BillJ wrote: 
It's not an interplanetary helicopter.

Stupid Ways to Save the Earth

(A fairly decent piece of writing)

 Southern_Boy wrote: 
But you've got your own helicopter.

oldslabsides wrote:

Only those of us not wealthy enough to be launched into space just prior to the apocalypse.

 Welly wrote: 
only by their parents.

 Southern_Boy wrote: 
that may well be our epitaph.

 oldslabsides wrote: 
Don't you think that it should be required viewing for all grade 6 classes?

oldslabsides wrote:

Money talks.

 Welly wrote: 
seen it.

 Welly wrote: 
#6 - Right you are

 oldslabsides wrote: 
Watch this great animation that sums up the issue very concisely.

 Southern_Boy wrote: 

Well recycling is a business like any other. If there is no market for the materials, what else can you do? We've ridden a wave for many years now. It was almost inevitable. The real problem is that we don't practise the fist 4 R's before we look to recycling to solve our garbage problem.

The 5 R's are:

Refuse - to buy what you don't need, or to buy anything with excess or non-recyclable packaging
Return - packaging to the retailer, and be sure to return all recyclables such as bottles and cans for the deposit
Reduce - how much you consume, overall
Reuse - as much as possible
Recycle - whenever possible

 Southern_Boy wrote: 
People need to stop thinking in linear terms in a finite world.

Welly wrote:
A recycling company in the building next to mine went out of business in November when the Chinese market crashed and they canceled all orders for recyclable materials. Al the material they had was thrown into dumpsters as trash. How bizarre.

 aflanigan wrote: 
1 billion plastic single-use shopping bags each year in Canada alone. The US population is ten times ours, so I can only imagine.

Commodities markets are very depressed right now so many "recyclables" aren't recyclable any more. We aren't buying cheap plastic crap from China so they don't need our plastic recyclables as feedstock.

But seriously? If you remove organics from the municipal waste stream that takes care of about 40% of what is going into landfills. Plastic bags make up about 2% of the waste stream. They're a hot button issue that people love to get worked up about. Let's BAN PLASTIC BAGS they shout. It wouldn't help the waste reduction situation one bit.

And please do not be fooled by so-called bio-degradable or oxy-degradable plastics. They are not biodegradable in a landfill and they simply screw up the recycling stream.

When it comes to plastic store bags, I'm more concerned with the amount of imported crude oil that goes into making them than what happens to them after the groceries get home.  We make a whole lot of things out of non-renewable resources.  It's a habit that we should probably give up.

I re-use my shopping bags as garbage bags.  They bio-decompose a lot faster than paper, for example.  (Landfill explorers have found 100 year old newspapers that were in the same condition as the day they were printed.)  IMHO there has been so much stuff of all types dumped into landfills over the centuries that we should include landfill reclamation in the Superfund project.  I suspect that the technology that would be developed to reclaim recyclable materials from old-fashioned dumps (and find and isolate the toxic materials) could be adapted to primary refuse processing.

Call me a heretic, but I just don't see the "you buy your bag; if you forget it, you buy another" working.  Back in the good old days when soda pop had real sucrose (and no HFCS) and came in glass bottles, we paid a small deposit for the bottles, and returned them at our convenience.  As kids we used to horde the empty bottles that our parents had put the deposit on, and when we had enough, we'd take all the empties back to the store, and redeem them for cash.  We'd then spend the cash on candy, gum and more soda pop.  Why not do the same thing with shopping bags?

 aflanigan wrote: 
I think we can safely assume it's much more today than it was 25 years ago, although I do see a lot more people using cloth bags at the store these days.

I think if people came to the realization that most of our plastic bags are not being recycled, they would be more motivated to avoid them. It's so easy to do. I have about a dozen cloth bags and a couple of nylon bags that pack up to the size of a wallet, so it's easy to almost always have one with me.

 Rod wrote: 

They use data from over 25 years ago regarding how much of the waste stream was plastic bags back then.  What about now?

Using reusable bags is good, and I've always wondered what happens to recycleables after they get tossed onto the green recycling truck.  They should find some info on what the plastic recycling scenario is currently, and people would be more likely to consider their message seriously.

 *bump* 

 Beaker wrote:  
Yes, I saw that about Canada, and that's great! There has been a push here to get plastic bags eliminated from our stores as they did in San Francisco, but as yet it hasn't happened.

The sad fact and the point I was making though is that most plastic is not recycled, and even if it is, it is a very wasteful process and not cost effective.