Recycling Plastic Bottles Quotes

Bottled water comes in plastic, usually made from virgin plastic (non-recycled), which is made from oil and has to be transported (with a high carbon footprint). It sits on a shelf until you buy it, where it may leach chemicals – such as BPA and dioxins as well as microplastics – into the water. And while it has to pass safety standards, it is only tested when it is bottled. Recent studies also showed that 93% of bottled water showed signs of microplastic contamination.

One of the reasons that the area would never be renovated, however, was the council’s insistence that each house had three large plastic trash-bins on wheels, each a bright color: green for the bottles left over from last night’s drunken orgy, red for stolen goods now surplus to requirements, purple for dead bodies and used syringes, all in fact that a modern British urban household needs to disembarrass itself of.

Even as the Blue Marble was miniaturizing your conception of Earth, it was inflating your sense of importance in relation to it, endowing you a godlike perspective and agency. The image caused, in other words, a derangement of scale, from which you people still suffer. As your anxiety about the disastrous effects of your behavior on the biosphere grows, you console yourself with the thought that by changing a light bulb or recycling a bottle or choosing paper instead of plastic, you can save the planet.

[D]uring all my university years in the U.S. (doing a master’s and a doctorate degrees), I often noticed that young people were totally quiet when issues like wars and crimes against humanity in the Middle East came up, but they were very active and vocal when issues like recycling, environment, or global warming came up. While all these issues are important, the silences and complicity displayed on some issues rather than others; the selectivity of expressing resistance and rage are hypocritical, to say the least. I found that many choose to be active in what one could consider safe and convenient causes. How can I take seriously enraged rich and privileged students who want us to protect the environment by recycling a plastic bottle, yet it never occurs to them that all the bombs and weapons used in the Middle East are doing a serious damage to their beloved planet? Last time I checked we all live on one planet, unless these privileged students truly live on a different planet.

They recycle. Cooking oil comes in plastic Coke bottles, vinegar in ketchup containers. The correct ingredients in incorrect vessels. Like Louis and me

He also mentioned that I (or anyone else) could never really go zero waste because of shoes. He asked me the pointed question, ‘What was I going to do about shoes?’ I explained that looking at waste data as if it were a pie chart, I was interested in focusing on solving the largest slices of the pie first, or the ‘low hanging fruit’. There are big problems to solve like plastic bottles, textile recycling and food waste that make up about 60 percent of the pie. Once these issues were solved, we can then turn to the next biggest slice of the waste pie. But he wasn’t convinced by my answer and kept drilling me about the shoes.

issue. Glass has four times the environmental footprint of plastic.8 So swapping out a single disposable plastic drink bottle for a disposable glass drink bottle will only serve to increase your environmental impact. Glass recycling still faces many hurdles and is not as simple as the ‘infinitely recyclable’ tag line it comes with.  Glass breaks easily in garbage trucks and is frequently dumped in landfill because broken glass is not sorted for recycling.

This is the cornerstone of industry strategy since World War II--eliminate the burden of costs for negative externalities. It was throw-away living in the 1950s. It was crying Indian ads in the 1970s that made consumers feel guilty about littering, distracting them from the more meaningful issue of product design. It was crushing bottle bills across the United States in the 1990s and shifting responsibility for bottle waste from industry to taxpayer-funded recycling programs. Today it's World Bank loans to small countries, so they can buy waste-to-energy incinerators to burn it all and keep new plastic production alive.

We were so quick to embrace new technology that enabled us to make plastic bottles. It was faster! It was cheaper! It was a heathier alternative to recycling bottles. The plastic drinking bottle had arrived. But how many companies make plastic bottles? How many did research to find out the heath pros and cons? How many buried their findings so as to maximize profits? Today microplastics are everywhere. In the oceans; in the air; in the food chains and in us. There is nowhere where they aren't on this planet of ours and they even inhabit our blood streams. Scary? It should be! Because so much isn't known about the long term effects of microplastics on living organisms and if they really pose a serious threat. The companies that make the bottles and all the plastics know some of the answers, but if we want them to start telling the truth, then we will need to start asking more serious and searching questions before we all become a plastic society in a plastic world.

Shelly pulled out another crate. “People back then were the original recyclers, weren’t they? Wooden crates, reusable glass soda bottles. That was kind of cool. Why did we ever stop? Now we have plastic bottles littering the ocean.

FORTY-EIGHT She is almost fifteen when her father shows his true colors. It is the garage again. This time she is looking for empty plastic soda bottles for a school project. The recycling bin will have plenty. It is mid-afternoon on a weekday. Her school dismissed early due to a bomb threat that turned out to be nothing more than rumors. All of her friends went out to lunch, but Pea is home. She hasn’t felt like doing much of anything since The Day Her World Shattered. Her father is up her ass about school on a daily basis though, so she decides to get an early start on her project. This time, it’s not a gaggle of men that she sees. Instead it is only her father. He stands over his handiwork, chest heaving, a look of bloodlust and absolute satiation on his face that sends Pea’s stomach plummeting. Before she can turn away, he sees her. He smiles. A voice in her mind tells her to run but where would she go? This is it. This is what she has in life. This is her life. She can run, but this man will always be her father. She hears something dripping, sees her father turn toward her, hands at his sides. He says, “I had to, Pea.

