Green Recycling

December 21, 2009 by Erwin Heid · Leave a Comment

Why Go Green – Living with all the “Green” Garbage and Green Recycling

Once a week the “green”garbage disposal truck drives up to your house and lets the stinking rubbish disappear in his belly. Did you ever think about, where your garbage is driven and what happens to it?

Green Garbage disposal becomes more problematic from year to year – and more expensive.

These immense garbage amounts must be decontaminated in some way. The garbage waste dumps are full, up to the edge, which overloads combustion arrangements. Dumps, suitable for poisonous garbage disposal and processing arrangements are missing.

And so originated a quite new, rather dubious branch of industry: the garbage tourism. In road containers and stinking ship bellies lands our mud, in particular the hazardous waste hardly to be removed, against foreign currency in poorer countries, mainly in the Third World.

In the meantime, there are waste dumps with highly toxic garbage everywhere on earth and even already on the sea bottom.

That’s why the “Dual System Germany” (DSD) was introduced in on the 1st December, 1991. Since then the “ green point “ smiles at us on most packaging. He lets many consumers believe, they act for the benefit of the environment if they buy products with this marking, besides, even if it states merely that the necessary packaging of these consumables should be returned and be recycled.

Experts have calculated that thereby the piles of rubbish can be relieved yearly with about seven to eight million metric tons of packaging material.

The reasonable solution would be to produce more meaningful packaging.

It is quite strange: On the plastic bottle one finds, for example, no „ green point “, although it is going back to the refiller, up to 40 times again and produces therefore by far less rubbish and claims, above all less raw resources and energy than one aluminium tin with the ” green point “.

Any type of recycling takes a load of the environment and the purse of the consumers.

Over this come the trade the originating costs – also count as addition the professional advertisements for the ” green point “ or that the consumers have to pay per packaging, up to 30 cents more. And whether actually everything can be recycled is not sure generally yet.

The laughing winners are the packaging manufacturers, cheerfully producing as much as before.

Nearly 30 percent of our household waste consist of packaging of all kind.
Most packaging materials are senseless, environmental-damaging and expensive.

Therefore, we may pay for it three times.

1. with the purchase at the supermarket,
2. when we pay our green garbage disposal fees
3. with our tax money with which garbage combustion arrangements, waste transports are financed.

with the combustion of every single metric ton of garbage originate in addition circa 4,000 to 5,000 cubic metres of toxic exhaust gases which are blown more or less in the air and are spread out to the surrounding fields, meadows and forests.

Better than any combustion or green recycling is avoiding of garbage.

II. You can avoid rubbish already at the purchase

A little packaging IS necessary – for hygienic reasons and for the protection of the contents.

Nevertheless, mostly the packaging serves only for the purpose of the advertisement or to draw the attention of the customer to the product and to force him to buy more.

From the goods of the same kind You should always select that which are packed in an easy way.

And use for shopping a carrier bag, a basket or a net.

You should buy vegetables and fruit of the season, freshly, instead of ready packs

Drinks and milk products you should buy instead of in tins, plastic bottles or disposable bottles only in refundable plastic bottles. They can be refilled up to 40 times. For the production of a refundable plastic bottle about 0.17 kWh of energy is spent, but during the production of the disposable bottle almost the tenfold, namely 1.65 kWh are needed.

You burden the environment if you buy drinks in tin cans. The production of a tin can from a tin plate claims about 2 kWh, of an aluminium tin even 3.6 kWh. Always remember: Green Recycling is good, refundable plastic bottles are better!!

Leave all food in tin cans on the store shelve. Completely apart from material consumption and energy consumption in the production, they are the most expensive kind of the packaging.
The price lies sometimes higher than the contents of the packaging. In addition, fresh food contains much more vitamins, is healthier and tastes better.

Prefer afterfilling packs, e.g., with spices or salt.

Leave single use products, like ballpoint pen or lighters on the shelve, reach to refillable products.

Don’t buy in plastic packaging whatever there is also in glass containers.

If our politicans are not able to do anything, than you should go green

World leaders have failed us. They have walked away from the global summit in Copenhagen without a treaty to save the climate. They still have a chance to get it right and we will not let them fail. The future of 6.5 billion people is at stake… You are one of them.

They are not done yet, and neither are we.
Act Now – Change the Future

Your friend for Why Go Green
Erwin German architect, Buildingbiologist and Advocate for Go Green
Owner of sites connected with Why Go Green:
“Simply Weight Loss – Strip That Fat”
Go Green with Flyfishing for Beginners