Plastic Recycling

Look at the recycling logo on a plastic bottle or container. It depicts a continuous loop, a virtuous circle, if you like, of plastic being made into bottles then being recycled into new bottles then the whole process repeating endlessly. Nothing falls out of the cycle and nothing new is introduced. It is a bit misleading. It doesn't take much imagination to realise that energy needs added to the process at the very least - energy for collecting the used plastic, treating it and manufacturing the new bottles. Less obvious is the fact that very few food grade bottles contain material from recycled bottles. Plant has been developed to do this but at this time its use not widespread.

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#CTWW Weekly Challenge, 18th April 2012

This Week's Challenge:

This week's challenge is from Stephanie. 

This week take a walk and pick up trash. Then, come back here and tell us what you found (photos of what you collected would be great)!

I must confess, this week time and weather got the better of me so I.m digging in to the dim and distant past for this challenge. The Thursday before Easter to be precise. I went for a fresh spring walk at Palacerigg Country Park in nearby Cumbernauld. The country park specialises in rare breeds of domesticated animals but I was there more for the fresh air and to see how spring was progressing.

I walked from the visitor centre to the start of Brockhurst Woods when I spotted a clear plastic bag snagged on a tree just above head height, so I grabbed it and stuffed it in my pocket, then headed down Glencryan with a spring in my step, pleased at doing a good deed.

Further on, I came across what I initially took to be a pond but later found was a small reservoir, pictured above. As I drew nearer, my heart sank. Beer cans, broken glass litter strewn on the banks and in the water. You can see them floating in the photo above.

The area is clearly frequented by some of the more anti-social locals for boozing, littering and fire raising, with partly burnt out living trees, like the one below.

Clearing up this area is, I feel, beyond the scope of this weeks challenge and really needs a well equipped squad with waders, protective gloves and other safety equipment to get the litter out of the reservoir.

It was really disappointing "discovering" this place only to find it trashed through lazy people's carelessness but we do need accessible outdoor places near our towns and cities.   Walks through the woods is good for us both physically and mentally. We just need to work out how to get people to take some responsibility for their actions.

Fortunately it didn't ruin the walk completely! There was lively birdsong, flowering gorse bushes, fantastic fungi and and wind blown trees of gigantic proportions.

So what challenge is in store for us tomorrow...  

http://reducefootprints.blogspot.co.uk/p/change-world-wednesday.html

Plastic bags: it's not all about carbon

I recently read an article which discussed how we could tackle the problem of the 800,000 tonnes of plastic bags thrown away each year in Europe, an average of 191 for every citizen of the European Union.  It highlighted the much smaller carbon footprint of disposable single use plastic carrier bags compared with alternatives.  Part of the article described re-using plastic bags as bin liners rather than using purpose made bin liners and it had a nifty graphic .  To a point, this makes sense but considering that many people use plastic bags for almost all of their domestic purchases, then to use every carrier bag once as a bin liner would require all that was bought to be disposed of in the bin.  I know that there is a lot of waste packaging in groceries but it does generally compact down to a smaller volume than the original (unless you live entirely on tinned produce) therefore assuming that all plastic bags are re-used in this way is stretching things a bit.  To then hypothesise that they could be used three times as bin liners is clearly not relevant.

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Bag it, Bin it or Don't

I took my 6 year old daughter Christmas shopping the other week. We went to Lush, the hand made cosmetics company, looking for a gift for her mother. She was in heaven: the bright colours, the smells, the glitter and the pretty shapes of the soaps and bath bombs. There was no difficulty in choosing a gift for mother (especially one she might share), the only problem was deciding to stop!

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