Recycling garbage Ho Ax

[Alabuckeye]

20 Mule Team Borax works wonders on mold if you have it in your home....bathroom ceiling or such.

[cincydawg]

Borax also kills roaches pretty well. I think it gets inside their caparaces crevices and irritates them.

I never saw any evidence it did anything for laundry.

Some of the cheap detergents (granular type) would load up with cheap sodium carbonate to run the pH way up and that helps cleaning, but the safety factor was beyond what our folks would allow, and it damages clothes over time.

I used to use Cascade all the time, it worked well, then they apparently took out the phosphate and it's crap, and now they make those little pouch things which also are crap in my experience.

If you get residue on your dishes, run the hot water to fill the lines with hot water before turning on your machine (some machines heat the water themselves). Using a gas hot water heater to heat water is cheaper than using some electric resistance thing.

We were having trouble here initially, the wife was impressed when I told her this trick.

[zigbee]

20 Mule Team Borax works wonders on mold if you have it in your home....bathroom ceiling or such.

Clorox bleach  bathroom shower/tile spray does great on mold as well.

[cincydawg]

Chlorine bleach is pretty good stuff for a lot of things. The cheap stuff is the same as Clorox nearly as I can discern.

Chlorine is interesting stuff, if you mix it with water, it makes an acidic hypochlorous acid (HOCl), if you increase the pH it become sodium hypochlorite, which is household bleach, but it still has some residual chlorine which is why it smells.

It pretty much nails anything "organic" that is unsaturated or has a heteroatom (something not carbon or hydrogen or oxygen).

[BigDroppa]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/envir...tic-waste/

Is burning plastic waste a good idea?
Many within the trash industry think so. But incineration and other “waste-to-energy” projects may pose dangers to the environment.

5 MINUTE READ

[/url]










[url=https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/should-we-burn-plastic-waste/#]

[BigDroppa]

WHAT IS TO be done with the swelling flood of plastic waste, if we donâ€t want to see it snagged in tree branches, floating in ocean gyres, or clogging the stomachs of seabirds and whales?

Plastic production is expected to double in the next 20 years, according to a report issued by the World Economic Forum. Plastic recycling rates, meanwhile, hover around 30 percent in Europe, just nine percent in the U.S., and zero or close to it in much of the developing world.

This past January, a consortium of petrochemical and consumer-goods companies called the Alliance to End Plastic Waste, including Exxon, Dow, Total, Shell, Chevron Phillips, and Procter & Gamble, committed to spending $1.5 billion over five years on the problem. Their aim is to support alternative materials and delivery systems, beef up recycling programs, and—more controversially—promote technologies that convert plastics to fuel or energy.



Sophisticated incinerators that burn plastic and other municipal waste can produce enough heat and steam to turn turbine blades and generate electricity for the local grid. The European Union, which restricts the landfilling of organic waste, already burns almost 42 percent of its waste; the U.S. burns 12.5 percent. According to the World Energy Council, a U.N. accredited network that represents a range of energy sources and technologies, the waste-to-energy sector is likely to witness steady growth in coming years, especially in the Asia Pacific region. China already has some 300 waste-to-energy plants operating, with another several hundred in the pipeline.

"As countries like China close their doors to foreign waste and an overburdened recycling industry fails to keep up with the plastic pollution crisis,” says John Hocevar of Greenpeace, “incineration will increasingly be pushed as an easy alternative.”


Is it a good idea?

Burning plastic trash to create energy sounds sensible: Plastic is, after all, made from hydrocarbons, just like oil, and is more energy-dense than coal. But several obstacles loom to a big expansion of waste-burning.

For one thing, siting waste-to-energy plants, like siting landfills, is difficult: No one wants to live near a plant that may host hundreds of trash-filled trucks a day. Usually the plants end up near low-income communities. The U.S. has seen only one new incinerator since 1997.

Waste-to-energy plants are also expensive to build and operate, so they generally charge more to tip loads of trash than landfills do. And because plants run most efficiently with steady streams of waste, their owners often need to import material from far, far away.

Large plants do generate enough electricity to supply tens of thousands of houses. But studies have shown that recycling plastic waste saves more energy—by reducing the need to extract fossil fuel and process it into new plastic—than burning it, along with other household waste, can generate.


Finally, waste-to-energy plants have the potential to emit low levels of toxic pollutants such as dioxins, acid gases, and heavy metals. Modern plants employ sophisticated scrubbers, precipitators, and filters to capture these compounds, but as the World Energy Council cautiously states, in a 2017 report, “These technologies are useful as long as the combustion plants are properly operated and emissions controlled.”

