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Posted by David Sherman [24.32.202.83] on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 20:32:20 :
In Reply to: Dave, one should double check what "They" posted by clueless [201.197.229.218] on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 20:15:17 :
Today's garbage is tomorrow's industrial feedstocks. Someday people may well be mining our garbage dumps. As it is, they're richer in most valuable metals than natural ores. Copper mines these days work on the basis of a few pounds of copper per ton of ore, and gold mines get a couple grams of gold per ton of rock.
Recently in Japan, a sewer district had the ash from their sewage sludge incinerator assayed and it turned out to qualify has high-grade gold ore. Now, instead of paying to dump it, they ship it to a refinery and get paid for it. That particular sewage district has a lot of industries in its service area that use gold, so their sewage was a little higher in gold than the average, but still, it gives you an idea of what we're throwing away.
In general, the switch to plastic has drastically reduced our consumption of natural resources and energy. Plastics definitely do more good than harm. Try plumbing your house with cast iron and lead drain pipe, and compare how hard that is and how much natural resources it takes, versus doing it with plastic drain pipe. Plastic in the ocean, though, is bad because fish and birds eat it and it clogs up their guts. The only real solution there is to not dump it in the ocean. It would probably be better for the environment overall if ships in international waters incinerated their garbage, let the nasty smoke go into the air, and dumped the ash into the ocean.
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