Recycle This: Still Learning How To

Some People Love Garbage

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Ah, Oscar the Grouch. Now there’s a fella that loves garbage. I wonder how he feels about recycling. I don’t mean re-purposing. Using a wine bottle as a candle-holder is ‘re-purposed.’ -To me, that is not “recycling.” I say that recycling is melting aluminum soda and beer cans and making more or something else, something different and useful. Recycling to me means grinding plastic milk bottles etc. into chips, melting them and magic steps later, making useful new things like plastic sheet roofing, automobile parts, plastic lawn furniture or those fake boardwalk boards. Saves a forest of old trees right there. Benefit here too being plastic, they do not expand, warp, rot or harbor molds and fungus. I wonder if ‘plastic boards’ would be suitable for home construction? I suppose that there would be health & safety issues with toxic outgassing over the long-term though. Certainly vinyl siding is recycled plastic and, it is on the outside of the house so any issues with outgassing is moot.

Plastics recycle with difficulty, more so than glass or metal. They must be separated by their ‘resin identification code’ and reused that way. Merely remelting them all together is not sufficient; there are processes that must be followed to prevent a condition called phase-separate whereby dissimilar plastics melted together fail to bond together in an alloy, they separate like water and oil.

Recycling is not the same world as when I was a kid. Back then, putting trash in its place was all you had to do. “Every Litter Bit Hurts”, “Give a Hoot: Don’t Pollute” and all that. -Just throwing the trash into a trash receptacle was depicted as being the end of it. Turns out, it is only the beginning.

Glass Bricks

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The author of this image cites a company that is making these; they are 97% recycled glass. Mixed with cement, this aggregate glass material can be used to make building blocks. Another postee cites that roads are (or can be) built using glass particles and that rain water will filter through the porous material thus eliminating pooling/standing water on the road surface. This would make the wet pavement less slippery. I recall ground-up glass being tried as an additive to asphalt for highway construction many years ago… it was a fail as it made the road exceedingly slippery when wet. Like, well …like wet glass!