recycling

Whereas most recycling (apart from composting and metals) is pretty energy-costly and pollution-generating and not worth doing, recycling of drink containers that can actually be reused - notably glass containers - would substantially reduce litter and plastic pollution. Complementary to such a scheme should be discouragement of throw-away plastic containers. There is so much we can still do to reduce our energy-footprints, as well as reducing population growth.

Bins for North East Victoria – a feeble step for a giant problem

The launch today in Rutherglen of Coca Cola’s ‘National Bin Network’ pilot litter initiative is feeble and will hardly scratch the surface of the region’s and state’s annual 2.5 billion landfilled or littered beverage containers, the Boomerang Alliance of 17 environment groups said today.

“The launch is intended to distract from the real game changer which is a national 10cent container deposit scheme (CDS) currently being considered by environment ministers. It’s just another part of the beverage industry’s tactic to avoid taking real responsibility and leave all future management costs to councils,” said Jeff Angel, National Convenor of the Alliance.

“The proposal for more bins in the street and sporting grounds simply won’t have a meaningful impact - we would have to have millions of bins lining roads or creeks and parks to have a broad and significant impact on litter. Unlike a CDS where a 10cent deposit is built into the scheme encouraging people to return the container or pick up the litter, this bin proposal offers little incentive for consumers or collectors to act. Industry will put bins in and then walk away leaving local councils and the community to meet the ongoing costs of collecting and processing for landfilling this contaminated material.”

“It’s a non-solution and we’ll keep campaigning in Victoria and other states for the real answer – container deposits.”

“A national container deposits system (CDS) will deliver $1.78billion for recycling in the first five years of operation – 17 times more than the national bin offer from the beverage industry. Not only is this amount and the recycling of another 6 billion containers per year assured, the CDS funds could support a wide range of measures to improve recycling across Australia,” he said.

“A container deposit system does far more for the packaging problem than any other option at a maximum cost of one tenth of a cent per container”.

Key benefits from a variety of studies shows CDS will produce:

• A fund worth $1.78billion – derived from unredeemed deposits in the early years to support
increased recycling and reprocessing in Australia; improve commercial and industrial collections; public education on litter; local council efforts; and CDS costs.

• Miniscule impact on beverage prices – RIS (Regulatory Impact Statement) data shows an impact of one tenth of a cent per container by 2020; or under adjustments to errors in the RIS – a surplus of half a cent or more – when part of the fund supports CDS costs.

• Clean, not contaminated recyclate – a CDS produces clean materials that attract a price premium rather than contaminated bins material for lower value uses, or dumped into landfill.

• Financial boost for local councils/ratepayers – Victorian councils will save over $20m a year

• A new tier of hundreds of convenient drop-off centres – as in South Australia these will also

take e-waste, used white goods, batteries etc – generating several thousand jobs

• A boon for charities – Scouts SA generate $22m from their recycling centres and other charities in other states have expressed an interest in being involved in a national CDS.

Source of article: Boomerang Alliance

Hi there! We're the Percapitas.

We've cut consumption

We've cut per capita consumption and our per capita waste. We compost, we conserve, we re-use and we recycle. And we're going to teach our three carbon footprints----Mark, David and Robert---to do the same.

We are very knowledgeable

Yes, we know that each of us will require more than 38,000 pounds of mined resources each and every year to maintain our cosmetically green American lifestyle, or 2.96 million pounds in our average lifetime of 77.9 years. That's 8,509 lbs. of stone, 5,599 lbs. of sand and gravel, 496 lbs. of cement, 357 lbs. of iron ore, 421 lbs. of salt, 217 lbs. of phosphate rock, 164 lbs. of clay, 65 lbs. of aluminum, 12 lbs. of copper, 11 lbs. of lead, 6 lbs. of zinc, 36 lbs. of soda ash, 5 lbs. of manganese, 332 lbs. of other non-metals for making glass, chemicals, soaps, paper, computers and cell phones, 24 lbs. of other metals for the same uses plus electronics, TV and video equipment and more-----not to mention 951 gallons of petroleum, 6,792 lbs. of coal, 80,905 cubic feet of natural gas and 1/4 lb. of uranium to generate the energy each of us uses in one year. http:/minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/

And we also know that our typical surburban house-----the one with the Prius in the driveway----was constructed with a million pounds of minerals and metals as were 130 million other homes across the country. Ours needed insulation (using silica, feldspar, and trona), roofing (silica sands, limestone and petroleum) and hardware (iron, zinc, copper, steel, brass), as well as windows made from trona, silica sand, limestone and feldspar, and concrete foundations made from sand, gravel and cement, which in turn is made of limestone, bauxite, clay, shale and gypsum and is re-inforced by steel rods. And we expect that another 70 million such homes will need to be built by mid-century to accommodate the next 150 million additional people who will make America their home, making us even more vibrant, diverse and strong than we already are now. People are our greatest resource----and besides, our local Sierra Club branch assures us that we can "de-couple" population and economic growth from environmental degradation! We can't wait until they de-couple ice cream consumption from caloric gain and thirst from the desire for fluid.