Some experts worry that countries lacking environmental laws, or strict enforcement, may try to save money on emissions controls. And then thereâ€s incinerationâ€s constant production of greenhouse gases. In 2016, U.S. waste incinerators released the equivalent of 12 million tons of carbon dioxide, more than half of which came from plastics.

A better way to burn?

Another way to convert waste to energy is through gasification, a process that melts plastics at very high temperatures in the near-absence of oxygen (which means toxins like dioxins and furans arenâ€t formed). The process generates a synthetic gas thatâ€s used to fire turbines. But with natural gas so cheap, gasification plants arenâ€t competitive.

A more attractive technology right now is pyrolysis, in which plastics are shredded and melted at lower temperatures than gasification and in the presence of even less oxygen. The heat breaks plastic polymers down into smaller hydrocarbons, which can be refined to diesel fuel and even into other petrochemical products—including new plastics. (The Alliance to End Plastic Waste includes pyrolysis companies.)


PLASTICS 101

Seven relatively small pyrolysis plants now operate in the U.S., some still in demonstration phase, and the technology appears to be expanding worldwide, with facilities in Europe, China, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The American Chemistry Council estimates that the U.S. could sustain 600 pyrolysis units handling 30 tons of plastics a day, for a total of around 6.5 million tons a year—just under a fifth of the 34.5 million tons of plastic waste the country now generates.

Pyrolysis can handle the films, pouches, and multi-layered materials that most mechanical recyclers cannot, says Priyanka Bakaya, founder of the plastic-to-fuel company Renewlogy. And it produces no harmful pollutants, she says, other than “a minimal amount of carbon dioxide.”

On the other hand, critics call pyrolysis an expensive and immature technology, with startups that have come and gone over the years, unable to meet their pollution control limits, or technical and financial goals. It is still cheaper to make diesel from fossil fuel than from waste plastic.

But is it renewable?

Is fuel from plastic a renewable resource? According to the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency, 16 U.S. states consider municipal solid waste, including the plastics in it, a renewable fuel source. But plastics arenâ€t renewable in the sense that wood, paper, or cotton are. Plastics donâ€t grow from sunlight: We make them from fossil fuels extracted from the ground, and each step in that process has the potential to pollute.

In the European Union, only the biogenic fraction of municipal solid waste is considered renewable. But no matter how the EU counts its carbon, burning plastics for fuel in incinerators, along with the rest of its waste, seems to contravene the unionâ€s adoption, in 2015, of “circular economy” goals, which aim to keep resources in use for as long as possible and call for all plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2030.

“When you take fossil fuels out of the ground, make plastics with them, then burn those plastics for energy, it's clear that this is not a circle—it's a line,” says Rob Opsomer of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which promotes circular economy efforts. But pyrolysis, Opsomer adds, can be considered part of the circular economy if its outputs are used as feedstock for new high-quality materials—including durable plastics.

Zero-waste advocates worry that any approach to converting plastic waste into energy does nothing to reduce demand for new plastic products and even less to mitigate climate change. “To uplift these approaches is to distract from real solutions,” says Claire Arkin, a campaigner with the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives—that is, solutions that allow people to use less plastic and reuse and recycle more.

[BigDroppa]

Around tables strewn with Exacto knives, bowls, cutting boards, tape, funnels, and bags of hemp powder, mushroom parts, and sugar, a dozen graduate students from the packaging and industrial-design departments at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, brainstormed.

Their brief? To create new forms of food packaging to replace the unsustainable designs upon which modern life seems to depend: single-use plastic beverage cups, lids, straws, and bottles.

Focusing on the long-lived detritus that typically accompanies take-out meals, the students baked and 3D-printed straws made of sugar and agar—a gelatinous substance derived from seaweed. They hand-shaped bowls from mycelium, the threadlike roots of mushrooms. One team designed sheets of black plastic that folded into take-out containers (seen in image above) and could be returned to a collection point, sanitized, and reused ad infinitum by a consortium of take-out chains. Another duo crafted an ingenious paperboard box with a fold-it-yourself fork/spoon combo that diners tear from a perforated edge (above). When lunch is over, everything gets pitched into a compost bin, which in an ideal world is, of course, never far away.


By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from National Geographic Partners and our partners. Click here to visit our Privacy Policy. Easy unsubscribe links are provided in every email.

“Weâ€re seeing a tremendous acceleration in the demand for packaging alternatives as the unintended consequences of plastics become more visible, both locally and globally,” says Kate Daly, of Closed Loop Partners, a social-impact investment fund that focuses on waste.

