If you are interested in reducing your plastic waste, don’t buy a solar powered gadget, at least not until they get serious about making them truly useful and efficient. Amazon reviews are a good place to find an honest assessment of any given gadget. I have looked at solar laptop chargers and so far nobody has hit the right balance of power, portability and affordability.

Residential solar panels are serious business. These days various government incentives are boosting demand for them. This is driving the costs down. It is also driving production that might not be environmentally responsible. If you want to be as green as possible, you need to do some research and find out which type of panel has the least negative impact on the environment. Some of the cheapest panels are made in countries with a poor environmental track record. The production of solar cells typically involves a lot of toxic metals. It also involves a lot of water and energy use. Researchers in environmental science have done the work of comparing the environmental costs of a range of different solar panels. Here is a PDF with their results. That research is a couple of years old, so there is a chance that newer technologies are even better.

One important consideration when calculating the environmental cost of residential solar panels is the fact that the technology can potentially replace a system that involves long distance transmission. Transmitting electricity over distance is inefficient and it uses mined metals and plastic insulation.

One of the most offensive forms of environmental damage that I have ever seen involved electrical transmission lines. When I lived in a rural area of Canada I found a spot in the forest where some criminals had burned the plastic off a pile of stolen copper wiring. Copper had value as a material for recycling. Plastic doesn’t.

Buying LED light bulbs might be a better investment in green energy tech than solar panels for most people.

Three doors down from where I live, a typical neighborhood shop sells cooking oil, vinegar, bleach and detergents in identical bottles that are delivered and picked up by the same truck. The soft drink suppliers bring both plastic and glass to the store, but they only pick up the glass.

My casual observation is that close to half of the non beverage trade of liquids is carried out using returnable glass.

Plastic and aluminum appears to have returnable glass beat in the beverage trade. I could be wrong about this. When I attended a wedding reception this summer, I was served a 200ml returnable glass bottle of soft drink. Most small stores have soft drinks available in both returnable and disposable containers. Local customers are often not charged the deposit with the understanding that they will bring the bottle back to the store in a timely fashion.

It’s actually a lot like North America 30 years ago. I would love to see someone do a careful study of the environmental costs of the two options in a small economy.

I was happy to see this big bin installed on the public beach access this summer. A lot of water bottles that may have otherwise ended up in the sea are placed in it. At the same time it serves as a daily reminder to me that collecting and recycling plastics is a costly and inefficient process. My blog is supposed to focus on the first ‘R’, Reduction. I have reduced my own consumption of plastic water bottles as much as possible by drinking filtered tap water.

Here are a few quotes that I have found, both optimistic and pessimistic about recycling plastic…

Recycling is almost universally regarded as a virtue. I beg to differ. The act of recycling actually means that we have failed to reduce or reuse.
- Gary Hirshberg

Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W bulb for up to 6 hours.
- South Lakeland Recycling

I am not sure how they got these numbers. The fact that a lot of plastic is transported for huge distances leads me to doubt the figure.

The majority of the plastics we recycle, regardless of type, end up in China, where worker safety standards are virtually nonexistent and materials are processed under dirty, primitive conditions…
- Mindfully.org

Recycling one ton of plastic saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space.
- Earth911

These quotes are starting to look like ‘tweets’. Maybe I will recycle them

I am putting this question out there, even though the idea doesn’t sit that well with me. This post sat as an unfinished draft from February until today.

Some scientists at Penn State have taken the idea and come up with some prototypes. These machines take non-recyclable plastic waste like plastic mulch film and irrigation tape and extrude and slice them into nuggets that can be added to the mix used at existing coal fired generators. They have also designed burners for applications like heating greenhouses.

Plastic was blended 5 and 10 percent by calorific content with coal. Dirty mulch film and drip irrigation tape from three States was made into Plastofuel™. It was then sliced into small pieces, then burned with the coal in a stoker simulator. Air emissions and burn quality were closely monitored. Test results were encouraging.

This idea is being put into practice to heat greenhouses in Pennsylvania. The research tested dioxin output from the process and it was well within EPA limits. I am concerned that any number of other toxins could be released into the air by this process.

I have had some time to think about this idea and I have thought of many reasons why it isn’t a good idea. The tidiest argument is that it’s application will not have any real impact on plastic litter in the environment. It will always be more cost effective to source agricultural plastic waste and pre-consumer waste than to collect or purchase actual litter.

Note: The emissions tests for this stuff was funded by the American Plastics Council, now called the American Chemistry Council.

Clothes washing is a chore that is automated for the vast majority of people living in America and other developed countries. For many people, going green in the laundry room means buying big appliances that use less water and electricity than their old ones. They might also choose soaps or detergents that pollute less and come in sustainable packaging. Washing all your clothing by hand sounds like absolute madness.

