Types of Beverage Containers We Use

I am not a technology freak, but posting a link is something I have learned on this forum. Copy the address and paste it where you want it.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q...AE7C&FORM=VIRE

Your points are well taken and would be a great starting point for what we can do to improve our experience on this earth. If everyone would make decisions based on trying to give more to society than we take and realize that all of our decisions are in essence a loan from our grandchildren, our lives would be better. I do not believe mankind can destroy the earth, but instead the earth will destroy mankind. The world will be here long after mankind is gone. Our decisions will dictate how long the earth will play host to mankind.

Ummm ... humm ...well ???

Maybe we ought to slow down. We might be getting ahead of ourselves. We don't want to jump to the wrong conclusions.

The thing with micro plastics in the ocean is still just an idea. ( Not like global warming .. that's proven fact ! ) I know a few of the players at the Maine Environmental Research Institute aka. The Shaw institute. They're intelligent people with a strong environmental concern. This may be a case of confirmation bias. This environmental thing is like a religion with some folks. They're out to spread the good word.

Doesn't mean they're wrong .... but ... IMO, extensive further studies should be done to confirm their concerns as fact.

If it pans out to be right ... the best way to address this problem would be to stop dumping municipal waste into the ocean.

Beverage containers are only a small part of municipal waste.

Quite frankly ... we've got a pretty good system in place for recycling beverage containers here in Maine with our nickel deposit system. I overhauled the division of our company that runs a bottle redemption center this past year. It's pretty darned effective and a money maker for us. I'm dealing with this stuff on a daily basis because it's a portion of my job.

I'm not offended or anything. It just seems like there might be a lot of mis-information out there.

I'll throw my opinion out there. ( You know what they say about opinions. Mine are no better than the rest. )

1: There are good arguments for glass containers from a human health point of view. The wealthy folk with cutting edge health concerns seem to be willing to pay the little bit extra for this option in packaging. From an environmental standpoint this stuff seems pretty inert. It's essentially just big particles of sand. It seems a tossup as to whether or not it's profitable to recycle or not. At times past .... the market has been pretty soft.

It seems like the carbon footprint could be pretty large with this packaging material. It's energy intensive to make and very dense. It takes more energy to move it to market and then back to the recycling facility for reprocessing. I sometimes wonder if it would be a better choice to re-grind to a fine powder like sand and dump it on-site. Out municipality has used crushed glass in place of processed rock for backfilling road culverts before just to get rid of it when there was no market for it. It seems to work okay for this purpose.

Last note: JMO ... but it seems like the fear of getting cut by broken glass is a lot bigger than the actual problem.

2: Aluminum seems to be okay. Some folks complain that it leaves a tinny taste to the product. There seems to be a fair market for recycled aluminum. It's not dense so the carbon footprint is smaller. It's less energy intensive to reprocess than to extract from ore.

3: Plastics seem to be the more popular choice with the average consumer. There might be some human health concerns. We recycle a lot of plastic containers.

Ayuh .... there's money in them things ... we ain't throwin' em' into the water !

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Just a couple of other ideas for those with environmental concern. These come from our company grocery division.

Styrofoam coffee cups and hot, ready to eat, food containers. We phased those out in favor of bio-degradeables.

Same with meat and produce packaging.

Similar with plastic grocery store bags. They are still our most popular choice but we have a recycling bin in the store. Paper bags and cardboard boxes are available options for our customers that request them. We also have re-usable cloth grocery bags available at a low price to our customers that wish to purchase them.

The Town of Blue Hill Maine, the birthplace of MERI / aka / The Shaw institute recently outlawed all plastic shopping bags. The major grocery store in town took it one step further and stopped providing ALL grocery bags. Their customers were left to fend for themselves.

This seems a bit extreme but the town appears to have it's own certain environmental mentality from the view of an outsider. It's the peninsula center point for arts, culture, wealth, advancements in education science and healthcare. Quite progressive.

I use this...

I have to say my recycling efforts concentrate on making me an mine money. Oh and we recycle while making money.

Onto the plastic grocery bags, being as unqualified as most but without an agenda(I don't get paid to push an opinion), they are sanity, cost nearly nothing and take up an indescribable small amount of room in the land fill.

