Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

It takes mad amounts of money to ‘recycle’ it but good point

The Expert answers:

The answer depends heavily on where you are and how your water is won. If being in small village up in the Rocky Mountains and water is taken from a local creek, it does not really matter if it goes downhill directly or by your toilet. If it is a village or town, not all of the water of the creek should be used for toilets because otherwise there is no creek anymore – an no tourists coming for fishing. Not even a substatial part should be used for human neds (toilet, wahing, cleaning the dishes etc) without clearance because this would pollute the river and there might be no fish anmore as well,

If being in California, New Mexico or other states in the south, the water supply is taking from rivers – Rio Grande (Great River) is not great anymore because almost all water is taken by humans) – or from groundwater, sometimes even from groundwater reservoirs that took thousands of years to form. Taking more water from groundwater than is resupplied by nature means to lower the level of groundwater. The consequences are disastrous because the area of the reservoir will slowly turn into a desert. Plants can not reach water with their roots, ponds and lakes fall dry, rivers as well.In some of the southern states of the USA this is a serious problem. And in many other parts of the world as well. Ensuring access to clean drinking water for every human without destroying the basics of living has been marked as one of the most important problems for 21st century by the UN.

The Expert answers:

Mostly because it cannot be used again for sometimes hundreds of years. We draw water up from aquifers that is potable, but we either contaminate it to where we either cannot use it, or we can treat it. It can also just evaporate and end up in the ocean where it cannot be efficiently use. Meanwhile, the aquifer only recharges at a certain rate, so if we’re pumping more than it recharges, especially during drought, it can be pretty easy to “waste” water. It’s true it’s recycled, but it’s the matter of how long it takes for that to happen on it’s own, or the energy we need to put into it that’s what really matters.

The Expert answers:

Construction waste recycling is the separation and recycling of recoverable waste materials generated during construction and remodeling. Packaging, new material scraps and old materials and debris all constitute potentially recoverable materials. In renovation, appliances, masonry materials, doors and windows are recyclable.
Most construction waste goes into landfills, increasing the burden on landfill loading and operation. Waste from sources such as solvents or chemically treated wood can result in soil and water pollution.

Some materials can be recycled directly into the same product for re-use. Others can be reconstituted into other usable products. Unfortunately, recycling that requires reprocessing is not usually economically feasible unless a facility using recycled resources is located near the material source. Many construction waste materials that are still usable can be donated to non-profit organizations. This keeps the material out of the landfill and supports a good cause.

The most important step for recycling of construction waste is on-site separation. Initially, this will take some extra effort and training of construction personnel. Once separation habits are established, on-site separation can be done at little or no additional cost.

The Expert answers:

Today, recycling, maintaining our sustainability and taking care of our environment is a big thing. While the best method is to reuse our wastes, this often cannot be done. Therefore, the only way to go seems to be to recycle, to use the same materials to make that same product again and again. While this seems to be a great idea, it is not always the case.

I usually carry a water bottle in my bag. I drink bottled water not because I believe it is safer or cleaner than tap water; but rather merely out of convenience. It allows me to have quick access to water when I’m not near a bubbler or a fast-food restaurant. I also refill my water bottle whenever possible. This is reusing waste products, and therefore the best way to sustain our environment. However, water bottles break. When it is broken, I throw it in the rubbish bins provided, NOT the recycling bin. Why?

I think that recycling is somewhat a pointless exercise. It is not totally useless though. I recycle aluminium cans and such. The reason why I recycle aluminium cans and not plastics bottles will be discussed later.

In the New York Times, John Tierney wrote an article called “Recycling is Garbage”. In that article, he declared that “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources”. In the article, he points out many things. For instance, packaging saves resources, reducing food spoilage. Fast-food meals generate less trash per person than home-cooked meals. Also, the cheapest way to dispose of garbage is in a landfill.

Recycling, however, costs a lot of money. The time, effort and money spent on picking materials and sorting them out costs more than it would cost to dump it in landfill. Then it would have to be re-processed. Tierney figures that the value of the labour of recycling to be literally hundreds of dollars per ton more.

People might say that landfills are taking too much space. However, it is a common myth. A. Clark Wiseman of Spokane’s Gonzaga University figures that, at the current rate, Americans could put all of the trash generated over the next 1,000 years into a landfill 91 m high and 56 km square or dig a similar-size hole and plant grass on top after it was filled. America has an area of 9,631,418 square km. I doubt they will have trouble finding an area to dump their rubbish. Some people might be worried that this landfill is hazardous and potentially lethal to the environment. An easy solution to this is to shoot off the rubbish into space. All we need to do is provide that much space for rubbish and shoot it off to space once every a thousand years.

People also say that we are going to run out of resources in the near future, they are wrong. Resources on earth are not scarce at all. WorldWatch, a group which has constantly predicted the near future when humans will run out of resources, now acknowledges: “The question of scarcity may never been the most important one”.

People think that recycling paper saves trees. This is wrong. Paper is made from trees which are specifically grown to be chopped down to be turned into paper. It has the same concept as a chicken farm. Australians eat 1 billion chickens every year. And yet, chicken is not an endangered species. This is because we farm chicken. If we are to hunt chickens from the woods and still eat the same amount of chicken, chicken will be extinct in a matter of hours. The same goes for trees. We ‘farm’ trees the same way we farm chickens. Recycling paper doesn’t save trees. As a matter of fact, recycling paper does more harm to the environment than to just make paper freshly from trees. The process of transporting used paper, sorting different types of paper and many other processes involved in recycling paper produces a lot more pollution than just chopping down trees and turning them into paper. The only real way to reduce paper consumption is to read the content of the paper over and over again. A fully-grown oak tree soaks in about 380 L of water a day. That is a lot of water. However, this oak tree does not only consume water, it also eats greenhouse gases and helps purify the air. On the contrary, if everybody stops using paper all of a sudden, we will eventually destroy those trees and use the area for something else. So in fact, throwing away paper saves trees. More paper demand means more trees will be planted and therefore cleaner air.

People also think that we are running out of water. But truthfully, water does not run out. Where would water go? We don’t shoot water off to space. The water that we use is contained inside earth’s gravitational pull. In fact, we have more water than the dinosaurs, since the icecaps are melting. The dinosaurs lived for 115 million years and they didn’t die out because they run out of water. Humans have only been around for 2 mill

The Expert answers:

It is not just the waste at the bottom that you need to remove by vacuuming the gravel. The real goal is to remove the ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate (poop is future ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate). You will almost always have small traces of these compounds in your WATER (not just sitting at the bottom), so adding the water back to the tank would really be doing very little (really, it completely counters your time spent cleaning the tank). Many people use their tank water to water their houseplants because the fish poop is pretty much fertilizer…

Soop Nazi

The Expert answers:

It gets naturally recycled, generally yes. But if one country were to waste a lot of water through evaporation due to improper agricultural practices (like, for example, India), then that water isn’t lost for the planet as a whole, but it might only come down as precipitation in other countries, or over the ocean, our out of season.
So yes, it’d difficult to destroy water, but it doesn’t cycle instantly, and you can have local losses, or losses for a season, and thus have water shortages.

The Expert answers:

The amount of water needed to rinse a plastic container is negligible compared to the resources used to make a new one. If you wash them in water used to wash dishes, you’re not wasting any water.

The Expert answers:

Donot waste water at home
Recycle the water in your society
Use rainwater harvesting in your area