When we moved to a developing country, we were a bit surprised to find that our options for furnished accommodation did not include washing machines. We were very surprised to find that it is in fact humanly possible to do all your laundry by hand. When we decided that we staying long term, we bought a twin tub washer spinner. It is, unfortunately, a very big hunk of plastic (I never claimed to be perfect). I am able to effectively reuse gray water from the laundry for toilet flushing and watering the garden (non-food).

I had my eyes peeled for a washboard during the weeks that we were hand washing. There was still a washboard in use when I was growing up. It was mostly for socks. My mom insisted on us washing our own stinky sports socks. Washboards are popular with the Amish and with soldiers. If you are planning to make some changes in your laundry procedure for the sake of the environment, give the old scrub board some consideration. Automatic washing machines don’t do anything magical, they just move your clothes around in some soapy water, remove the soapy water, rinse and repeat. Washboards are obviously labor intensive, but you could consider the chore to be part of your fitness regime. There’s probably a piece of equipment at the gym that simulates the main action required to wash socks on a washboard. I don’t know if it targets your abs.

Washboards work well with bar soap. Some people are moving to laundry soap in bar form to avoid excess packaging.

A lot of other household tools and gadgets disappeared for good when the avocado colored appliances landed on our planet back in the 70s. The washboard managed to hang on partly because it was in demand for alternate uses like musical percussion and decoration. It is also really useful.

Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker

Update: The question of drying clothes came up in the comment section and I mentioned wringers. I realized later that many people aren’t backwoodsy and ancient like me so they might wonder what I am talking about. Here is a photo, I am pretty sure they aren’t due for a comeback.

Myth #9:
Recycling plastic bags is too expensive.

Fact:
The price of not recycling them is high. Recycling can help save resources and minimize the amount of waste going to landfills. Also, recycling helps reduce litter, as bags are contained and stored. Its worth noting that it takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound of paper.

Myth #10:
There’s no demand for recycled plastic.

Fact:
Today there is a growing market for recycled plastic that didn’t exist 15 years ago. It’s also cheaper now to use recycled plastic than to obtain new materials, increasing potential for more recycling of used plastic bags. Recycled plastic grocery and shopping bags are currently being made into new consumer products such as clean new plastic shopping bags, outdoor decking and railing products.

One bone I am going to pick here is the assertion that it is cheaper to use recycled plastic than to obtain new material. I don’t know if that ever was the case for any of the various types of plastic. While the actual industrial process of recycling plastic may have been cheaper than making new plastic up until recently, tax payers pay the bill for most of the costs of recycling such as labor and transportation.

The recycling business has been hit very hard by the recession. Plastics that were separated by consumers for recycling may end up in landfills in the UK, Canada, Australia and the United States.

Outsourcing recycling to Asian countries often means that the process will be carried out in unsafe, unethical a environmentally unfriendly ways.

Reducing and reusing are not given a lot of press because they are concepts that exist outside of what is defined as ‘the economy.’

Myth #8:
Low recycling rates for plastic bags prove recycling them doesn’t work.

Fact:
Recycling does work. The problem is not everyone knows that plastic grocery bags are 100% recyclable and not everyone has access to plastic bag recycling in their community. A national at-store plastic bag recycling program would bring the recycling solution to everyone and increase rates. One Southern supermarket chain has such a program, and recycles more than 20% of the volume of plastic bags that it provides to customers.

In actual fact there are some dreary statistics floating around the internet about how recycling rates have plateaued despite the explosion of environmental activism, environmental journalism, environmental media etc.

4-6% is the sad number for plastic recycling overall. This 20% that the plastic industry brags about for one supermarket chain is an exception and it might be the best case scenario.

Here is a 2002 article from the New York Times that provides an overview of the state of plastic recycling back then. Not much has changed.

Additional reading : Where can we put all those plastics?

Ok, I get it. Paper bags are bad. The last time I checked, though, there wasn’t an area the size of Texas filled with floating paper bags in the middle of the North Pacific.

The plastic people got this one right. The plastic is made quite efficiently. That’s why so much pointless crap is made from it. Most opponents of plastic shopping bags focus on the environmental impact of discarded plastic.

The only fact I can think of to counter with is that the oil used to make plastic bags is a nonrenewable resources. Alternatives like cloth bags (or paper for that matter) are made from renewable resources.

The plastic industry is totally pwning the paper industry with these statistics. You will notice that my blog is not called PaperMore. Reusable bags can’t be compared to plastic in the same way because the number of plastic bags that a reusable bag replaces is variable. We have been devotedly using cloth bags for a couple of years. We have lost a few in a taxi (I assume they continued to be used). One of our early ones recently broke. The 8-10 bags that we have used and are still using have undoubtedly had a lower cost to the environment than the hundreds or even thousands of plastic bags that we could have used instead.

In defense of paper…

• Paper is compostable
• Paper is recyclable
• Paper is biodegradable
• Paper can be reused
• Paper can be used to light a fire in a wood stove
• The Unknown Comic died of suffocation when he tried to perform with a plastic bag over his head (ok, I made that up, he’s alive and writing a book)