[rescue] Clutter???

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 04:11:02PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > 1.  If he's burning the paper, he is using it a fuel, essentially
> > recycling it. (one item serves multiple purposes)
> 
> IFF he's using it as a fuel.  :-)

Really, I just used the word burn originally figuratively.  Although
we do also use paper as starter for wood fires (which is how the house
is heated) and we used to use it as starter for charcol fires (until
we got a gas grill).

Of what we don't burn, newspaper pretty much always gets recycled, but
I don't think that much else does.  At the old house, my recall is
that the recycling guys didn't want anything other than newsprint.  No
idea about the new house.  At school and work (where most of my paper
gets generated anyway) I do recycle it (well, put it in the recycle bin).
 
> > 2.  Traditional recycling is very expensive, and often not worth it.
> 
> ????  Most "cardboard" packaging material used in Canada is 100%
> post-consumer recycled paper fibre (and then there are Josh's ceiling
> tiles and lots of similar stuff).  That stuff is made of recycled paper
> because it's cheaper that way!  (Now there are some factors which are
> somewhat hidden, such as collection costs that may not be fully offset
> by the sale of the raw material.  It's one thing to collect paper and
> other recyclables in a large metropolitan area, but I'm not sure some of
> the collection efforts I've seen in rural southern Ontario are even
> close to paying for themselves, not even in good will and PR!)

I would imagine that recycling paper for the ceiling tiles is cheaper
than getting the materials elsewhere.  But I'm not involved in that at
all.  I haven't heard of them buying recyclable paper from other
places, only of them collecting it internally.  Apparently they do go
out of their way to collect used ceiling tiles to use a raw materials
for making new ones.  I find it hard to believe that this is really
cost saving finacially, but I could be wrong.

Considering that wood is renewable (and hemp is even more so), I
suspect that composting paper in rural areas would be the most sound
way of dealing with paper.
 
> I don't think anyone has the numbers quite yet.  We don't know yet how
> good trees (of the type found in North American forests) are at handling
> higher levels of CO2, and there's a lot of FUD and double-speak from the
> extremists (both the eco-nutcases and the forestry industry, and the
> petroleum freaks too) about how many extra trees and other greenery we'd
> need to compensate for current CO2 outputs.

I don't know.  But living next to a corn field and a forest certainly
seems to make life nicer.
 
> We still use a lot of wood fibre, and if people are willing to put it in
> a box and "pay" their city to pick it up and sell it, then we should do
> that, regardless.  The same goes for steel and aluminum cans, glass,
> plastics, etc.  It's better than putting it in a garbage dump, even if
> some of it does have to be stored in big warehouses before buyers are
> found.

I think that aluminum recycling is supposed to be profitable.
Otherwise, why would the recycling company actually pay for it
(whereas they only accept paper without paying for it) when people are
often giving it away for free?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd