I keep getting pressures from various religions on how I should come through their doors, but I can’t help but recall the passage that taking up my cross from Christ would mean I would see torment, reticule and punishment.

I would encourage anyone struggling with religious types kicking you to the curb because you don’t fit into the mold they have set for followers to seek out this book, “The End of Religion.” If anyone should act towards you counter to love and understanding with truth they are not following the teachings of Jesus but their own wicked directions. Seek a body of believers that help, nurture and teach you about Jesus and walk within his teachings. Jesus hated religious types and openly made examples of he rules and rites they professed would bring you closer to God. Sorry, the only way it through Jesus. And frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A women i got into a conversation with once told me that Christians (not Christ Followers) kick you and degrade you first before they will help you, and then only will help those who are already Christians. Initially, i was put off by this but I have come to see her point and to really see why she said this. After all this is what happen to me and why I abandon any kind of faith for nearly 30 years.

Here is a thought to take away from this, Jesus did not come to start a religion. He came to abolish all religions and to say that there was no need for any spokesman to intervene on your behalf that he was the only way and that without him no one would connect with his father that sent him. But so many make you believe that your passage is through them rather than directly through Jesus. If your struggling take it Jesus, no church or religion is needed.

Oh, but wait this was the topic of the book The Skeptical Environmentalist which points out that recycling is the only industry in the world where is it ok to pull a loss because after all we are saving the planet. But if you really look at legislation in cities and town centered around recycling isn’t this more like a tax then a levy? Because after all you are working for free to sort and clean all the products you have already paid for and then you pay into fuel and transportation to willing do something that an industry would do if there was one. And still once the plastics are reground and pellitized they can’t be sold as virgin polymer because they can’t make virgin products again because of public out cry. There are a few products that can be made that take higher concentrations of recycled polymers but for the most part anything that is colored is where they end up.

Now something i do not agree with which I over heard at my last attendance to the recycling center was a lady being told that if they by any chance mixed up the plastics in the bin that it would screw up the recycling process. Well, I ran plastics for 21 years. Setup extrusion lines, ran shifts and pretty much was involved in plastics ground up and any time we ever got cross contamination it did not thing more then plugged the screens. Which I might add happens with all the dirt that is sucked up because of the static plastics give off. