Quote Originally Posted by Blurock View Post
Agreed, recycling is very costly and cumbersome, but there are actually some guys who have found a solution to recycling plastics. Do they perhaps have a source of
"clean: plastic?

The best way to save the environment may be to start eating human flesh as one scientist suggested recently. (Shock & horror!) He did not actually suggest cannibalism but recycling flesh of the deceased. Sounds more like eating "roadkill" to me. To be honest, reducing the human population will solve 90% of our problems as we are running out of resources, including water and clean air.
To me the biggest problem is capitalism / consumerism / consumption / obsolescence. Our economy is driven by continual sales and consumption and thus we manufacture low quality products designed to fail purely to keep our economy going. Cars are a perfect example. The are generally over produced because the seller needs to have them ready on the floor in case a person happens to walk in and purchase the car. The next year new models are produced in the same volumes yet the previous year models remain unsold. The unsold cars are not put on the market at lower prices because that wold damage the resale value of the newly purchased cars. They are shipped to storage facilities to be destroyed.

Another example is light bulbs - one can argue that led bulg use less electricity at the end consumer than incandescent bulbs but those led lamps use up far more resources to manufacture and also do not recycle particularly well. An incandescent bulb is a bit of metal and a bit of glass that recycles very easily. It it a well known fact that incandescent bulbs can be manufactured to last 100 years yet the practice was stopped so as to promote consumerism.

I cannot think of any product today that is value for money - Every single consumer product manufactured today is designed to fail within a fairly short time. The washing machine fails after 3 years, the geyser blows up after 5 years, the cell phone is replaced every 2 years etc. The old Kirby vacuum cleaner manufactured in 1950 still works - the new hoover falls apart in a year.

Shoes - my Hi-Tec boots cost R700 and fail at exactly the same place year after year.

Everybody always blame the Chinese for poor products but the problem goes far deeper than low quality knock-offs. The problem is that the 1st world is driven by consumption and that consumption is at the expense of the 3rd world.

Recycling is really a farce to make the 1st world consumer feel a little better about the continual unnecessary waste of resources. It doesn't work in practice on the scale that it needs to to make a real difference.