We are college-educated

Now, some doomsayers like analyst Chris Clugston have warned us that 69 metals and minerals vital to our industrial economy have peaked and will soon not be affordably accessible. But we both majored in classic economics at Northwestern and so we know that substitutes will be always be found if the price is right. You can never discount human ingenuity and there is a technological fix for everything. We can have 'green growth'. What we can't have though, is pessimism. We need hope to get us through the night. Cassandras need not apply!

Our children are not your business

OK, it's true. We could have done better. By not having three kids we could have saved the atmosphere from an extra 28,223 metric tons of C02 each year---or 58 times the amount that we have saved by switching to a fuel efficient car, driving less, recycling, installing CFLs, replacing our inefficient refrigerator and old windows. And by adopting rather than conceiving, we would not have added to the 350,000 children who are born every day to a planet now burdened with 7 billion humans, and braced for more. But we thought that it was vitally necessary that the world have our genes and that our children have the same pair of eyes or ears that we have. And besides, if educated, responsible and morally superior people like us don't have children, then "they" will overwhelm us. So let the breeding war begin!

Oh, and by the way, our procreative choices are NOYB. Pushing other people and other species off the plate is our sacred personal right.

We're the Percapitas. We're green, we're progressive, we read Utne magazine and Mother Jones, we listen to National Public Radio, vote liberal Democrat and we are oh so much more aware and responsible than you are!

(Does anybody have a cream pie handy?)

Tim Murray
July 19/2011

Originally posted at

No Surprise: The Department of Sustainability and municipal councils' positions on recycling have long been an insult to the intelligence of the population. The auditor general's report should also be used to expose "Green" groups that collude with government on this nonsense and to muzzle sustainable population voices. The audit found that the Department of Sustainability and Environment, Sustainability Victoria, the Environment Protection Authority, the Metropolitan Waste Management Group, one regional waste management group and four municipal councils have not effectively fulfilled their roles in implementing the strategy, resulting in ineffective planning, leadership, coordination, and oversight. And gee, we are not going to meet our so-called target of Towards Zero Waste Strategy by 2014.

Recycling lies

The audit found that the Department of Sustainability and Environment, Sustainability Victoria, the Environment Protection Authority, the Metropolitan Waste Management Group, one regional waste management group and four municipal councils have not effectively fulfilled their roles in implementing the strategy, resulting in ineffective planning, leadership, coordination, and oversight. No surprise that the so-called target of Towards Zero Waste Strategy outcomes being achieved by 2014 in relation to municipal solid waste won't be met. It is particularly shameful is that the Government and colluding Greenish groups have consistently tried to drown out concern about overpopulation by marketing recycling as if it were much more effective than it could possibly be. The questionnaires for the annual event of the Sustainable Living Festival have consistently required environmental groups to rabbit on about what they manufacture and the recycling they do, which places nature preservation and overpopulation groups at a false disadvantage since most are not in business or manufacturing and have little or no built space.

Municipal Solid Waste Management

This audit examined whether waste management and resource recovery actions have been effective and efficient in achieving the Towards Zero Waste Strategy objectives and targets for municipal solid waste. It reviewed the activities of the Department of Sustainability and Environment, Sustainability Victoria, the Environment Protection Authority, the Metropolitan Waste Management Group, one regional waste management group and four municipal councils.

The audit found that Sustainability Victoria and the Department of Sustainability and Environment have not effectively fulfilled their roles in implementing the strategy, resulting in ineffective planning, leadership, coordination, and oversight.

Sustainability Victoria has missed an opportunity to review and modify the strategy to improve its effectiveness. It also missed an opportunity to review its own practices. This has diminished the prospect of the Towards Zero Waste Strategy outcomes being achieved by 2014 in relation to municipal solid waste.

Link to audit summary and full report:
http://www.audit.vic.gov.au/reports_and_publications/latest_reports/2010-11/20110629_municipal_waste.aspx">

In his Short Report (Tabled in Parliament: 29 June 2011) the Auditor General states:

"The 2005 Sustainability in Action: Towards Zero Waste Strategy (TZW) set statewide objectives and targets to reduce the amount of solid waste generated and increase recovery rates for individual waste streams—thereby decreasing waste disposal to landfills. It also set out to reduce litter.

