The World's trash crisis

[LONDONER]

To be fair I don't think America is alone in this. Where I live we have trash collections seven days a week. Marvellous you would think, especially in the long hot summers when organic waste would putrify very quicky but.................this ease of disposing of rubbish does mean that people tend to accumulate and throw away much more. Instead of insisting on less packaging etc, they just buy and then throw away the discarded packaging.

Personally I refuse to buy over packaged food. If I see a lettuce packed in a plastic tray, I pass it by. That goes for the rest of my shopping. Were it not for the organic stuff I would be able to take down my very small amount of trash once every two or three weeks.

http://www.latimes.com/world/global-deve...story.html

[mrex]

that is terrible.. we sort here everything from biowaste through paper to drugs and once a week they empty our carbage cans but still too much is going to wrong places.

some countries definitely need to sort their waste much better and start using biodegradable materials to pack things. i wish we would use even more them. atleast we recycle over 90 % of plastic bottles for example. but.. 10% is going to somewhere else :O oh why?

when i go to the trash room, there are several boxes for trashes: bio, paper, board, glass, metal and the rest normal waste. and near me there are stations or trashcans where i can drop waste like batteries for example and drugs go back to the drugs store for free.


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[LONDONER]

Thanks mrex. Where I live we also have different containers for different waste; general rubbish, paper/cardboard, plastic/Tetra bricks, aluminium drink cans, glass etc. Trouble is that in spite of the seven days a week trash collection, some people are juts too lazy to sort out their rubbish and just dump everytthing in to the general rubbish container. I agree with you that this needs sorting out.

[Beaux]

Well...this might seem a bit insane to some, but I have always tried to re-use and recycle as much as possible, and ever since I started raising and breeding colubrid snakes I have found (what I believe to be) a really neat way of composting paper, cardboard, and kitchen waste.

As many people already know, snakes eat rodents. When I got my first snake, I ordered pre-killed, frozen rodents from a supposedly reputable company, but when I got my first order I discovered that 1/4 of the rodents had not been frozen in a reasonable time and had begun to decay. To top it off, another 1/4 of the rodents had apparently been euthanized improperly (you could tell from their positions that their death was not peaceful). This disturbed me greatly.

Not long after, I read several articles which described some of the unsafe practices used by many in the frozen rodent industry which could result in the death of snakes being fed those rodents. The number one unsafe practice was feeding the rodents food with red dye. Red dye causes cancer in snakes, and some of my snakes are worth thousands of dollars.

SO...I decided to raise and humanely euthanize my own feeder rodents. I chose Natal Mice, as they produce virtually no smell.

It took a little while to get my system down, but now I create the substrate/bedding for the mice out of shredded junk mail and paper packaging. I soak the accumulated paper and use a drill attachment to create a paper-slurry. After rinsing it a couple of times to remove the bulk of the dye, I spread it out on screens to dry. Once dry I place it in the 50 quart tubs I raise the mice in. I change the paper substrate every 3 weeks. As the mice urinate in the paper, the ammonia in their pee breaks down whatever dyes remain in the paper, and the used substrate can be safely added to my composting pile.

The mise eat virtually all of our kitchen scraps, which GREATLY reduces the cost of feeding the mice. I feed an average of 100 mice a month in this way for about $5 (I use a mix sold for squirrel feeders; one 50lb bag for $60 lasts ~12 months).

In this way, I no longer add any paper products to the recycle bin, nor am I adding any organic matter to the landfill.

~Beau

[LONDONER]

Thanks Beaux, it sounds fascinating but I'm not going to breed mice nor keep snakes. I'll just keep recycling as much as I am able.

[Insertnamehere]

Were it not for the organic stuff I would be able to take down my very small amount of trash once every two or three weeks

Plastic is organic too, you know?


Aye, the problem is hardly anyone is or wants to be aware of it. If folks indoctrinated newer generations to care about proper waste handling and recycling as much as they indocrinate them for other nonsense (like religion), it wouldn't be so much of a problem.

When custome fails, legislation should fill in the void. I reckon not long from now, this will be a thing. What you're not willing to do voluntarily, you'll be forced to do by law. How many places will do it and how fast, I don't know.