zout
@zout@fedia.io
- Comment on I care when it affects deez nutz... 1 day ago:
So I looked up the numbers. The packaging waste is collected as a mix of plastics, drinking cartons and metals. When collected it's about 42.6% plastics, 8.3% cartons and 6.3% metal, the rest is residual waste. The sorting plant then recovers 39.3% plastics, 7.1% cartons and 5.9% metal which means over all more than 90% recovered. The plastics are recovered about 66% into mono streams like PET or PP. The other 34% is recovered as mixed plastics, which can be recycled for low value stuff.
- Comment on I care when it affects deez nutz... 2 days ago:
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.
- Comment on 6🤷♀️7 2 days ago:
2 fingers in who's ass?
- Comment on I care when it affects deez nutz... 3 days ago:
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.
- Comment on I care when it affects deez nutz... 3 days ago:
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.
- Comment on Publisher reveals and immediately cancels new Postal game after fans accuse it of using AI generation 3 days ago:
Publisher's reaction looks like corporate bullshit to me to be honest.
- Comment on Anon lives in 2056 3 weeks ago:
There was also William the third of Orange, who first lived in the Netherlands where he had no wife but a lot of really close friends who would visit him frequent behind closed doors. He eventually married his cousin Mary Stuart and became the king of England and Scotland in 1689.
- Comment on When you wake up, how long does it take for your brain's "OS" to "resume from hibernation"? 3 weeks ago:
How would you measure the time it takes to wake up without somehow monitoring brain activity externally? I mean, you start sleeping, so at best a dodgy perception of time, and at some point in time you're awake. For me it would be impossible to tell the time it takes, might be a second, might be an hour.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
The stupid thing is, there were already talks about moving away from the blackface. Of course the people at the television stations (who could make this happen) took their time, which caused the people of "kick out zwarte Piet' to make a stir. So far nothing wrong, but they did this at the televized arrival of Sinterklaas, so now they had crying children on tv. This caused the "all brown people back to Morocco" crowd to scream outrage, and suddenly we are at the current stage with two very vocal groups screaming at each other.
My kids were still in the believing age when this started, and I never had a problem explaining the issues and the changes to them (Piet used to come through the chimney, when this wasn't possible anymore he painted his face black to look the same, but now he realized this looks like blackface). The right wing voters had problems explaining, because they didn't want to, and now they see it as a defeat by the "others". Throw in some politicians who can only fare well if there's disorder, and suddenly it takes over twenty years to phase out something that should have been gone a long time ago.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Come to the Netherlands, we have layers on this since Santa Claus is Coca Cola's take on our Sinterklaas, who is usually acompanied by "six to eight black men" (more commonly known as "zwarte Piet", black Pete). he was was taken to the US by Dutch immigrants, after which it evolved in the current Santa Claus. And it gets worse, because while it has alway been a bit of a battle between team Sinterklaas and team Santa Claus, the last twenty years or so there is a different battle going on between team "Dutch tradition" and team "kick out zwarte Piet". Both of these last two teams are obnoxious, and would choose confrontation over dialogue every day of the week. This has resulted in a conflict with no end, where it would have been easy to phase out the blackface character with no fuss in a short time.
- Comment on Cloudflare apologises for outage which took down X and ChatGPT 3 weeks ago:
That's a bit pessimistic, you could also say very good to see that nothing important goes down when Cloudflare has an outage!
- Comment on It's always been women in STEM. 3 weeks ago:
That depends on the the view point. It is true that it was founded as a mosque, and became a teaching centre later. Since universities are considered a European invention by some, it is argued that it was a madrassa op until the 1960's. However, madrassa is basically Arabic for place of study, which this mosque was since the eleventh century or earlier. It was in any case a place of study before the foundation of the university of Bologna.
- Comment on Anon takes a DNA test 3 weeks ago:
He's referring to the fact that paternity doesn't make you a dad.
- Comment on Propain 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on They were big in the 90s 4 weeks ago:
In case you're serious: the original.
- Comment on People who don't wear earphones outside - why, and what do you do instead? 4 weeks ago:
Did you write this post deliberately to trigger us? Some examples; The phone died when it should have 7% left, spilling soup at a store, smelly euro village and of course the main question.
- Comment on It's OK to just like lemon water. 4 weeks ago:
TIL, thank you. It indeed makes perfect sense that it would help for this.
- Comment on It's OK to just like lemon water. 4 weeks ago:
Better for the teeth than pH neutral? Nope. For heartburn it might help, but only for a real short time. Non-fat milk would probably be the better choice.
- Comment on It's OK to just like lemon water. 4 weeks ago:
Alkaline water won't be alkaline for long after it enters the stomach, so it doesn't really matter
- Comment on If animals could speak English in what foreign accent do you think that a certain species would certainly have ? 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on These are the types of Whatsapp Channels Indians get recommended 5 weeks ago:
TIL Whatsapp has channels.
- Comment on It really is heart warming when grandkids teach their grandparents how to use the internet 5 weeks ago:
I love that you're getting down voted for shitposting in a shitposting community, it really shows how Lemmy is growing as a community.
- Comment on It really is heart warming when grandkids teach their grandparents how to use the internet 5 weeks ago:
Baby Shaggy and the old guy from Up.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
You either shit in a record time, or won't shit for the rest of the day!
- Comment on I Powered My House Using 500 Disposable vapes 5 weeks ago:
I always wondered how that works? Do you have phases 180° against each other? Our (Europe) phases are at a 60° angle to each other, so while one phase is 230v, two phase is 400v.
- Comment on US tech firm Nvidia invests $1bn in Nokia, with sights on next-gen networks for AI 5 weeks ago:
The handset devision was sold to Microsoft, after being managed by a manager from Microsoft for a while. Microsoft shut it down within two years if I remember correctly.
- Comment on And what car did you learn in? 5 weeks ago:
Volkswagen Golf type 3.
- Comment on School pickup lines are wild 1 month ago:
Say it again!
- Comment on Everytime 1 month ago:
Drenthe actually.
- Comment on Everytime 1 month ago:
We don't really care about that, we can't understand you any way :p.