I live near a large nature reserve (wetland) in the Netherlands, and we have hundreds of bird species there, including cuckoos. In spring and summer we tend to see lots of people with really big binoculars trying to spot all kinds of birds. It always makes me laugh seeing these people raise the binoculars whenever a cuckoo calls, because when you hear them they could be miles away with how the sound carries in the open space.
In the USA the name cuckoo is also used to refer to people who like to do… a thing.
My grandparents had one of those in the 1980s!
I have no idea how Tetra pak is recycled to be honest, my guess is probably by dissolving the paper in water and burning the plastic/aluminium. A coworker of mine once looked into shredding them and feeding them to an anorganic digester in order to produce biogas. According to him it gave some nice gas yields in the lab tests.
I’ll fetch some general numbers on raw material recovery tomorrow and report back.
I agree, I would actually consider this BP as normal-ish, wearing a too tight belt makes your BP rise higher.
I’m about the same age os OP, and before I got medicated I usually had 160/100 without any of these symptoms. My physician told me not to worry about it, which was bad advice in hindsight. My BP ultimately got to 190/110 which did cause problems and made very clear there was an underlying problem.
That’s an interesting question! My first reaction was “I’m not sure, but definitely more than 50%”, but then I remembered that’s the yield of our separation plant. I’ll try to find some numbers on recovery percentages this week and update this post to give a general idea.
Once it leaves our plant, it should be recycled at high yields, because otherwise no one would bother since reworking plastic waste to raw materials takes lots of energy. And like I said, virgin plastics are dirt cheap. Some first considerations; we extract plastics like PET, PP (solid), PE (solid and film) as mono streams for higher end recycling, and a stream of mixed plastics containing all of the previous for low value recycling. There are other outputs like ferrous and non-ferrous metals, milk cartons and residual material.
Disclaimer up front, I work in waste treatment (EU), and at work we separate waste for recycling, we burn waste, we compost organic waste, we operate organic digesters and we operate land fills. Also, I’m rambling in the text below.
So regarding separation of packaging waste, it’s doable. Automated separating works pretty reliable, and we can get plastics like PET out of the waste at 98+% purity. Second biggest problem is stuff that doesn’t belong in the stream to be separated, people throwing stuff in the wrong bins. Biggest problem however is money and the politics behind it. Since oil companies are higly subsidized, and plastic producers are closely related, so called virgin plastics are dirt cheap. They’re so cheap, that plastic manufacterors are finding novel ways to use plastics every day where ther really is no need to use them. I mean stuff like cookies invidually wrapped in plastics and then packaged by 6 or 8 in tray which is wrapped in plastic. At some point all this stuff gets thrown away, and my employer comes and the plastics then need to be separated from the other waste. This costs money, and the gate fee for waste doesn’t cover this, it’s cheaper to burn the waste and produce energy from the generated heat. It would be even cheaper to put the waste in a landfill, but there’s laws against that, today only stuff that can’t be handled in any other way is allowed to go to landfills where I live.
So who pays for this? The government! In the EU countries have all kinds of environmental ruling, which are translated into laws for every country. The countries could basically rule that the producer of polluting materials have to pay for the clean up, but then you’re threatening oil companies, so the lobby industry dealt with that. Same goes for plastic producers. Now all that’s left is waste treatment companies and civilians. The waste treatment companies aren’t in the business to lose money, so it comes to the civilians. Of course it’s hard to sell to the people that they need to pay for all of this, so how do you deal with this? You start a semi-government company to handle the separation and recycling with subsidies for the companies doing it. So far so good. So where does it go down hill? Well, where everything goes wrong!
In general, the semi-government company (SGC for brevity) gets his money from the government, and pays the for profit companies to do the job. To check if requirements are met, the SGC’s budget is controlled, and the allmighty god of metrics is summoned to check if everything is running ok. The metrics turn into KPI’s, and KPI’s will become their own goal. So the SGC now has goals it needs to reach to get funding, and it will work to meet these goals. It does so by introducing lots of different KPI’s througout the waste management chain, and (for example) in the process allow the waste collector to mix in industrial waste into household plastic waste to get more volume, snce this is a metric by the government. Then the seperation plant has to put in more effort into their process generating more reject and a less pure end product, which gets harder to recycle. Meanwhile the SGC gets a lot of slack from the government for not meeting its targets.
All in all a big wall of text which seems to go nowhere. However, my opinion is, if laws would be made to reduce plastic up front and to tax companies for envornmental impact, the waste industry wouldn’t need to be as convoluted as it is. It would would mean less virgin plastics produced which leads to less demand for recycling. I’d still have a job since waste will always be around, but the fossil industry and the money behind it might take a hit.
It’s called objective tinnitus. Tinnitus can have different causes, the damaged hair cells one is the most common.
Like Bob from the Bobiverse.
They’re gettinh their salad tossed from the looks of it.
It would explain something I guess.
There are multiple vaccins against shingles, and I can’t find which one was used in this study. Does anyone here know which it was?
I actually had kind of a shower tought today which relates to GDP as a metric and your comment. It started with a contractor at my work, who had met someone at another company who used to sell guns, drugs and whatever illegal. The guy basically said that he felt no remorse and needed to this at the time, because otherwise he wasn’t able to afford the expensive brand clothes and other status symbol stuff. The tought hit me later that this is what we have become as a society, a place where having lots of stuff is more important than having morals. And because of metrics like GDP but also stuff like wealth hoarding, this mindset sets us on a path which can only lead to destruction. Throw in social media and it’s influencers as a catalyst, and it only gets worse.
Alkaline water won’t be alkaline for long after it enters the stomach, so it doesn’t really matter
Ultimately: robot pythons
How do you know my brother?