sweasel.com

Hippies. Is there nothing they can’t ruin?

Thank God, YES: sweasel.com

Have I thanked you lately, Mme. Ermine, for maintaining this delightful little corner of the ‘net? Thank you muchly.

After long, arduous, tedious, mind-numbing research and calculation, I have determined that the net environmental benefit from having bottles with recycleable lids is a big fat zero.

Here’s a little insight into the way the greenie NGO’s propagandize. Here in the U.S.A. and likely elsewhere in the so-called civilized world, we are told in breathless announcements that zOMG! ALL OF OUR CURRENT LANDFILLS WILL BE FULL WITHIN 20 YEARS!!1! WE MUST DO SOMETHING!!1! What they don’t bother to tell you is that landfills operate under licenses with a duration of 20 years. If you’ve already had a few adult beverages and haven’t figured it out yet, is is always and forever true that all current landfills will be full in 20 years. Not to worry, somehow or other we keep finding ways to open new ones.

And how much extra does that cost, because changing over wasn’t free.

I’m waiting for MiniTru to declare for our benefit that a lb weight is now only 14 ounces to reduce the amount of weight we have to carry for products sold by the pound.

What effect that has beyond your purchase of coffee or apples is left as thought exercise which lobbyists would never consider.

Recycling doesn’t happen. From what I’ve read, all the stuff from the blue trash cans goes in the same landfill as the other stuff.

If recycling hadn’t become such a political thing years ago, we probably would’ve had incinerators with proper scrubbers and so forth to allow us to burn the trash and use the heat to generate electricity.

I first noticed it in June when we were on holiday in Italy, just like you I thought there was a fault in the cap production until I realised what was going on. I immediately thought, “Well, that’s awful.”

They’ve now started to appear in Dublin, the local Ballygowan water doesn’t have them yet but some of the cheap stuff from Lidl does, just a matter of time I’m afraid.

As for recycling I recently read an article (and cannot find the link) that said recycling plants in the West are, even with the best filters currently available, producing huge amounts of microplastics which find their way into everything. It seems like just landfilling it is the best way to deal with the stuff after all.

Yes, send the plastic to China so they can dump it in the ocean or bury it in a landfill instead.

And microplastics (uh huh…), oh dear, yet another horrid thing about civilization that prevents our immortality! Oh dear!
What terrible fearporn thing will they think of next?
Makes me feel like spinster Aunt Mary, the family matriarch, is still with us.

Yeah, I’m guessing unless it’s a pure PET bottle (and probably not even then) it’s not getting recycled to any significant degree. I mean, how many synthetic park benches do we really need.
I bought some new computer speakers last week (to replace the old (Altec Lansing) pair w/subwoofer that I got with my old Gateway computer hell way long ago). These have an annoying feature that they power down (go to “sleep”) after about 10 minutes of no sound signal detection; then it takes about 5-6 seconds of incoming sound to wake them back up again. I read somewhere this came from an EU regulation. Thanks so much, government.

We recycle here, but only so the family that comes to our compound and grabs the big bags of glass and plastic bottles, tin cans, and cardboard can make some money. As far as the rest of our garbage – we burn it. There is no trash pickup here. If you want to take the trash to the dump (wherever the hell that is) you take it yourself. But the local ‘dump’ usually turns out to be a empty lot that everyone is just dumping their trash on. So, we burn it. Burning is easier, and not as unsightly as a huge pile of trash in the middle of a neighborhood.

BTW: about straws. They are banning plastic straws here, and some places are just not providing any. Not even paper straws. I guess you need to bring your own. The places that do provide paper straws – the straws suck (ha!). They get soaked and collapse and are unusable after only a few sips.

HOWEVER, there’s a matcha drink place near us that has “paper” straws that work very well. I was curious as to why, so I carefully dissected one. It turns out it’s actually a plastic (!) straw inner with a bamboo paper wrap glued to the outside! Cheeky buggers. They figured out how to get all of the virtue without the complaints.

I also like the places that give you a paper straw . . . IN A PLASTIC WRAPPER that you have to remove and throw away before use! That defeats the whole point, doesn’t it?