China's Waste Ban Is Causing A Trash Crisis In The U.S - Page 3

I generally agree but ..... ?

There are plastic liners inside aluminum cans. Add to that ... the plastic ball shake em' up sales gimmic thingie they sometimes put in em'.

A glass wine bottle with cork is the option for the wealthy purists. Right or wrong it is what it is.

Totally stupid thing at our bottle recycling center yesterday.The driver that picks up the bottles and cans that have been processed through our reverse vending machines comes in waving a new law that the legislature passed recently. We now have to separate our glass according to color. Brown, clear, and everything else. Jeez ... Louise ... those guys in the state house are way too far removed from the reality on the ground.

Grumble ... grumble .... grumble .... dam*ed granolas. Totally clueless. They would do a lot better job of writing laws & regulations if they came down and got their hands dirty from time to time.

Originally Posted by t00nces2

Well, I'm not going to feel too guilty about plastic soda bottles. I don't drink soda, I rarely drink bottled water (and many times, it is a bottle I have refilled with water from my RO), my beer and wine is in glass bottles (which I don't care what is said, the stream of glass, ALL GLASS, could be diverted to an aggregate rock crushing facility and added and mixed with crushed rock aggregate), and I drink ice tea I make myself and pour from a Tupperware 1/2 gallon jug I have had since the mid '80's.

Crushed multicolored glass could be added to terrazzo grout and make really cool terrazzo floors. I like terrazzo and the glass aggregate would look really cool.

that would be kinda cool seeing more glass made into aggregate. you can turn plastic into couch cushions and sweaters too with out as much nit picking over the type and color being fed into the stream as it takes to make new bottles. so hopefully someone with enough money to really change something steps up and does it. cause we can bicker about this and that all we want but in the grand scheme of things unless we start taking action on these words i don't think much will change with just opinions. although now I am pretty determined to start stepping up my ac compressor game as soon as i get back to the states. before i was doing them on just the tailgate of my truck and i wasn't all that efficient. but i'm looking into getting a shipping container set up with all my equipment and cutting table on a swinging door. so as soon as I open the door i can just flip a switch and start cutting. no more wasting an hour setting up.

Im sorta suprised about the sorting the glass bottles by colour. Unless they start regulating the type of glass into just one sort/grade or glass for each colour.
Like theres probably 20 different types of green glass. Unless there isnt or that the shade consistancy doesn't matter between glass batches.
Or they intend to introduce just one single shade of green ( or brown or clear) for everybody.
I dunno.

In my area the glass is seperated out from the recycling bins, but they have huge piles of mixed glass in different places just waiting untill they can recycle it ( i doubt that that will happen)
or they can single landfill it somewhere ( most likely )
In other areas ( different island ) they do recycle it somehow.

Plastic bottles? The 1.25 & 2 litre clear bottles are getting recycled into house insulation here at the moment.
The Goverments just introduced laws requiring all rental houses to be insulated properly so theres been a big demand for roof & underfloor insulation & plastic sheet on the soil under the house for damp.

Our houses are very poorly insulated compared to American houses. We dont have plywood sheet under the roofing or outside walls under the brick or weatherboards.
No underfloor insulation & no basements, often no wall insulation. We use glass fibre insulation here. Not rockwool.
Our temps go from minus -4°C during the winter, up to around +35°C during summer.
The South island is colder with drier air. While the North island is more humid & warmer.

Well ... some recycled glass here does get melted and used to make new bottles and jars. I can see why they need color sorting.

It's my bad ... i probably should have explained more.

Our beverage bottle recycling centre has been in operation for over twenty five years now. It used to be that they were all sorted by hand. That turned into a huge mess. It's very labor intensive ( and expensive ) to do things that way.

Twenty years ago, they introduced something called a reverse vending machine. The customer puts their bottle into the mouth of the machine. A conveyor picks up the bottle and scans the bar code. From there, it gets dropped into a hammermill and the glass is pulverized.

Our original machine had the capability of sorting the glass by colour. Brown, clear, and green glass all went into separate bins. It was a good machine. Processed in excess of one million bottles over the years. It's one major flaw was in the sorting mechanism. That was constantly jamming up and shutting down the machine.

Here it is twenty years later and we can't source repair parts anymore. We got a brand new state of the art machine about 8 months ago. The new ones are really good but cost tens of thousands of dollars to put in place. The problem is that the new ones don't sort by color anymore.

So .... here we are .... there's a ton of money invested in new equipment and the regulators turn their nose up at it because it doesn't sort by color. Jeez man .... there's no money in this. We're just running our bottle redemption center as a service to the community and those guys are getting all persnicketty ?

Yeah right .... i've run into that kind before. It's like a religion with them. It goes beyond all reason. It's never good enough with that kind.

