# Bin talk



## xenon (Jul 25, 2006)

Apparently where I live isn't included. Flats in Bristol. but I've heard about peple getting these bins for various forms of waste. 1 in particular for food.

This gets emptied fornightly. nice. What's the idea behind this. I mean surely food is biodegradable, thus it would break down in the normal rubbish anyway. What are they planning to do with all this muck once it's been decanted into separate bins? 

Maybe I've got this wrong because I havent' seen the letter. But it sounds rediculous. Trying to make people think they're doing something for the environment when it counts for fuck all. Bit like the collection of iron from households in WW2.


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## Maggot (Jul 25, 2006)

Uncooked food waste can become compost. Better than filling up the ever decreasing number of landfill sites with it.


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## Crispy (Jul 25, 2006)

bECAUSE IF YOU SEPERATE ORGANIC WASTE OUT IT CAN BE MADE INTO COMPOST/FERTILISER/BIOFUEL?

oh sod, caps lock. sorry.


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## astral (Jul 25, 2006)

I'm all for recycling and have no problems with separating out the biodegradable stuff, as we already do the glass/ tins/ cans/ papers etc.  However I don't think its that practical to have one wheelie bin collected every two weeks when we have six people living in our house, especially as they don't recycle plastic.  We already struggle to make it through a week, and I can see this resulting in trips to the tip every other week.  I think I'm going to have to see if the council will give us another bin.


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## xenon (Jul 25, 2006)

I can see the sense of this if collecting food waste from factories supermarkets etc. But is it really going to be that efficient in terms of return for effort and fuel burned, to collect and process it from domestic users? how are they going to enforce it anyway. I want to throw an out of date pot of potato salad away. I'm not bothering emptying it out of the pot. I'll just chuck the whole thing in the main bin.

I'm not anti recycling. I do the glass, can paper thing. no problem. But this looks liek a potential public health problem. Containers of rotting food out in the sun for 2 weeks. It's a good insentive for being more considerate about not wasting food I suppose. Looks like I won't have to be doing it though. My kitchen's too small anyway.


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## ATOMIC SUPLEX (Jul 25, 2006)

Maggot said:
			
		

> Uncooked food waste can become compost. Better than filling up the ever decreasing number of landfill sites with it.



Yes yes and yes. I have a tiny garden and had to make my own composter because any you could buy or get off the council were too big. Anyway it's teeny but it all rots away so quickly and makes lovely compost that it never gets full. Yet if I had thown all that veg waste away it would have made up half my bin waste per week.


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## JTG (Jul 25, 2006)

xenon_2 said:
			
		

> This gets emptied fornightly. nice. What's the idea behind this.



It gets emptied weekly actually (unless you forget to put it out  )

If it gets composted properly it's good for flowerbeds n so forth. If it goes to landfill it turns into methane and buggers up the atmosphere.

It's that simple really


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## JTG (Jul 25, 2006)

BTW - empty your food waste into your brown bin - it gets collected weekly

Empty into your main bin - it gets collected fortnightly and goes all minging and turns into a potential health problem

The answer is simple eh


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## munkeeunit (Jul 25, 2006)

xenon_2 said:
			
		

> Bit like the collection of iron from households in WW2.



All that iron s still being used to make manhole covers in the present, apparently, or was up to about 10yrs ago, when I heard about it. Railings are typically so low quality that if you tried to make planes out of the stuff, they would fall apart, which is why they never made planes out of it....

....................................

Back on topic...


I'm sceptical of the efficiency of households decanting their waste like this, but more from the perspective of it putting the onus of blame on individuals, while the wastefullness of the system in general, of big business, and at source is left unchallenged.

But look at it this way, oil is set to reach $100 dollars a barrel, and never significantly drop below that again. There's plenty of oil left, but the cheap, easily accesible oil is about used up (this in a nutshell is the nature of the crisis, too many people think that oil is about to be used up entirely, wrong!)

All our food is grown in oil (fertilisers, pesticides are made from oil), tractors run on oil, the food is moved around by oil, made from vehicles increasingly made from oil, to be transported to shops increasingly made from oil, where it's packaged in oil, displayed in stands made from oil, shop assistants clothed in oil based fabrics, on tills made largely from oil.

You get the idea.

Expensive oil eventually translates into the end of cheap food, at which point all that locally produced compost will come into it's own.


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## xenon (Jul 25, 2006)

Ah well. As I say. Haven't got the letter. 2 other peple told me it was collected fortnightly. Is there any way the methane gas can be used from land fill sites?
Better ask that in sci and env.


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## munkeeunit (Jul 25, 2006)

JTG said:
			
		

> If it gets composted properly it's good for flowerbeds n so forth. If it goes to landfill it turns into methane and buggers up the atmosphere.It's that simple really



uh.... methane is produced as an aspect of decomposition, period. The decompositon process isn't mysteriously transformed by changing the location of where the waste decomposes....

Not sure about all those farting cows though.




			
				xenon_2 said:
			
		

> Is there any way the methane gas can be used from land fill sites? Better ask that in sci and env.



Yes, methane can be extracted from landfil and burnt as an energy resource, but generally isn't, just like everything else which could be used instead of fossil fuels, but isn't.


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## munkeeunit (Jul 25, 2006)

Also, you may be interested to know, there are unimaginable quanties of methane locked up at the bottom of the ocean, as a result of billions of years of rotting matter. Both the pressure of the ocean, and the near freezing temperatures keep all that methane locked out of harms way.

But if the oceans warm up beyond a certain threshold (not sure what that is) all that methane will begin to be released, the oceans will catch fire and the planet will be returned to a seething burning cauldron of primordial fire.

Nice, eh.


