Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

For plastics, 1 and 2 are ALWAYS recyclable.
5 and 6 are commonly found, but are usually Styrofoam-like products and cannot be recycled… They are found in nearly all ‘hot cups’ [whether they look and feel like paper or not], but most fast food places almost always use them instead of paper cups. So just try to avoid them.
Some grocery stores now have ‘reusing’ centers for their plastic bags, so please participate, as plastic bags are #6 and cannot be recycled, only reused in their original form.

Paper. It is also important to recycle paper. Contrary to popular belief, all paper can be recycled. Paper bags, kid’s old school assignments, junk mail, newspapers, coupons, everything.

Glass is easily recycled, and jars and bottles are the most common.

Aluminum from tuna cans, fast food take out and the like are often recyclable.

But always check online for what your facility will and will not take.

Bottom line: If you are lucky enough to live in an area that includes recycling with garbage pick up, participate. If your area does not include recycling, look for your local recycling center. You may or may not have to pay a small handling fee, but keep in mind that those who have ‘free’ recycling are really just playing for it with their larger garbage pick up bill.

~Stay Green

The Expert answers:

Yes, I use fabric trash bags. But no, I don’t use big plastic bags glad trash bags, or any of those products.

To line our kitchen garbage, I use a heavy duty (non recyclable) department store bag which is rinsed out and hung on the line to dry and disinfect, after it’s been emptied in the trash bins.

For the occasional plastic grocery store bag we sometimes end up with, they either get recycled, donated to a food pantry, or placed in a mutt mitt tower in public parks.

The Expert answers:

Plastic bags are causing more damage than paper bags; especially plastic bags with thickness less than 20 microns.
Though there are many reasons for this fact, the main reasons are:
(i) plastic is not easily biodegradable
(ii) if thickness of plastic bag is less than 20 microns, it cannot be recycled
(iii) plastic bag getting into soil, accelerates soil erosion and cause soil sickness thereby rendering soil to loose its fertilitiy
(iv) the improperly disposed plastic bags are eaten away alongwith other things by the animals causing digestion problems to the animals.

Coming to your point of cutting trees for paper, you’re correct. But, trees are being felled leaving the base and roots for making paper thereby trees are allowed to have a fresh growth. However, if we are very much worried about conservation of trees/nature, we have to save paper by using them repeatedly number of times and to use them to the extent possible. Further, we can adopt methods of paperless communication, administration, examination, etc. By adopting conservation of paper, we indirectly aid in conservation of forest and environment.

It seems cruel to ask suggestions for killing animals. Animals are also one of the God’s creation and they form a link in food chain of living beings including humans. If one link is cut in a chain, it will harm all involved in the chain. Further, animals are also forming part and parcel of the ecology and they are having equal rights to live on the earth as human do have.

I hope a person like you who is concerned about better usage of paper and plastic bags in an interest of preserving environment, will not upkeep interest in killing animals though mightier than animals.

The Expert answers:

What exactly happens will vary depending on the kind of system that’s set up in your location, but I’ll describe a typical system.

The garbage man will dump the bag into the truck. This can be either by hand, or a mechanical claw which picks up the dumpster/garbage can. There are rear-loader, side-loader, and front-loader garbage trucks. The garbage is then compacted. Regardless of whether you threw out food scraps, some old stuff, or dirty diapers, it all gets squished together and pushed into the truck to make room for more. The plastic bag will probably tear or be damaged, but that doesn’t make much of a difference.

The truck will then move on to the other houses, dumping their garbage and compacting it into the other garbage. After the truck finishes its rounds, it may head either to a transfer station, directly to the dump, or to an incinerator. At the transfer station, other trucks can take it to the dump or an incinerator while the regular truck continues its rounds. Certain high-density residential areas may pay to have their garbage shipped to another place. Some places will make the garbage go through machinery which sorts out certain materials for recycling, but most places just dump it directly.

The incinerator is fairly self-explanatory, it burns garbage for power and heat. The remaining unburned garbage will still have to be dumped.

In the dump, it all comes out of the truck in a big pile. Your individual garbage bag has been crushed and is in there somewhere. Bulldozers will roll over it, move it into “neat” hills, and partially cover it with dirt. Here, it will stay for a long time. Some things will slowly biodegrade, but they don’t do so very well in the conditions of the landfill, because all the garbage is squished together. The plastic bag stays there practically forever, unless you use biodegradable bags.

When landfills are closed, they’re covered completely. Pipes will be installed to collect the gases emitted from biodegrading garbage. This has a dual purpose: if the gas leaked out it would contaminate the area and the gas can be burned for electricity/heat production. Things are often built on top of old landfills, but these places tend to have lower property values because of the problems associated with landfills and possible environmental contamination.

I hope I helped!

The Expert answers:

I wondered about this for many years my self, but finally last year i had the chance to go see a recycle transfer station in action.

Each transfer station may work differently, it depends what your council recycles. Also i wonder what sort of contaminants you are talking about,…

The good news off the bat, is they can deal with a fair amount of contaminants. Depending, I have heard Garbo’s say (to me) where they collect “recycle” bins in city and market areas it mostly does get dumped as waste- as there is just too much mixed rubbish. 🙁 PPL!!! Lift your game!!