Lets take a look at the floating island of garbage in the Pacific Ocean said to be the size of the state of ?? Don't mistake me, pollution is bad, clean up and prevention good. But let me ask you has anyone seen a photo of it from space, a high flying aircraft. Well I haven't only photos of people picking up large piles of trash next to boats and on beaches. Not good but not the size of even Rhode Island. So why do "they" exaggerate, I think to extract more money.

I think I'll just keep selling scrap and have a recycling by product. 73, Mike

One more thin Capitalism makes all the other good possible without it there would be no money. MD

Originally Posted by SKWrapper

[...]or run E85 you are polluting anyway (still 15% with E85 - debatable about the carbon dioxide from E85[...]

Gasoline has 31,000 calories per gallon
Ethanol has 20,224 calories per gallon

Ethanol is 1.55 times less fuel efficient ... meaning you need to burn 1.55 gallons of ethanol to go the same distance of 1 gallon of gasoline ( there is no magic engine that changes this ).

1 gallon of gas releases 19.6 pounds of C02
1.55 gallons of ethanol releases 19.68 pounds of C02

Edit: I had forgotten to mention - ethanol releases a LOT of C02 during fermentation

Originally Posted by recyclersteve

If you are just on this site because of the money you can make by scrapping, you might want to skip to the next message.

For those who care about the environment in addition to our own pocket books, I'd like to throw something out there for all beverage drinkers to consider. I'm talking about TYPES of beverage containers. I would like to have you consider using aluminum cans first, then glass bottles and finally plastic bottles as a last resort. In addition, I am requesting that when possible you avoid using plastic straws. More on the straws later.

Aluminum, of course, is easily recycled and many of us have make decent to good money by doing so for ourselves and countless strangers. Glass, while recyclable in certain areas, can pose a hazard when it breaks. I don't have any data to prove this, but I'd imagine that glass beer bottles are more likely to break than glass Coke bottles as an underage drunk person doesn't care too much about the environment- they just want to get rid of the evidence. Either way, broken glass can be difficult to see, especially in the dark or in grass. I'm sure that many of us have cut ourselves on broken glass, yet we continue to drink from glass containers. Please, if you can, wean yourself off of glass containers and substitute aluminum.

The worst is plastic. Go to Youtube and type words like "plastic in oceans" or "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". I absolutely LOVE to eat seafood. Yet the huge quantities of plastic going into the oceans are broken down by sunlight into micro-particles and ingested by marine life. They mistake the plastic for food and don't have the ability to pass this stuff through their systems. Many die each year as a result.

For those who aren't too squeamish and can stand the site of blood, I invite you to watch a Youtube video titled "Sea Turtle with Straw up its Nostril- "NO" TO PLASTIC STRAWS." The video is by Sea Turtle Biologist, is 8:07 long, and has a whopping 32+ million views. If someone knows how to post the link here, thanks in advance for doing so.

I wonder how much plastic is inside some of the seafood that I eat. What happens to humans that consume quantities of plastic in their food for many years? I don't know and I'd rather not be concerned about it.

Athletic footwear company Adidas is partnering with a company called Parley to make shoes from recycled ocean plastic. Starbucks is changing the types of straws that they use. People are finally (slowly) getting on board with the change that needs to occur.

I hate to be preachy, but I remember being in Hong Kong many years ago and seeing what they called "junk boats". People would openly take cans of trash onto a junk boat and dispose of it in the local harbor. It was amazing that you could just see it in the open. There was NO WAY that I would ever swim in that filth!

I'm not expecting anyone to become some kind of radical activist, but if you can think of some small gesture you can make in your life to try and do something about the environmental situation, that would be appreciated. One of my little gestures is this post. Another is refusing straws (when I can) when people give them to me and educating them about the issues with plastic straws. My goal with this post is that maybe a few people will think a bit differently about the habits they've had for years and make some change for the good.

Even those of us who do scrapping just for money are inadvertently helping the environment. For those who would like to take it to another level, please consider the words in this post.

I hope this doesn't come across like I'm some kind of environmental freak- rather a polite request to reconsider some bad and easily changed habits. Does anyone else have anything to add?