Sustainability Victoria and the Department of Sustainability and Environment have not effectively fulfilled their roles in implementing the strategy, resulting in ineffective planning, leadership, coordination, and oversight.

While Victoria met four out of six mid-term TZW targets, progress related to the municipal solid waste sector, a significant source of organic waste, and therefore greenhouse gasses, has been slow. Waste generation continues to rise above expectations and little improvement in reducing this rate of increase is envisaged over the remainder of the strategy's life.

Sustainability Victoria has missed an opportunity to thoroughly review the strategy and modify it to improve its effectiveness. It has also missed an opportunity to review its own practices in light of its lead role and the existing level of underperformance. This has diminished the prospect of TZW outcomes being achieved by 2014 in relation to municipal solid waste."

No Surprise

The Department of Sustainability and municipal councils' positions on recycling have long been an insult to the intelligence of the population. The only surprise is that some relatively intelligent people have actually bought the spin. A year or two ago I was amazed to hear a man in charge of a big bit of a large hospital talk about how "We" were all getting on top of environmental problems by recycling. Childlike, he gave an example of how a surgical department had produced a plastic chair from recycled plastic products. Apparently it was being displayed as an example of progress on the problem of pollution and drawdown on resources - as if this were merely something that could be fixed by engineering.

People need to realise that disposable goods and the scale of manufacturing and consumption is laughably unsustainable. It is a sick joke.

About the only useful recycling possible for most of us to practice regularly is that applied on a small scale at home in composting.

Recycling the Emperor's new clothes

No attention is given to the amount of fuel used and pollution generated by recycling inorganic and highly processed materials (such as plastic) on a large scale. No attention is given to the childish math problem of how you cannot meaningfully reduce energy and pollution when you are increasing production and consumption. When recycling is done 'for profit' the problem is even more ridiculous. You can bet that the community, the tax payer, is underwriting scams that use trucks and factories and all sorts of fuels for transport and reprocessing of manufactured bits and pieces. For instance the late Richard Pratt, who was often trotted out as some kind of hero by the growth-extremist Victorian Government under Bracks, had a major business, subsidised by the public, getting stuff from councils and sending it on boats to Taiwan for reprocessing. How anyone could have been fooled by the recycling paradigm in gross or in detail is hard to imagine. Unfortunately the story of the Emperor's New Clothes effectively portrays the unsophisticated state of the nation - and of most peak environment groups (including the ACF, which for a long time effectively promoted Dick Pratt as some kind of business-man eco-hero on this issue) the Greens and the Friends of the Earth. The most shameful thing about this unrealistic and misleading position is how the same groups have used and abused it to deter Australians from acting quickly to stop overpopulation. Again and again they have effectively frightened people from speaking out on high immigration, yet have offered nothing in aggregate of any net effectiveness to help us all avoid catastrophy.

Effective recycling

Glass recycling can be very effective, but the use of returnable bottles has been almost entirely phased out. The reason is false profit at the expense of the community because more money is to be made by manufacturers in churning out petroleum-based disposable containers of extremely overpriced lollywater, diabetagenic fruits and juices and fatty sugary milks. In some cases some plastics are inconveniently and fuel and pollution expensively somewhat recyclable. They don't compare to glass. Overwhelmingly the main feature of glass containers is their durability. Broken glass for reforming is already a stage down in recycling value because it becomes a factory project which needs larger scales, so lots of fuel, transport etc.

Metal recycling can be very effective, as in building and construction materials.

Wood recycling in building can also be extremely effective, where we are reusing whole materials to rebuild. That is doors, lintels, roof-pieces, glass. The idea is to carefully take a building apart and use the materials again. This should happen without transporting those materials over great distances, using fossil fuels.

Manufactured goods recycling:

Tools should also be available for people to borrow or hire cheaply from local governments, instead of so many households having their own fossil-fuel expensive drills, sanders etc.

The fact that no state or federal government seriously supports any of the above effective recycling, yet all of them abuse the notion of recycling for profit, is a condemnation of our leaders.

James Sinnamon, the owner and creator of this internet site, candobetter.net, has long proposed that building materials and tools be held in depots by local governments for reuse by anyone who needs them. Unfortunately a serious accident from which he is still recovering has made it impossible for him to push these projects as effectively as he would wish or to persevere in running for political office on them in the foreseeable future.

Bio-gases

Small-scale local production of cooking gases from compost is also effective, but probably not when communities try to make a profit on selling the gas because the economies of small-scale disappear and transport requires subsidies.

Sewage waste recycling

Sewage waste can be effectively recycled or more properly made into clean water and soil components by allowing it to be processed on a managable scale through natural systems. This is already done by a lot of sewerage systems which are state subsidised or managed.