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## xenon (Jul 25, 2006)

Methane will be produced by the decomposition as you say Munkee. Was just thinking though in the case of land fill sites. It's locked up in pockets which can be quite dangerous AFAIK. Risk of explosion etc. Surely that makes it a resource though. being as it's all in the same place.

I was reading something the other day about the methane trapped under the sea. Very scarey. I was actualy trying to find out about a company that is looking at how to develop a way of producing low level clouds. The idea being to reflect heat back out to space. however, it seems clouds are still very little understood by scientists.


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## Dru (Jul 25, 2006)

The gas by-products of landfill are methane and CO2. If dealt with properly, the methane can be extracted and used in heat engines, producing some electricity.

There's a blinking great THING rumbling away over at the landfill site by Colliter's Brook, down Ashton Vale way. I presume that that is what it's doing.

As I recall, methane is a by-product of anaerobic decomposition, and you don't get it in a well-tended compost heap.


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## astral (Jul 25, 2006)

munkeeunit said:
			
		

> Also, you may be interested to know, there are unimaginable quanties of methane locked up at the bottom of the ocean, as a result of billions of years of rotting matter. Both the pressure of the ocean, and the near freezing temperatures keep all that methane locked out of harms way.
> 
> But if the oceans warm up beyond a certain threshold (not sure what that is) all that methane will begin to be released, the oceans will catch fire and the planet will be returned to a seething burning cauldron of primordial fire.
> 
> Nice, eh.



So theoretically would it be possible to tap into these methane reserves at the bottom of the oceans (in a drilling for oil type way) thereby accessing a new fuel source and preventing the primordial fire option?


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## xenon (Jul 25, 2006)

I'll defer to your better science knowledge than I. Might take this to science forum. I'll freely admit I know bugger all though.


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## wrysmile (Jul 25, 2006)

JTG said:
			
		

> It gets emptied weekly actually (unless you forget to put it out  )
> 
> If it gets composted properly it's good for flowerbeds n so forth. If it goes to landfill it turns into methane and buggers up the atmosphere.
> 
> It's that simple really



What he said ^^^
It's a good system actually.


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## munkeeunit (Jul 25, 2006)

Dru said:
			
		

> As I recall, methane is a by-product of anaerobic decomposition, and you don't get it in a well-tended compost heap.



True, a well tended and aired compost heap will produce significantly less methane. While without oxygen, such as at the bottom of the ocean, only anaerobic (without oxygen) decomposition can occur, producing more methane.


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## gentlegreen (Jul 25, 2006)

Maggot said:
			
		

> Uncooked food waste can become compost. Better than filling up the ever decreasing number of landfill sites with it.


*All* food waste - plus tissues, matress stuffing etc. etc. composts perfectly well and in my case goes into a seemingly bottomless compost bin in my front garden beside the wheelie bin.
(including whole dead rats in my experience )
Don't believe the paranoid council hype.


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## xenon (Jul 25, 2006)

Found a link on the methane under the sea. At least they're looking into it I suppose.


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## munkeeunit (Jul 25, 2006)

astral said:
			
		

> So theoretically would it be possible to tap into these methane reserves at the bottom of the oceans (in a drilling for oil type way) thereby accessing a new fuel source and preventing the primordial fire option?



Possibly, yes (as linked to above), but we have to hope it doesn't start releasing on any signifant scale of it's own accord. We do appear to be on the cusp of an irreversible chain reaction, whereby the amazon rainforest is now experiencing drought, is drying up, and may soon catch fire, en masse, and revert to savannah. That may be enough to release sufficient C02 into the atmosphere to warm things up sufficiently for these methane stores to become unstable. 

The article above touches on this too.

But I can't imagine we could use enough of it to reduce these stores below potentially catastrophic levels.


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## munkeeunit (Jul 25, 2006)

"The vast Amazon rainforest is on the brink of being turned into desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate, alarming research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could begin as early as next year."

Amazon rainforest 'could become a desert'
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1191932.ece

So we'd better kill those methane farting cows and keep stirring our composts to counteract the methane stores which may be released.


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## Maggot (Jul 25, 2006)

gentlegreen said:
			
		

> *All* food waste - plus tissues, matress stuffing etc. etc. composts perfectly well and in my case goes into a seemingly bottomless compost bin in my front garden beside the wheelie bin.
> (including whole dead rats in my experience )
> Don't believe the paranoid council hype.


 I thought you shouldn't put cooked food waste on compost heaps. Not that I get much, I love my own cooking.


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## gentlegreen (Jul 26, 2006)

Maggot said:
			
		

> I thought you shouldn't put cooked food waste on compost heaps.


It's an urban myth perpetuated by the same local councils who design cycle lanes without ever consulting cyclists. As far as attracting vermin is concerned, rats are probably more likely to be attracted to a warm place to make a nest than to any tasty food scraps.


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## Dru (Jul 26, 2006)

We had a family of wood mice in my compost bin. They were charming. But for cute, it was hard to beat the compost bin of a friend down Glasto way; he lifted the lid, rolled back the hessian, and... there were some very snug slow worms, blinking and going "o, maaaan... too much light..."

_edit: _re-reading the bit about collecting iron during the war, I think that a lot of the value of the exercise was to put people into a war mentality. Just as the introduction of the brown bins might jump-start a few complacent people; like my landlady, who thinks that everything should go into the bin and disappear, because *she pays her rates*.

(As a side note, I don't think anyone was daft enough to try to build a Spitfire out of scrap iron; it would have needed a very long runway. And then another very long runway after that one... and so on...    ..but they did collect aluminium, too, hence this little thing by Elsie Cawser:

_So now, when I hear on the wireless
Of Hurricanes showing their mettle,
I see, in a vision before me.
A Dornier chased by my kettle._)


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