Honestly, I really don't care. Everything dies from something. There are relatively few enjoyable or painless ways to die. I don't think we have a problem here. If you want to go to Hong Kong and the Philippines and get them to change their tune, perhaps that would be a better use of your effort.


Would you please post a picture of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch".

A nine year old invents straw numbers....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/b...check-nyt.html

Perhaps straws made from ZigZag's would be more environmentally friendly. You just need to sacrifice just a tiny bit of effectiveness to save the iridescent pond scum.

Sorry for the snark, but I thought the forum was supposed to be politics free. I would imagine you enjoy ALL the benefits of a first world nation while posting objections to it. How much plastic and heavy elements in that computer you use casting your admonishments? It would seem that condemnation of straws can only be truly appreciated by a fat someone pounding away in air conditioning, sitting in a comfy chair, while looking at a computer and a TV that could buy a village in china a year worth of food, delivered in plastic containers.

I will burn ten pounds of styrofoam in your honor to produce light I will refuse to look at.

Disclaimer- I do not want anyone to get the wrong idea about my last post. I believe mankind is conceded if we believe we can control the earth. How can mankind cause global warming in the short time we have been here compared to the age of the earth? Should we take credit for the Ice Age as well?

I get a kick out of the environmental extremist that preach about how we are destroying the world while standing there holding a bottle of water. They evidently do not know that water is free and that the bottle of water they are drinking probably came from a municipal tap some where. Why do I want to pay to drink water from L.A. when I could drink directly from the Madison Aquifer for free.

I make sun tea in a glass jar and drink it in a glass. They are easy to clean and used over and over again. Pop and beer taste better in a glass container, but I am to cheap and use aluminum containers instead. Gatoraid is purchased in plastic bottles but the plastic bottles are reused to make it out of powder because I am cheap. I like brown paper bags over plastic because they are great for starting fires and used to make compost. Plastic bags are stuffed into a potato bag and used as an archery target. Paper plates cost money and disliked for eating anything with juice including meat. Cartons of milk are preferred because they are a great fire starter when filled with bark. BTW I use wood for heat and burn my trash. Because I am frugal I assume this lifestyle is better than Al Gore getting off his private jet to give a speech on the damage fossil fuels are causing the planet.

Prior to the last sentence I did not perceive this thread to be political but I could not help myself.

Originally Posted by RLS0812

Gasoline has 31,000 calories per gallon
Ethanol has 20,224 calories per gallon

Ethanol is 1.55 times less fuel efficient ... meaning you need to burn 1.55 gallons of ethanol to go the same distance of 1 gallon of gasoline ( there is no magic engine that changes this ).

1 gallon of gas releases 19.6 pounds of C02
1.55 gallons of ethanol releases 19.68 pounds of C02

Edit: I had forgotten to mention - ethanol releases a LOT of C02 during fermentation

It's sustainable so even though it has less BTU's it can be produced much easier, additionally when an engine is designed to run it, there is a performance gain because of the Stoich value, it runs cooler and the intake charge is more dense and oxygen rich, as a result the combustion is cleaner and more complete and produces more power even with less MPG.

Much better choice than gasoline. Gasoline already has ethanol and the plants that are required to produce it would have released CO2 anyway so... yeah water vapor and CO2 is much more acceptable than Carbon Monoxide in high concentration + Carbon Dioxide (gasoline).

There's a reason that many car enthusiasts are running E85 instead of race fuel - it's not just because it's far cheaper, it's better. NASCAR runs Ethanol now as well.

Oh and it's horse poo about ethanol "eating gaskets" on anything made 1995 to present, unless the car makers are all idiots metals and gaskets are all designed to work fine with ethanol, think about it, if 10% ethanol is OK for an engine (in all gasoline in the USA), after 10 tanks, you've run 1 full tank of it. So if it's damaging then all engines would leak/fail pretty quickly, in fact it's gasoline that creates the deposits etc... it's recommended if you have a flex fuel vehicle and you've never run E85, to start with 1/4 tank, then 1/2 tank then full because it will quickly clean all the deposits gasoline leaves behind and clog the injectors if you don't.