Medical Instruments waste

Compare the massive use of plastic disposable needles and syringes with the earlier practice of metal and glass syringes and needles which were actually disinfected and reused time and again by hospitals. Similarly, instead of disposable plastic packs, reusable towels and metal instruments were used for small-scale operations and large ones. It required more permanent and responsible staff, more local water and fuel (but less globally) and more time, plus generally more careful and thoughtful practice. The style runs counter to the flashy and wasteful use of resources and human resources for rapid and spurious efficiency of modern hospital practice.

Stephen Hazell,
Executive Director
Sierra Club of Canada
April 28/08

Mr. Hazell,

In your latest solicitation you enumerate the number of results that Sierra Club volunteers and staff have achieved this year owing to my support. You mention postponing the Kearl tar sands mine pending environmental impact assessment (climate change). You mention stopping the Digby Neck mega-quarry in Nova Scotia that would have proved harmful to right whales. You say you convinced the federal government to develop a new water strategy. You kept global warming at the top of the agenda by advocating "strong" action at Bali and providing needed criticism and analysis of the Harper governments (non) actions following this up. And then you successfully urged the Ontario government to "Grow the Greenbelt" and protect millions of acres of "environmentally sensitive" and "agricultural land" in Southern Ontario.

It sounds like, Mr. Hazell, that you and your team have been busy. Busy like a hyperactive janitor mopping a floor but ignoring that the tap is left wide open to continuously pour water over your work.

Do you remember the IPAT equation? Probably not, I suspect you were not even born in 1970 when the Sierra Club and the whole mainstream environmental movement accepted it as conventional wisdom. "I" (Environmental Impact) equals "P" (Population level) times A (Affluence or per capita consumption) times "T" (technology). Still makes sense to me. But no longer to the politically correct, who have taken the "P" right out to render environmental degradation incomprehensible.

Let's illustrate. We will have to cut global GHG emissions 60% just to make up for the increased emissions brought about by population increases globally in the next four decades. In Australia the population increased 30% from 1990-2006 and its GHG emissions increased by exactly the same number during that same period. In the United States, the population increased 43% from 1970 to 2004 and its GHG emissions increased 43% during that same period. The correlation is clear, is it not? Yet Sierra Club "analysts" in commenting on the governments emissions targets failed to even note Canada's immigrant-driven G-8 leading runaway population growth of 1.08%. Just as they were completely silent following the release of the March 07 census report. A stunning omission for an "environmental" organization.

Environment Minister Gordon Miller said that Southern Ontario can expect to have to jam another 6 million people into its agricultural region in the next 25 years if immigration rates are not curbed. And you want to "Grow the Greenbelt". How? "Smart Growth?" (Smart growth, Smart clear-cuts, Smart extinctions etc.) Check out what is happening to British Greenbelts, once 14% of the UK, now crumbling under development pressure. If Portland Oregon went down, anything will. There is no sanctuary from relentless population and economic growth. Renewable technologies? The energy produced by the 900 wind farm at Sarnia will be erased by the energy demands of 23 days of immigration. BC Hydro claims that if every British Columbian household turned their lights off for one hour it would provide enough power for 4000 households for a year. But the population growth rate in BC is such that in just one year everyone would have turn their lights off for 6 hours a day to power those 4000 households and in four years time everyone would have to leave their lights off permanently. Recycling is also futile. A British study revealed that one new citizen via the maternity ward or the airport wipes out 80 years of responsible re-cycling. I could go on. You get the point Mr. Hazell.

No, no. The point is not to quit recycling. Or to abandon the search for more efficient technologies. Or not to make more efficient and rational land use decisions. Etc. Etc. Rather, it is to point out that without population stabilization all of those worthy goals are pointless. That is why the Sierra Club of the United States was committed to it for most of its recent history and why one third of its current membership are trying to restore that commitment, led by a group of Sierrans called SUSPS (Sierrans for US Population Stabilization).

But I doubt, if you are a typical Canadian like me, that you will be interested in rocking the boat.

So get back to your mop and whistle your happy tune. Who knows, maybe Walt Disney was right, if you wish something to be true and avoid nasty thoughts and phrases like "over-population", "immigration", "limited carrying capacity" and "over-shoot" your Al Gore fantasy just might come true. By living greener lifestyles and vesting our hopes in renewable technologies, you might wish away the fact that there are twice as many Canadians here now as when I was born and pretend that doesn't make a whit of difference to the habitat they're destroying. Just whisper the magic words, “Aba-ka-dabra, Smart Growth!”, and presto! Done!

PS. Is there a technological fix for an extinct species?

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC.