Post by NFA on Sept 7, 2023 15:47:47 GMT 8
Two stories on recycling
The Editor
The Express
Two articles in The Express (06/09) claim there’s a “need” to develop a “circular economy”, which has been widely accepted without adequate analysis.
It’s implicitly suggested that there’s a shortage of the materials in modern waste-streams and of ways to dispose of them, and that a failure to repurpose them will create some undefined future hardship.
However, when you closely examine these suggestions you find they lack a factual foundation.
If waste had inherent value we wouldn’t throw it out. We’d sell it to a willing buyer who would profit from reusing it, as we do with metals. That lack of inherent value says the materials are very easy to produce and that the raw materials aren’t scarce.
Household organic waste could be composted in every backyard with an investment of time. However the value of the finished compost for most people is lower than the value of the time needed to make it – so they don’t.
Combustible waste such as cardboard and plastic has a significant energy content. It could be shredded, pre-heated, and burned in modern, exhaust-scrubbed incinerators to produce steam to drive turbines to generate cheap electricity that’s independent of the weather and time of day.
There’s a small market for recycled glass, but the energy input required to crush and transport it is significant. It’s inert, so it’s completely harmless when buried.
It’s claimed there’s a shortage of landfill sites, but if you’ve been outside the cities you know that’s rubbish. Look at the Mareeba and Springmount landfills on Google maps satellite view and zoom out – they’re specks in a vast landscape.
Leachates are no longer a problem in landfills because of advanced sealing technologies, which is how the Mareeba and Springmount sites gained approval.
Sending multiple fleets of trucks around the same routes to collect different types of waste and then paying people to sort through it at public expense when no defined market exists for it is blatant economic vandalism. If the current version of publicly-funded recycling was ever to pay its own way it would have done so years ago.
Those who believe the myth that carbon dioxide controls the climate must suffer emotional distress seeing the recycling trucks following the general waste trucks around.
If your mission was to destroy an economy so you could claim that capitalism has failed to introduce communism, then squandering the wealth capitalism creates on third-rate solutions to non-core problems is the first step in that process.
Intelligent non-communist state government leaders would have abandoned the current version of recycling years ago and adopted the alternatives outlined above. That they don’t says that the ALP-LNP twins have been subverted by communists.
(444 words)
Peter Campion
Tolga
The Express
Two articles in The Express (06/09) claim there’s a “need” to develop a “circular economy”, which has been widely accepted without adequate analysis.
It’s implicitly suggested that there’s a shortage of the materials in modern waste-streams and of ways to dispose of them, and that a failure to repurpose them will create some undefined future hardship.
However, when you closely examine these suggestions you find they lack a factual foundation.
If waste had inherent value we wouldn’t throw it out. We’d sell it to a willing buyer who would profit from reusing it, as we do with metals. That lack of inherent value says the materials are very easy to produce and that the raw materials aren’t scarce.
Household organic waste could be composted in every backyard with an investment of time. However the value of the finished compost for most people is lower than the value of the time needed to make it – so they don’t.
Combustible waste such as cardboard and plastic has a significant energy content. It could be shredded, pre-heated, and burned in modern, exhaust-scrubbed incinerators to produce steam to drive turbines to generate cheap electricity that’s independent of the weather and time of day.
There’s a small market for recycled glass, but the energy input required to crush and transport it is significant. It’s inert, so it’s completely harmless when buried.
It’s claimed there’s a shortage of landfill sites, but if you’ve been outside the cities you know that’s rubbish. Look at the Mareeba and Springmount landfills on Google maps satellite view and zoom out – they’re specks in a vast landscape.
Leachates are no longer a problem in landfills because of advanced sealing technologies, which is how the Mareeba and Springmount sites gained approval.
Sending multiple fleets of trucks around the same routes to collect different types of waste and then paying people to sort through it at public expense when no defined market exists for it is blatant economic vandalism. If the current version of publicly-funded recycling was ever to pay its own way it would have done so years ago.
Those who believe the myth that carbon dioxide controls the climate must suffer emotional distress seeing the recycling trucks following the general waste trucks around.
If your mission was to destroy an economy so you could claim that capitalism has failed to introduce communism, then squandering the wealth capitalism creates on third-rate solutions to non-core problems is the first step in that process.
Intelligent non-communist state government leaders would have abandoned the current version of recycling years ago and adopted the alternatives outlined above. That they don’t says that the ALP-LNP twins have been subverted by communists.
(444 words)
Peter Campion
Tolga