Of the 78 million metric tons of plastic packaging produced globally each year, a mere 14 percent is recycled. Lightweight and floatable, plastic that escapes collection flows into our oceans—nine million tons annually—most of it from developing nations that lack the infrastructure to manage it. The problem is expected to get worse as those nations grow richer and inevitably start consuming more packaged foods, and as many others in an increasingly convenience-obsessed world continue to purchase meal-kit and grocery services—which generate considerable packaging—and take-out foods.



A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOW PLASTIC HAS CHANGED OUR WORLD
Weâ€re addicted to plastic. But how did the world become so dependent on it in the first place?

More conscientious recycling would be a boon, but itâ€s no panacea. Recycling requires energy, water, and the transport of materials. Most recycled plastics get shredded, melted, and reformed into goods—like lumber, fleece, or carpeting—still eventually bound for landfills. Manufacturers continue to make bottles and shrink-wraps ever thinner, but the fact remains: plastics are made from nonrenewable resources, either oil or natural gas, and most never see a second life.


ENVIRONMENT
What is seafood fraud? Dangerous—and running rampant, report finds
But plastic is quite good at what it does, which makes replacing it so devilishly difficult. Plastic protects food over long journeys, guarding it against pressure, humidity, light, and the bacteria that accelerate rot. (Shrink-wrap a cucumber in polyethylene and its shelf life stretches from three days to 14. The wrap, however, may last more than a century.) Plastic is strong and clear, enabling consumers to see what theyâ€re buying. And the feedstock for plastic is widely available and incredibly cheap. At least for now.

The Birth of Throwaway Culture
Soon after the turn of the 20th century, food companies began using a flexible wrap called cellophane, made from plants. Chemists later imitated this bio-based polymer with polyvinyl chloride and later less toxic polyethylene, creating Saran Wrap. While cellophane was compostable, the oil-based films—and the rigid plastic containers that followed—were not. The stage was set for a throwaway future.

In the 1970s, Capri Sun began pouring its juice drinks into gusseted pouches that weighed less than a plastic bottle of equivalent volume. Made of melded, ultrathin layers of plastic and aluminum foil, the pouches could be shipped flat—saving room—and they kept food fresh without refrigeration. Today the pouch is ubiquitous, holding everything from tuna to tomato paste, pet food to pickles. Itâ€s estimated that Americans go through 92 billion pouches a year. But their end-of-life prospects are bleak. Pouches, it turns out, are kryptonite to recycling companies, which canâ€t separate their heterogenous layers.

Shrink-wrap a cucumber in polyethylene and its shelf life stretches from three days to 14. The wrap, however, may last more than a century.
A Continuous Cycle
Often working together, designers, engineers, biologists, investors, and recyclers are now striving to develop packaging that falls within the mandates of whatâ€s known as the circular economy.

Itâ€s a design framework that eschews the linear “take, make, waste” model that leads from oil well to refinery, manufacturing plant to supermarket, consumer to landfill. Instead, it envisions supply chains that continuously cycle old materials back into high-value products—with an emphasis on long-lasting design, remanufacturing, and reuse—and business models that favor sharing and leasing (washing machines, cars), rather than ownership. In the circular economy, material goods cycle in two separate loops. One recovers technical nutrients—like metals, minerals, and polymers—for reuse, and the other returns biological materials—fiber, wood—to nature through composting programs, or it converts them, through anaerobic digestion, to carbon-neutral energy.

To imagine the packages of the future, many designers are looking to the past for inspiration. RISE, a Swedish research institute, has prototyped a nearly flat cellulose-based container that soup makers, for example, could fill with freeze-dried vegetables and spices. As diners add hot water, the containerâ€s origami folds stretch into a full-fledged, and fully compostable, bowl. The Pratt students shaped a bowl from mycelium, which grows in a week and composts in less than a month.

Harvard Universityâ€s Wyss Institute created “shrilk,” a low-cost, clear plastic thatâ€s completely compostable. Made of chitosan, derived from shrimp shells, and a silk protein derived from insects, shrilk can be used to make film or rigid shapes. But it hasnâ€t yet found its way into food packaging, alas, because it requires manufacturers to tweak their machines.

Of course, a compostable future depends upon universal access to—and consumer participation in—municipal compost systems, which collect organic materials for their conversion to fertilizer or energy. Hundreds of municipalities in the EU, Canada, and the U.S. are moving in this direction, but setting up a system can present a chicken-and-egg problem. In New York City, for example, the volume of available material far exceeds the capacity of nearby processors. But without a guarantee of that stream, investors are reluctant to build facilities.

