Cardboard is the most recyclable material we have. Plastic is complicated.
Better than recycling is to not consume in the first place.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
58 points (90.3% liked)
No Stupid Questions
39621 readers
606 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
reduce, reuse, recycle... what's lost is that this is not alternatives, but an order
first try to reduce usage then try to reuse what you do use then try to recycle when possible
Oh for sure, anti-consumption is always important to remind. The packaging is out of control...and what paper does in terms of pollution - well I've simply had to come to terms I can't control these garbage bags at the top, I can only control myself and do my best.
One thing I have found that I love is land-fill biodegradable bags for my customers. Paper, as meantioned, makes me wary, so when I found these I was pretty happy. They seem legit and they're inexpensive
land-fill biodegradable bags
Just be careful with those. Some are really biodegradable and will be gone after a while. Others only degrade until they become entirely microplastics and stop there.
Thank you - I knew there would be more pieces to investigate but I wasn't sure what questions to ask - based on the price ($.07 each) I thought they might be a little too good to be true....I'll see if they still hold up!
$.07 each
That's actually a bit expensive. What of course still doesn't tell you it's good. But there's no reason to be suspicious of hat price.
Well other plastic bags are .03 - or the produce bags without handles are - I've shopped around, but primarily on Amazon since I have Prime, and the shipping costs elsewhere kill me
It's so effing hard to be 'good'
By what metric? Fibers breakdown during recycling in ways glass or steel do not.
Better than recycling is to not consume in the first place.
Well at that extreme it's even better to simply not exist.
No, there are several levels of nuance between your extreme and OPs suggestion. Reducing consumption would be the most obvious one.
I don't know much but I've heard that landfills are so dense and thick that there is not enough oxygen to break down organic matter like did waste. I don't know for sure about that and I don't know how it applies to cardboard but that's what I've heard and read and seen videos about.
I hope someone with more knowledge could give a better informed comment.
RemindMe! 2 days
From what I’ve watched and read you are correct. It also creates excess methane which is captured and sometimes used for things like energy.
I never even considered that in the first place, so thanks for speaking up anyway:)
I wonder if that has anything to do with the methane torches that burn from the landfills
Wait, hold the fuck up, do we have the RemindMe bot here now?
I compost at home, and I "toss" my pile at least weekly to get more oxygen in the pile and accelerate the breakdown of greens and browns into compost. As I understand it, everything in my pile would EVENTUALLY break down if just piled up, but composting is done semi specifically to take advantage of prime conditions for the breakdown process. All that to say, it definitely doesn't breakdown as quickly/effectively in a landfill due to lack of oxygen
Clean paper and cardboard are easily recyclable and worth money. I first figured this out over 30 years ago while taking commuter trains into NYC.
There were approximately one yard cubed wagons left on the platform to discard your already read newspapers for recycling. Local hustlers would often reassemble the papers and sell for half.
At some point locking tops eere put on so it was difficult to remove the papers. This was because the agency collecting the old newspaper was making money from it.
Fast forward. Some cities make it a crime to rummage through the recycling bins.
There is money there.
Uhhh what? I always thought those bins were to stop people from sharing papers and forcing everyone to buy a fresh copy
I was there when it started.
You were where when it started?
Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
You worked there and were part of the decision making process? Or you saw the exact same thing I did and came to a different conclusion?
I read there reasoning and believed it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/nyregion/new-recycle-bins-stop-a-long-habit.html
That article says, explicitly, that they did it to stop people from getting free papers and to kill the secondary market. It's a completely profit-driven artificial scarcity move that has nothing to do with recycling.
I think a lot of waste management is very local, so the answer might be different for you than it is for me.
In my town, there is a box factory that gobbles up all of our paper products and turns them into new boxes. So I know that putting the cardboard in my recycling bin is worthwhile.
If you can, paper and cardboard are compostable at home, help put that carbon back in the ground and grow more carbon scrubbing plants
I do!
Here's the hierarchy of recycling.
- aluminum cans, recycle at pretty much any cost. Recycling aluminum is so much cheaper than smelting new aluminum, companies will happily pay you for aluminum.
- corrugated cardboard, recycle if it didn't touch food, it's a bit overly restrictive, but contaminated cardboard causes lots of cardboard to be thrown away. Cardboard is super recyclable and profitable for companies. Ideally cardboard used with food goes to industrial composting.
- other paper products that are recyclable, it's generally down cycled, but still a pretty good deal.
- glass, only if it's perfectly clean or trivial to clean it. When in doubt toss it. Glass doesn't recycle well because it's more difficult to process into new glass, also color have their own chemicals that don't mix for recycling. Glass is better for a reuse target as recycling is at best breaking even economically.
- plastic, put it in the trash. Maybe if you are next to a recycling bin and the plastic is perfectly clean then recycle, but even then trash is probably better. Developed countries waste management systems will keep that plastic out of the water and it won't contaminate other materials.
This is awesome thank you
sources? I want to read more
There are some countries where you can reclaim a few cents if you return your plastic PET bootles on a specialized container.
On this particular case, since the plastic isn't mixed with other incompatible plastics, the recyclability is actually really good, as good as paper/cardboard.
Maybe part of the issue is the plastic bag that usually surround the biodegradable stuff?
There’s this idea that things will just “break down” in the garbage but in reality past a certain point in the landfill heap, there’s too little oxygen to fuel decomposition. And that point keeps rising…
view more: next ›