Recycling revolution may loom (single sort recycling system, Maine)

[jpak]

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/070504recycle.html

Tired of sorting plastic containers, old newspapers and empty cardboard boxes? Help is on the way. Recycling is about to get a lot simpler for many residents of southern Maine, thanks to a new processing plant that can do virtually all the sorting itself.

Ecomaine, a regional trash incinerator that serves 28 communities, unveiled Maine's first "single-sort" recycling system Thursday.

The $3.7 million plant -- it sits next to ecomaine's incinerator in Portland -- can eliminate the headache of household sorting because it dumps all the paper, cardboard, glass, metal and plastics onto a single network of conveyor belts that automatically separates the different materials and then packs them to be sold for reuse.

It's intended to promote curbside collection and more convenient drop-offs, and to move the state closer to its longtime goal of recycling as much waste as it incinerates or dumps at landfills.

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[Gormy Cuss]

1. We have something similar here with curbside pickup.

It makes it so simple that all but the laziest dolts can recycle every week.

[kirby]

Why not pay people?

Instead of this fancy 3.7 million dollar plant, why not just pay some people to sort the stuff? Not the most glamorous job, but it would provide employment for some, and solve the same problem with a low tech solution.

[hunter]

6. It's a nasty job.

Creating more nasty jobs for people who can't find better work is unethical. Our goal should be to create good high paying jobs for everyone.

We have single bin recycling where we live, and the process is increasingly automated. But there's still a lot of smelly work on the lines because the automation is easily upset by some of the materials that end up in recycling bins.

[kirby]

9. So...

So would you consider people who make their hard earned living as a trash collector as somehow part of an unethical situation? Come on now.

Not everyone in our society can have the 'high paying' jobs. Not everyone has the education, skills, or even drive to have the high paying jobs.
I don't think our goal is create good high paying jobs for everyone. I think our goal is to create an environment where there is the opportunity
for everyone who wants to pursue a good high paying job to get the education, child care, assistance to do so.

I know my recycle bins aren't that 'nasty'. I can imagine several other jobs 'nastier'.

[hunter]

10. I've had jobs cleaning up drunk-puke, shoveling pigeon poop out of attic crawl spaces, etc.

I suppose trash sorting is better than that.

Whenever people speak of "opportunity" in the United States it's usually a roundabout way of justifying why some group of people are oppressed. I mean if you don't have the "education, the skills, or even drive to have the high paying jobs," well then that explains why you have a low paying job, doesn't it?

I don't have to imagine the nastier jobs, I've had some bad ones, and I know people who've done worse.

Gotta say the nastiest job a friend ever told me about was working as a big city escort, mostly serving crappy dull sales conventions in third rate venues, the kind of convention that boring sweaty smelly flabby guys attend mostly to escape their grim realities by drinking, partying, paying to have sex with strangers, and maybe, just maybe doing something related to their job.

Ewwwwwwwwwww.....

[phantom power]

12. Wait a minute.... are you Mike Rowe???

[hunter]

14. That'd be a wild one for sweeps week!

Mike Rowe: trashy urban escort working to support a drug habit...

There are places you can get black rubber gloves and condoms.

[kirby]

16. My thoughts

Whenever people speak of "opportunity" in the United States it's usually a roundabout way of justifying why some group of people are oppressed. I mean if you don't have the "education, the skills, or even drive to have the high paying jobs," well then that explains why you have a low paying job, doesn't it?

I'm not sure about 'people'. I was speaking from my own belief system. Personally, I don't subscribe to the thought that we are automatically 'owed' or 'entitled' to a 'high paying' job. In the ideal world where everyone has an opportunity to better themselves, then the ONLY reason someone has for their situation, is their own education, skills or drive. Lets face it some people just dont give a crap. You could tell them that they can pursue any career they want and its completely paid for. There will a subset of people who just dont apply themselves. They aren't motivated and/or their purpose in life is to party all night. Today, because of limited opportunities for some, its hard to separate those people from those who are being held back because they cannot afford child care or cannot afford tuition for their books.