And then thereâ€s the problem of human nature. Fred Skeberg, a Swedish product developer and founder of the food and design website Ateriet, once found himself at a music festival where vendors served food on “edible” corn starch-based plates, meant to be tossed into compost bins. But people assumed their bowls and plates would disappear in nature, Skeberg says, “and they threw it everywhere. So that backfired.” As the United Nations soberly noted in a report, “Labelling a product as biodegradable may be seen as a technical fix that removes responsibility from the individual.”


Until systems and people are in sync, a great deal of compostable packaging will end up in landfills, where it can generate greenhouse gases. If compostables mistakenly land in recycling plants—many plant-based plastics resemble their oil-based cousins—theyâ€re considered a contaminant. And if they drift into the ocean? Compostable plastics are designed to degrade at temperatures around 135°F and with exposure to ultraviolet light. Since degradables are heavier than oil-based plastics, they are likely to sink and linger for many years.

A Better Plastic?

Considering these challenges, some designers prefer to stick with plastics, since recycling systems are, in the developed world at least, already established. More than thirty different plastics are currently used in packaging, but some innovators are on the hunt for a single polymer group, a super-plastic that meets a multitude of performance requirements, is affordable for manufacturers, demands few changes in machinery, is widely accepted by municipal recycling systems, and easily converted into new packaging. But so far this product remains elusive.

Meanwhile, some designers are intent on eliminating disposable packaging altogether. Consider the plastic straw: Starbucks committed to phasing it out by 2020, in favor of an elongated sipping spout on a lid. The new lid will weigh more than the old, but a larger chunk of plastic is more likely to make it through a recycling plant.

The same idea—doing without—could apply to pasta, commonly packaged in a recyclable paperboard box fronted by a nonrecyclable plastic window. “Just because materials exist, you donâ€t have to add them,” says Dayna Baumeister, cofounder of the consultancy Biomimicry 3.8. “Why canâ€t we accept a photo of the pasta, as we do with dry cereal, and get rid of the window?”

Or perhaps the entire package? The U.S. company MonoSol produces a range of transparent ethylene-based polymers that dissolve in water. Most commonly used for dishwasher or laundry pods, the polymer can also be safely used to contain food, according to European and U.S. regulators, and has no effect on smell, texture, or taste (unless flavorings are added). The food-service industry is already using melt-away packaging: MonoSol envisions a future where retail portions of hot cocoa, oatmeal, rice, pasta, or other foods cooked with hot water are commonplace.

Similarly, the Swedish design studio Tomorrow Machine developed a line of food packaging, dubbed “This Too Shall Pass,” that includes a small bottle of cooking oil made from caramelized sugar coated with wax. The bottle is cracked like an egg to release the oil, and the wax shell can be composted (but donâ€t hold your breath: it takes years for wax to break down). For refrigerated liquids, the firm designed a pouch from seaweed, claiming it will “wither at the same rate as its contents.” For rice and other dry goods, it fashioned a pyramid-shaped package made of colored beeswax, to be peeled open like an orange. The designs attracted a great deal of attention for their beauty and hopefulness, but they remain, at this point, merely concepts.

As part of his “Disappearing Package” thesis project, New York-based designer Aaron Mickelson eliminated the outer container and plastic shrink wrap of boxed tea bags by impermanently gluing the bags into an accordion-style book. The user tears off one tea bag at a time, and the book eventually shrinks to nothing.

Until systems and people are in sync, a great deal of compostable packaging will end up in landfills.
Loliware, based in the U.S., makes FDA-approved edible (and therefore compostable) cups from seaweed mixed with organic sweeteners, flavors, and colorants. Containing 135 calories each can hold cold or room-temperature drinks, and cost a dollar apiece. Like ice cream cones, they come with a paper sleeve, “to make the user comfortable,” says Chelsea Briganti, Loliwareâ€s cofounder. The company also makes a kelp-based edible straw. In talks with major food and beverage retailers, Loliware is rapidly scaling up, with plans to lower its price and replace a billion plastic straws a year.

The Consumer Test
Inspired by the way nature separates insides from outsides—think grape skins—scientists are experimenting with edible membranes to contain liquids. The startup Skipping Rocks Lab created a package-free swig of water, dubbed Ooho, by dipping ice balls into extracts of plants and brown seaweed, which form a water-tight membrane. The consumer bites the ball, releasing a few swallows of cold water, then swallows the membrane itself. The balls will be produced by a compact machine at their point of sale, eliminating the need for cups.

