Buried treasure

Another reason not to build waste-to-energy plants that vaporize plastic. It may become a valuable resource sooner than we think.

Check out this article from the Times (London): "Rubbish dumps are regarded by the recycling industry as an untapped source of riches, with an estimated 200 million tonnes of plastic buried as landfill since the late 1980s. At today's prices of £200 a tonne the discarded plastic has a value of about £40 billion. Alongside it are smaller, but still significant, quantities of valuable metals, including copper and aluminium."

Islands of plastic in the mid-Pacific

If you haven't heard about the floating plastic in the mid-Pacific, here are some interesting links. Not recent, but still current. Our casual conveniences can make waves far away...

Trashing the Oceans, US News & World Report:

Most plastic bags end up in landfills, part of the millions of tons of plastic garbage Americans dump each year. But whether jettisoned illegally by ships at sea, washed out from land during storms, or, as in the case of the chalupa bags, accidentally lost overboard from containerships, countless tons of plastic refuse end up drifting on the high seas....

Moby-Duck, or the synthetic wilderness of childhood, Harper's Jan 07:

The correspondent who forwarded this link to me commented: Donovan Hohn is one of the really great writers that no one knows about.

Just say no to throw away water bottles

If you insist on drinking water from bottles, you won't have the option of a home dispenser using non-refillable bottles if Metro Vancouver politicians have anything to say about it.

They took a hard stand on this issue after a local distributor who uses refillable bottles like the one in this photo complained that his competition is introducing a single-use alternative made of thin PET plastic rather than reusable polycarbonate.

When politicians saw two of the single-use bottles fill a large blue recycling container and learned that they would be worth only a 20 cent deposit, they put their foot down: tell the province to simply ban them! BC's beverage container regulation is too weak and the delay to prove that the system needed change would simply cause problems in the industry, said politicians on both the Environment and Waste Management Committees, who called for an outright ban on non-refillable bottles. (image http://www.recyclethis.co.uk/)

Of course, with new information emerging about chemical additives in plastics, the market for water bottled in plastic may dry up anyway... anyone see the CBC segment last night? I can't find a link on their website.)