Thursday, January 20, 2005

 

Recycling

I went to a seminar last night that was given by the president of the American Chemical Society, ACS. It was pretty good. Entertaining, but he went waaaaaaay basic at the beginning of the talk. I assume that most chemists and educated people know what polymers are so you don't really have to go in depth on the "basics of polymers". That and he just covered plastic recycling and did mention glass, but that's it. He didn't touch on paper or steel, but I assume both of those just involve shredding and/or melting. I'll do some online research on those.

But I left my notes at home so I can't do a good enough job of recapping, but the things I do remember are:
Glass colors don't mix. If they do, you might as well grind it up into sand.
Plastic colors don't mix. Your red-orange Tide container shouldn't mix with my blue ALL container. But if it does, no problem since laundry bottles are actually two layers of "virgin" plastic over a middle layer of recycled plastic. Very interesting.

And the 4 steps of recycling are collection, separation, processing, resale.
Currently the problem to recycling is supply of things to be recycled. Not "there isn't any recycling around here" or "We can't recycle that" but "we don't have enough stuff."
Another problem is the advent of the single serve plastic bottles. These are everywhere, but when you used it for lunch, you threw it away instead of taking it somewhere to be recycled. Not you, but the general you. I know you recycle.

So I guess I did remember more about it than I thought.

Recycle!

|

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

NORML

View Products
Freedom is NORML

Google
Search WWW Search silonius.blogspot.com
Who Links Here