Anyway ... i figured a little more back story would help put it into context.

Thanks. We are having sorta the same problem here in my part of NZ.
We have 2 big plastic rubbish bins, one is for recycling waste, glass bottles, tins, plastic bottles and paper/cardboard, & a few other things like clean polystyrene.
It gets picked up by the rubbish truck every 2 weeks, taken to the recycling centre, sorted, bailed & sent wherever it goes.
The other bins for just rubbish & its picked up weekly.
'They' are wanting to shut down the recycling station & i dont know what will replace it.

The glass problem? I have wondered if the glass could be made into 100% glass bricks. Hollow bricks i guess would help insulate against cold. They would absorb heat nicely.
The problem with glass is contamination, if theres any glass of a higher melting temp, scientific glass, oven dishes etc, a tiny piece of that in the recycled glass object wont melt it & will cause a sharp spot, since it wont expand & contract the same, it will cause the other glass to break.

We dont have the machine for taking bottles/cans. We did about 30 years ago for a short time, for Ali cans.
Then some idiot did something that got his little daughter hurt by the machine & the machines were shut down.
They would give you prizes randomly, free coke cola, free AA batterys, small prizes etc.
They took in huge amounts of ali cans too. Theres no redemption on cans/bottles here except standard scrap Ali can price of NZ1.00 /Kg. ( uS$0.68 cents/Kg )

Originally Posted by eesakiwi

Plastic bottles? The 1.25 & 2 litre clear bottles are getting recycled into house insulation here at the moment.
The Goverments just introduced laws requiring all rental houses to be insulated properly so theres been a big demand for roof & underfloor insulation & plastic sheet on the soil under the house for damp.

Our houses are very poorly insulated compared to American houses. We dont have plywood sheet under the roofing or outside walls under the brick or weatherboards.
No underfloor insulation & no basements, often no wall insulation. We use glass fibre insulation here. Not rockwool.
Our temps go from minus -4°C during the winter, up to around +35°C during summer.
The South island is colder with drier air. While the North island is more humid & warmer.

Construction methods here in the states do vary from place to place because it's such a big country. I think you mostly build for the kind of environment that you find yourself in. We have harder winters here in the Northeast. The climate is a little milder here on the coast. Average daytime temps here in the winter are about -6 C. They can drop to -23 C. at night. Add the wind chill factor and that pushes it down to -31 C. The cold is more extreme as you work your way inland.We have snow loads to contend with as well. It's not common but you can get as much as 1 meter of snow on the roof. That's quite a bit of weight. The most common way to build a roof these days is to use a system of engineered trusses for the framework with a 1/2" (13mm) plywood decking. This creates something called a stress skin panel that distributes the weight evenly across the whole structure. It's relatively lightweight and very strong.

Looks like we're taking a lesson from our friends in N.Z. Our traditional roofing material has been asphalt shingles. The metal roofing is really starting to catch on.

Standard insulation in this area is fiberglass batts. We use a minimum of 3.5" (89mm) for floors, 6"(152mm) for walls, and 12" (305mm) in our ceilings.

The ceiling is one of the more important things because it's where you get your most heat loss. It's important in the summertime too. Our daytime temps usually don't get much above 85 F. (29 C.) but the roof surfaces can easily exceed 120 F.(49C.). That radiates a lot of heat downward into the living space. Having lots of insulation in the attic / crawlspace area helps slow the transfer of heat both upward and downward.

We do use blown in cellulose insulation on some jobs. It's basically recycled newsprint that's been shredded up.That works well enough though it does tend to settle and lose it's fluff over time. It's the dead air spaces between the glass fibers -or- between pieces of shredded up newsprint that give you your insulation value so settling is a concern.

Another thing that's been gaining popularity over the last 25 years is blown in foam insulation. The basic idea of it is pretty good but it doesn't seem to be working very well in the real world. You want to avoid any kind of plastics in your building insulation. They can't "breathe". Water vapor gets trapped and quickly rots the building. It's also a heavy contributor to black mold problems.Something to avoid using if at all possible.

As with anything else there always exceptions to the rule. Most of our foundations are either 8' cement, 4' cement, or slab. It's always a good idea to use a heavy plastic under a cement floor as a vapor barrier. 2" foam glued to cement walls is a good insulator and doesn't cause building rot problems.

It all varies ya know ? In the southern part of the U.S. daytime temps can often exceed 100 F ( 38C.) in the summer. Air conditioning is every bit as important to them in the summer as heating is for us in the North during the winter. Good insulation works both ways. It keeps the heat in when it's cold. Keeps the heat out when it's too hot. It pays for itself over time with savings in energy costs. It's a good thing to have if you can possibly afford the up front cost.