but you're taking us with you. If we were doing that, you'd kill us. Guess what?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even if some neighbor drills a hole down to the "water table" and dumps contaminated materials straight down their hole, you've still got many feet of spongy filter material between your well and theirs filtering out contaminates. The water is not free flowing between wells. Any water moving between wells must pass through highly compacted soil/sand/etc that exists between the two holes.
Water moves through sand quite freely, even when compacted, because of the nature of sand; it's made of many little pieces of silicate, and it never fits that tightly together that water can't flow through it. That's why we add sand to soil if we need to increase drainage and the problem isn't clay. (Adding sand to clay helps nothing, and in fact it just makes the problem worse by increasing the mineral content when you actually need more organic material.)
In fact, many wells and even springs are "under surface influence", which is what they call it when rain can get into your well rapidly. If rain can get in to wherever your water is coming from, then so can any kind of pollutant. Our well is fed by an underground river, which as you probably know is just a bunch of sand and gravel. It's under surface influence to the point that the character of the water changes substantially when it rains. This is in spite of being a deep well (around 160') which goes through a clay cap.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you are putting too much stress on heredity instead of environment and whether you know it or not you are pushing a bit of a disturbing and misguided line popular in the 1920s to 1940s.
People are people, even if you think they are somehow in a lower class than you that doesn't make them a different subhuman species that is going to outbreed the social class you like. You and all those others "evolved" from ancestors with many children probably two generations or less back, so we already match your suggestion.
If I'm on the island, it's uninhibited. Even if it wasn't before. [dance club music]
In a strange sort of way, non-biodegradable plastic is working against global warming. It acts as a carbon sink by trapping carbon. The problem with co2 is we are releasing it by burning trees and oil. If we capture it in plastic, we prevent it from being released. In some ways, it would make sense to capture as much carbon as we can in the form of non-biodegradable plastic and bury it underground where it can't be released. Kind of like what we are doing with landfills. The more oil that is used for plastic and ends up in the landfill, the less of it that ends up in the air as too much co2.
Makes me feel good to litter. Gives me a warm feeling, helping my fellow man. Heck, throw down three empty bottles, have some charity.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We can ship you our empties. Sounds potentially profitable. Will the swedish post do the post due on delivery thing?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just put your trash in the neighbors bin, duh. You euros aren't good at the whole innovation thing are you?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If it says 'from concentrate' on the bottle, buy the concentrate. Why pay to ship the water?
Bottled 'Ice Tea'...fucking morons.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Since most bottled water is really minimally filtered if at all tap water, sell reusable insulated water containers (from cheap single wall to nice double wall, with fancy caps or plain) next to a water dispenser. Buy a token, fill your cup. Containers are reusable, no million bottles a minute. Forget your container, buy a new one and get a token with it to fill it. different size containers, different cost tokens. Even the tokens are reusable. in an area with bad water? filter it, UV it, sell it. It's now clean. and easier to clean centrally. Make sure there is some redundancy (multiple machines spare parts, redundant filtration paths). No water locally? Ship water in and store it in bulk. Bulk beats single unit containers.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I don't doubt that a spring would be under surface influence, as a spring by definition is water trickling out of the ground by itself. That water can't be very far underground if it can just ooze out by itself. It could have been filtered by travelling only a short distance through soil, unlike a well.
A 160' well should not suffer from much surface influence -- unless it was constructed poorly. I could see coarse grained sand and/or gravel letting water flow freely with poor filtering effect, but such materials would NOT stay free of finer grained materials washing into the crevices over time. Maybe if you lived on a beach or riverfront where the waves have been literally washing away everything but sand for millennia. Maybe if you were pumping out water (and dirt) in massive quantities to wash out the finer materials. Otherwise, no, there IS going to be finer grained materials washing into the sand and gravel, allowing your well water to be filtered and clean.
One possible problem is that surface water can potentially slide down the outside of the well casing, bypassing the filtering effect of the soil.
A good well should have a 2 inch annular ring of dry sodium bentonite clay down the borehole between the well casing and the surrounding soil. This bentonite clay will swell up when moist, creating a water tight seal around the well casing to prevent surface water from washing down the sides. The ground level around the well should be raised and sealed with concrete to encourage water to run away from the borehole rather than puddling up around it.
A commercial well driller wants to the job done, get paid, then go home and drink beer. If skimping on the bentonite seal or flubbing it up happens without the buyer realizing, they get paid and go home just the same. If the buyer complains later, tell 'em the well is fed by a "dirty underground river" and shrug. Maybe the buyer will buy another well in a new location to try to avoid the dirty underground river -- more beer for the driller, right?
Drill your own well and do it right.
Exactly right. 60 years ago "small" (8oz) bottles had a 2-cent deposit and "large" (quart) bottles had a 5-cent deposit. Back then most folks found it cost effective to return the bottles and retrieve their deposit.
Fast forward 60 years and bottles and cans now have a 5-cent deposit. Almost nobody but the impoverished homeless folks find it cost effective to stand in line to recover the deposits. I see some spending their days and nights collecting and then lugging sacks of cans as big as themselves worth only about five dollars, maximum.
The bottling industry has a very strong lobby.
Those countries still have very high child mortality rates, especially for the very young.
A 160' well should not suffer from much surface influence -- unless it was constructed poorly.
There's nothing wrong with my well, and the well head is in a pump house so rain isn't entering along the casing regardless. The truth is that geology is complicated, and your generalizations are bullshit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That only works when the people are good at separating recycling and compost from the stuff that can't be. You don't want to have people just dump stuff into the recycling in order to avoid the fee. All it takes is one person to do that and you can ruin a truck load of recycling. It depends on the sorting capabilities at the depot and what the people at the truck do on how much recyclable materials get thrown out.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's a good idea to get people to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out.
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I thought plastic bottles were UDP only, not ICMP