Dharma Master Cheng Yen is a Buddhist nun living in Hualien County, a mountainous region on the east coast of Taiwan. Because the mountains formed barriers to travel, the area has a high proportion of indigenous people, and in the 1960s many people in the area, especially indigenous people, were living in poverty. Although Buddhism is sometimes regarded as promoting a retreat from the world to focus on the inner life, Cheng Yen took the opposite path. In 1966, when Cheng Yen was twenty-nine, she saw an indigenous woman with labor complications whose family had carried her for eight hours from their mountain village to Hualien City. On arriving they were told they would have to pay for the medical treatment she needed. Unable to afford the cost of treatment they had no alternative but to carry her back again. In response, Cheng Yen organized a group of thirty housewives, each of whom put aside a few cents each day to establish a charity fund for needy families. It was called Tzu Chi, which means “Compassionate Relief.” Gradually word spread, and more people joined.6 Cheng Yen began to raise funds for a hospital in Hualien City. The hospital opened in 1986. Since then, Tzu Chi has established six more hospitals. To train some of the local people to work in the hospital, Tzu Chi founded medical and nursing schools. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of its medical schools is the attitude shown to corpses that are used for medical purposes, such as teaching anatomy or simulation surgery, or for research. Obtaining corpses for this purpose is normally a problem in Chinese cultures because of a Confucian tradition that the body of a deceased person should be cremated with the body intact. Cheng Yen asked her volunteers to help by willing their bodies to the medical school after their death. In contrast to most medical schools, here the bodies are treated with the utmost respect for the person whose body it was. The students visit the family of the deceased and learn about his or her life. They refer to the deceased as “silent mentors,” place photographs of the living person on the walls of the medical school, and have a shrine to each donor. After the course has concluded and the body has served its purpose, all parts are replaced and the body is sewn up. The medical school then arranges a cremation ceremony in which students and the family take part. Tzu Chi is now a huge organization, with seven million members in Taiwan alone—almost 30 percent of the population—and another three million members associated with chapters in 51 countries. This gives it a vast capacity to help. After a major earthquake hit Taiwan in 1999, Tzu Chi rebuilt 51 schools. Since then it has done the same after disasters in other countries, rebuilding 182 schools in 16 countries. Tzu Chi promotes sustainability in everything it does. It has become a major recycler, using its volunteers to gather plastic bottles and other recyclables that are turned into carpets and clothing. In order to promote sustainable living as well as compassion for sentient beings all meals served in Tzu Chi hospitals, schools, universities, and other institutions are vegetarian.

For example, Japan is far better than we are at recycling plastic. They recycle a very respectable 77 percent of plastic consumed. Which makes our 7 to 8 percent percent look pretty shameful. Japan’s recycled plastic is sent overseas to make toys and used in production of textiles, bottles, packaging, industrial parts, and a whole host of other products. Sweden also steps up the game when it comes to using waste as a fuel. In fact, they’ve become so efficient at converting waste into fuel that only 4 percent of their trash winds up in landfills. They even started running out of trash to convert, and began importing around 800,000 tons of garbage per year to create power and heat for homes.

Opportunities for enhanced recycling remain great even in the case of paper and aluminum cans, the two materials whose recycling rates are the highest in all affluent countries (Japan's paper recycling may be the exception as it is already about as complete as is practical). Perhaps most notably, until 2008 paper was still the largest discarded material going into US landfills (almost 21% of the total mass, compared to nearly 17% for plastics), and although by 2010 it had fallen to just below plastic's share (16.2 vs 17.3%) the total mass of buried paper was still nearly 27 Mt/year (USEPA, 2011a): that is more than the annual production of all paper and paperboard in the same year in Germany (FAO, 2013). And while the mass of paper landfilled in the USA in 2010 was half of the total in 1990 (26.7 vs 52.5 Mt), during the same two decades the mass of discarded plastics rose by 70% and the total of buried polymers, 28.5 Mt, was greater than the combined annual production in Germany and France (Plastics Europe, 2012). Or another comparison: a destitute waste collector may spend a day collecting a mass of 1 kg of plastic shopping bags when rummaging the open garbage tips of Asia's megacities, while the USA buries nearly 80 000 t of plastic in its landfills every day. While in the USA only about 8% of discarded plastics were recovered in 2010 (with the rate ranging from 23% for PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles to less than1% for PP (polypropylene) waste), the EU's goal for 2020 is full diversion of plastic waste from landfills (EPRO, 2011). This would require a 50% increase of the 2010 recovery rate of 66%, roughly split between recycling and incineration for energy recovery. And, of course, waste recovery is not synonymous with recycling as significant shares of collected materials are not reused but landfilled (after volume reduction by shredding or compression).

For although like you I could be a spokesman denying rumours from below that predefer to be stifled till the return of the repressed prodigal, I could also be a streetsweeper cleaning up the unmanuring dung dropped from above, which will have to be collected up and sorted out and recycled maybe into serviceable goods, as in psychoanalysis, a genie from a plastic bottle. When the magic cycle of genuine shit will have been replaced by the chemicycle of pure electronic thought ever expanding, more and more unbiodegradable, the heart of the earth will stop, shrivel to a curled up foetus to be ejected lifeless and wither to a moon without even the attracting planet to encircle except the distant sungod dead because unseen unfelt by anyone.

Recycling trash, on the other hand, has a lower environmental impact and pound for pound, can save more energy than burning the same trash produces. Recycling aluminum cans, for instance, saves a whopping 96 percent of the energy needed to produce aluminum from bauxite ore. Recycling glass jars and bottles saves 21 percent of the energy needed to make new glass, recycling newsprint saves 45 percent, and recycling plastic beverage bottles saves 76 percent (other plastic types differ in the percentages, but the energy savings are there, too).