plastic first praised as indestructable abused_as_disposable

4.30: news.pol/trash/
plastic praised as indestructable abused as disposable:
. it was said on Fresh Air, that an LA suburb
has a problem with gulls showering them with dump waste .
. when the dump was first started,
there were no houses in the area;
but the dump has grown that much?
perhaps they can't believe that suburban sprawl
would try to compete with dump space .

news:
. the Puente Hills landfill near Los Angeles,
has so much trash
that its natural gas emissions can generate
enough electricity to power 70,000 homes,"
. the author of Garbology stated that
methane gas is not very efficient;
the way to get energy from garbage
is to burn it
using europe's new stack scrubbers;
but the old scrubbers are so notorious
that nobody in the usa trusts them any more .
. plus we found other ways to unload it:
the chinese will recycle our paper
but this very inefficient too because
they are using fuel to ship tons of garbage to china
and then ship tons of paper products right back .
. Terry Gross was perplexed, and quipped:
"( if everyone is happy,
what is there to this Garbology book?!),

. I thought most of this was just another
side attack of the overpopulation issue
but I was truly impressed when it was pointed out
that plastic was originally praised as the
make-anything substance that would last forever,
and then it's most common use becomes
one-night-stand tossable containers!

. the plastic never really decomposes either,
it simply gets smaller (and absorbing more toxins)
until it is eaten by marine life .



comments @ npr.org:
# Haans Petruschke (Haans) wrote:

. "I am very tired of this constant anti plastic propaganda
and wonder who is really behind it?
It really is a pack of constantly repeated lies."

# felix culpa (polemicrat) Fri 27 Apr 2012 02:39:39 PM MST

. I worked at a recycling center for a bit.
We were told that all the separating was for show.
We were told that most plastic (PP, V, some PETE) was not recyclable
and was sorted then shipped to a landfill somewhere in Central America.
We were also told that if any PP, V, or PETE
gets into the process of recycling HDPE or LDPE
the final product is useless.

[. elsewhere it was pointed out this is known as banking:
dedicating a dump to a particular kind of material,
so that when we do have a use for it,
then it will be relatively pure, and easy to use .]

...
And to say that plastic is "bio-inert" is a lie for two reasons.
One, the chemistry of the process of digestion of plastics
has not been thoroughly studied;
two, what is known is that chemicals used in plastics manufacturing
are out gassed as the material breaks down
and are variously toxic to life.