Harvard Universityâ€s David Edwards created his own version of edible skin, called WikiCells, using fruit and other organic molecules to coat single-bite balls of soft, perishable products. Stonyfield used the technology on its Frozen Yogurt Pearls, which debuted in 2014, but sales were tepid and the pearls disappeared. “It was a great attempt,” Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirshberg says. “But consumers found grabbing an unwrapped product incomprehensible, even though they could wash it.” (The company is experimenting now with bamboo-based yogurt cups, which degrade in backyard compost piles, an advance over materials that compost only in industrial facilities.)


Today, WikiCells can be found encircling PerfectlyFree fruit snacks. But consumers donâ€t pluck these products from bulk containers: the snacks come in nonrecyclable plastic pouches or trays. “We have tried some products with a very minimalist packaging design,” says Marty Kolewe, director of research and development at IncredibleFoods, which owns PerfectlyFree, “but it turns out that consumers—and also the business infrastructure surrounding food distribution—is a ways off from accepting truly package-less products.”

The Waste of Convenience
Ultra-packaged meal-kit delivery services, which ship ingredients and recipes for a single meal, are a $1.2 billion market that some analysts expect to more than quadruple by 2023. But itâ€s accompanied by mountains of non-recyclable or hard-to-recycle ice packs, bubble film, and Styrofoam packaging.

A three-year-old company called Temperpack has responded to one part of this waste challenge with a completely recyclable insulated shipping box that eliminates the need for expanded polystyrene packing peanuts, which are made from oil and gas and arenâ€t welcome in recycling plants.

How does the Temperpack—which is used by the nationâ€s largest meal-kit company—keep a camembert from getting squished or from melting? Its layers of Kraft paper are stuffed with Climacell, a bio-based foam that melts to cellulosic fiber, alongside the box itself, inside a pulping plant. According to Temperpack, manufacturing Climacell foam generates one tenth the greenhouse gases generated by making polystyrene peanuts. But an enormous amount of nonrecyclable waste remains: one industry investigation of three different mail-order meals revealed a total of 72 plastic packages, of which just 23 could be recycled.

Critics say a better solution would be challenging individuals to adopt a radically different model of consumption: one that doesnâ€t involve any single-use packaging.
While designers and psychologists struggle to resolve these issues, governments can also institute policies to reduce packaging waste, such as imposing higher taxes on fossil fuels used to make single-use plastics. They can enact minimum recycled-content laws, which require manufacturers to make new stuff from old, and require deposits on packaging, to ensure more of it is recovered for reuse. And, of course, they can ban single-use plastics—including bags, straws, and cups.

Package-free Living
Some retailers are already on it: Ekoplaza, a supermarket in the Netherlands, devotes an aisle to more than 700 “plastic-free” offerings, wrapped or contained in cardboard, metal, glass or certified compostable plastic. And the British retailer Iceland plans to eliminate plastic from all its own-branded products within five years, in favor of returnable glass bottles, paper and pulp trays, and plastics, like cellulose, that are compostable.

Some critics say a far better solution would be challenging individuals to adopt a radically different model of consumption: one that doesnâ€t involve any single-use packaging.

MIWA, a Czech packaging and delivery system that won Ellen MacArthur Foundationâ€s Circular Design Challenge, seems to fulfill this mandate. After ordering food using the MIWA app, producers and wholesalers place their items– whether cookies, chopped liver, or celery—in durable, reusable containers and capsules, then deliver them to nearby stores or consumers†homes. When the capsules are empty, MIWA collects, sanitizes, and returns them to producers who refill them.

MIWA is, so far, a thought experiment, but it points to solutions already in play today: bringing washable bags and jars to shops that sell bulk foods or are willing to slice provolone and salami into your containers; shopping at farmers markets for naked cucumbers; buying beer in refillable growlers; and eschewing convenience foods wherever possible.

“Technology isnâ€t going to get us out of our waste conundrum,” says Dayna Baumeister. “Human psychology has to change. At some point, you just have to say enough is enough.”

[cincydawg]

A lot of this depends on good source separation. If you can get a clean supply of polyethylene, you can indeed do stuff with it.

In some waste energy operations, they have to include a lot of NG to help burn off the water included in municipal solid waste, if not source separated.

Polymers all have a thing called ceiling temperature. If you heat them above that, they tend to unzip and regenerate the monomer from which they were made, which can be collected and reused.

You still have to collect all the trash, separate the useful stuff, and process it.

[lrrps21]

Plastic bottles do have use.