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by Michael Willoughby
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What colour is your recycling kit? A clear silly season discussion has begun on the normally staid Scalation news list regarding the bruised hues - and various shapes and sizes - of different containers up and down the land.
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Apparently, in South Manchester, they have green for garden waste, blue for paper and board and black boxes for glass, tins, etc. But plastic bottles have to be taken to the local tip.
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In North Lincolnshire the wheelies are brown for compostables, burgundy for card and plastic, and green for residual waste, plus a blue stacking box for paper and a green one for glass and metal. They will also take textiles and shoes in a plastic bag.
In Herts, they have a black (general and non-recycleable) and a Green (recycleable (paper, card, tins, but no glass) and a Brown (compostable waste).
Personally, in Tower Hamlets, east London I am lucky in being able to shove all my naughty, no hope waste in large metal bins in my trash hut next to my compound gates and all mixed recycling in another bin in the waste house. I gather from a recycling friend of mine that this is not great in the long term, however, because the quality of the resulting mish mash of materials is lower quality. A lot more sorting goes on in Hackney, over the border.
A correspondent from HCD Building Control points out that there are only TWO slots for waste bins in building regulations. How does that work, then?
The info-sharing rose from discussions about the damage that complexity might do to progress. My parents' rudimentary concern about the environment is regularly challenged by difficultness - at 63, it's tough for them to battle through 19 different Dorset council recycling receptacles. But they do it because they believe that recycling works and don't really want to think about it. Should their faith be questioned?
Some were keen to talk about whether it was really worth rinsing out and recycling a pasta jar in terms of carbon benefit, while others pointed out that these kind of 'doubts' might not just confuse a Daily Mail audience, but also make them sense there was some kind of trick, or the whole thing was pointless, and question the validity of the exercise.
Nonetheless, Chris Church, whose list it is, did actually calculate out the case for rinsing and recycling that pasta jar, and, thankfully, came out on the side of the angels. His workings follow.
My immediate reaction was to think “of course you should recycle,” and some initial research showed that most if not all out there on the web concurred. However, I found very few numbers that proved that this was the case. Not able to let it rest, I set out to calculate some of my own. After several hours, I had the beginnings of an answer (and please share your thoughts if you disagree or have more to add!). I decided to focus on energy use / carbon emissions and water use, since the benefits of avoiding the landfill are clear.
Energy and Carbon Footprint
To do this right, I needed to find some information about the energy consumption and associated carbon footprint of the entire process of producing glass, from securing raw materials up through manufacturing and through to distribution of the finished product. I also needed the same information for the recycling path. Fortunately, the good folks at the EPA had done a great analysis of this very topic. After some fairly complicated conversions, you can boil a spaghetti sauce jar down to this: the process needed to take sand and turn it into that spaghetti jar on your shelf creates about ten ounces of carbon dioxide per jar. So, anything LESS than that in the recycling process means that you’re reducing your overall carbon footprint. After doing some calculations using the EPA information, it turns out that recycling the jar SAVES about six ounces of CO2 when you compare it to a) having to make that amount of new glass and b) sending that jar to the landfill.
Now, to the question at hand: what if it’s full of caked-on sauce and you have to use hot water to rinse it out? Using the equations behind the hot water portion of LIL’s Environmental Impact Calculator, and assuming that you heat hot water with natural gas to the relatively low temperature of 120 degrees (conservative assumptions)
Water
Water usage was a bit trickier. I found some data that suggests (after some analysis) that it takes about half a gallon of water to make each jar, although that amount can vary quite a bit depending on whether or not the manufacturer reuses water during glassmaking. This means that, to come out even on the water front, you’d have to only use about 15 seconds of water (full blast) during your rinsing process. That’s definitely do-able, but you don’t have quite the room to err as you do with carbon emissions.Now, these numbers might not seem that large unless you eat spaghetti every night! But remember that this is a worst-case scenario involving a very gunky jar - the rationale for recycling is even stronger for the easier-to-clean beverage bottles we use every day. The typical person in the US uses over 130 glass bottles or jars a year - that’s about 40 pounds of carbon dioxide and 60 gallons of water saved per person per year, and over 100 pounds of waste kept out of landfills.
So the next time you go to empty out that pasta jar, rest assured that you’re doing a good thing for the planet. But to be safe, use a scrub brush, some elbow grease, and shut off the water unless you’re specifically rinsing!"
So thanks Chris. It's easy to founder under complexity. Thank god someone else has the brains to sort it out.
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