The main contaminant is plastic bags./ They are the hardest to deal with- even if they are recyclable (as denoted by the triangle with the number). THis is because at the transfer station paper is sorted out on its floating thin (physical) properties: which unfortunately plastic shares- we DOnt want plastic with our paper. So they have guys on a conveyor belt just there to take out plastic bags…

Magnets lift the metals ( not aluminum- its not magnetic) so that’s nice and easy.

PLastic bottles are last left and their numbers are sorted at a different location ( china??)

A reverse polarity system gets the aluminium cans.. They are worth more than 2c EACh so they really want them

MOstly food scraps don’t matter- they hate getting them at the depot.. But it seems the problem is rats and smell rather than contamination that leads to reduction in recycleability!

The Expert answers:

I dont really think you should make money by doing that, its not worth it, hold a garage sale or something. I went to a recycling center and brought like 5 full garbage bags full of bottles and they only gave me 10 bucks back. And it also takes a long time to build up on bottles and cans. Good luck!

The Expert answers:

Great question. As you can see from the previous answers, beyond individual initiative the ‘garbage disposal bureaucracy’ has alot to do with motivation to recycle. For instance, in many places in the usa, you can collect all the plastic in the your world with an intention to recycle but discover there is nothing to do but put it in a landfill because plastic recycling facilities are just not existant 🙁

Picking up one’s own garbage (and that of one’s neighbors’) is still a wonderful personal initiative and better than nothing, in spite of where it ultimately goes (either effectively recycled or alternatively landfilled).

Funny story: I was with my Canadian husband [I am US american] waiting to cross the border into Canada from New York one day – in my car with USA tags. While in the car line to show our passports, my Canadian husband tossed a cigarette out of the window – a bone of contention between us because I hate that and constantly ran behind him retrieving his butts and crunching them up and putting them in my jeans pockets for proper disposal. When we got to the Border Guard Shack, we watched the Officer walk back to the point at which my Canadian husband had pitched his butt. The Canadian Border Guard retrieved the butt from the ground, came to my car window and said “We are so tired of YOU PEOPLE [meaning US Americans – assuming we were us Americans] TRASHING [CANADA]” I was so sad that US Americans, in general, carried the ugly reputation for being trashy. My Canadian husband protested that, even though our car tags were USA, he – a Canadian – was the litterbug. Point of this story is that: It MUST be an individual effort. We are all responsible for our litter and you have to make it an indivual moral philosphy – just as you seem to be doing. The secondary moral here is: Generalizations are not always accurate. Some Canadians are environmental slobs and some US americans have environmental morals.

Hopefully, environmental fragility will make environmental morals a mandate for us all.

The Expert answers:

Here are a few lovely ideas that are inexpensive, quick & recycle material :

http://www.google.co.in/search?q=paper+dress&hl=en&client=opera&hs=bOc&rls=en&prmd=ivns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=bfWLTfmSBNT4ceyTlIkK&ved=0CDQQsAQ — paper dress
http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Paper-Dress — how to make a paper dress in 9 easy steps
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&client=opera&hs=bOc&rls=en&q=how+to+make+paper+bag+dress&aq=6m&aqi=g2g-v3g-j1g-m4&aql=&oq=paper+bag+dress –how to make paper bag dresses
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&client=opera&hs=BQc&rls=en&q=how+to+make+a+dress+made+out+of+newspaper&aq=2b&aqi=g2g-b1&aql=&oq=how+to+make+newspaper+dress — how to make newspaper dresses
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&client=opera&hs=RRc&rls=en&q=how+to+make+a+dress+from+bin+bags&aq=8&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=how+to+make+a+dress+from+ — how to make garbage bin bag dresses.
Http://www.ehow.com/how_5778784_make-dress-out-cellophane-wrap.html — How to Make a Dress Out of Cellophane Wrap

Hope these help
Have fun “fabricating” 🙂

The Expert answers:

Where have you been? Oo

1. Many centralised recycling bins have popped up in many HDB estates. Seeing how HDB accounts for over 75% of housing in Singapore, this is a fairly large movement.

2. For new estates in development, the government has embarked on a pioneer project to install a recycling chutes. The project is currently under testing for feasibility in Seng Kang. I can’t remember the exact name of the estate though.

3. There are recycling bins in ORCHARD ROAD. I don’t know about you but when I pop down there for my weekly Japanese lessons, I bring the weekly household collection of paper for recycling and dump them there.

4. Bring Your Own Bag Day every first Wednesday of the month. If you have not heard of this….@.@ Basically, supermakets in partnership with this campaign don’t provide plastic bags to their shoppers on that day. Shoppers must bring their own bag, or purchase a resuable bag from the supermarket for $1 or pay 10 cents (I believe) for everything plastic bag issued. Recently, certain retail stores have also took to the initiative to expand this campaign beyond supermarkets.

5. Recycling bins have invaded schools as well. For me, we have bins for both paper, (outside the photocopy shop and library) metals and plastic (in the canteen, most likely for tin cans and bottles.)

6. Regarding your email point on int catridges, I know for one that HP is willing to recycle their old ink cartridges. It’s rather inconvienent as the drop off points are not very well known (You can see their list here: http://h50055.www5.hp.com/ipg/supplies/recycling/supplies/sg/individual.asp) and I seldom remember to bring my ink catridges out. (Yes they’re still in my cupboard.)

Of course you’re right about what little we have done compared to countries like Japan and Europe. The government can only do so much, what matters most is the mindset of the people. For example in Australia, it’s only natural that the people bring their own bags when they go groccery shopping.