There are other people who just aren't very intelligence. They might not be able to handle a job in the new 'high tech' industry. Yet, they could contribute to society sorting recycling and being paid a fair wage.

[NJCher]

2. we have it, too

And it does make life simpler. Still, I timed it last night and it took 25" for me to load up all the recyclables and take the trash to the curb.



Cher

[Donnachaidh]

3. Yeah -- let's give another corporation control over cleaning and recycling

After all, they've done so WELL in the past. :sarcasm:

People are so frigging LAZY they cannot sort things themselves? This sort of nonsense would play in larger cities -- but MAINE? I know people who used the ADDED income from recycling to pay bills there.

So let's take THAT away from the people too. It's the Amurican way! :sarcasm:

[trotsky]

4. Yes, they are that lazy.

And there's no way you can legislate to change that.

So we come up with solutions that work around people's laziness yet accomplish the goal of reducing strain on our natural resources.

When we wake up in utopia, I guess this won't be a problem. 'Til then...

[Dogmudgeon]

7. It's not about laziness

The same criticisms were made in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. The idea of automating manufacturing processes was criticized, often from the pulpit, as encouraging the indolent masses to become even lazier.

Automation of most routine physical tasks quickly becomes more efficient than using human labor. We still have tremendous problems of waste disposal that are too large and too hazardous for individual workers. You may recall that in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the poor were drafted for this kind of work; they were called "economen".

There are three problems that you are rightly concerned with: waste disposal, corporate power, and employment for the poor. But uniting solutions to them for the purpose of employing the poor isn't the way to do it.

And considering that corporate concerns have led us to many of our waste problems, I would like to field a suggestion: compel all corporate officers convicted of financial crimes to do waste work, pay them the prevailing wage, and oblige them to forfeit their earnings into a fund to train the poor for well-paying work.

Meanwhile, mechanized waste processing, especially coupled with organic material recovery (for large-scale composting) and thermal depolymerization could become a self-financing industry that can clean up over a century of industrial and consumerist waste.

All the while, we can still work on reining in the corporations.

--p!

[Donnachaidh]

8. You obviously don't know of the POVERTY in Maine

It's got NOTHING to do with *automated processes*.

When you have raging poverty (the state actually has lots of folks that don't live in Kennebunkport) in a State that already has recycling laws that 'benefit' the poor by allowing them to scrape together an extra income -- what is the point of throwing up a corporation that is going to take that pittance away from the poor?

George Bush and the NeoCons call that *progress*. :sarcasm:

[hunter]

11. The poor could always send their kids out on the streets to sell gum!

Like they do in Tijauna...

[jpak]

13. Oh please

Because Maine's 1976 Bottle Bill and subsequent amendments, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for anyone to throw a 5-15 cent deposit container into the recycling bin -
it would (literally) be throwing money away.

If people did that, all them po' Mainiacs would ransack recycling bins the minute they hit the curb.

[hunter]

15. They don't do that where you live?

Is it like a gated community or are the cops just mean?

[Peace Patriot]

5. I was just thinking of giant compost heaps. Americans throw away 20% of the food

they buy. What if all that thrown away food and other organic waste was piled into giant compost heaps, and used to refertilize lands ruined by chemical pollutants or GMOs, or to "green" desert lands? Pile it all up in ruined or otherwise infertile lands and stick tree seedlings into it, or dole out the newly cooked land (think of a foot of compost-rich mulch raked over it) in small plots to campesinos, local gardening groups, organic farmers, homeless-feeding groups, or prison groups (reduction of sentences according to how much greenery you create--prison carbon-trading!). Instead, we mix USEFUL, LIFE-GIVING compost with dangerous chemicals and a toxic stew of plastic and mineral compounds that makes it useless for anything but highly polluted landfill--and go on producing oil-based products and oil/chem pollutants, and killing people for their oil, or killing people who resist pesticides (as in Colombia)in an endless loop of stupidity and crime.

Apply a little intelligence (and remove global corporate predators, the greedy rich and their political hacks from the decision-making loop), and the earth is green again, and full of life!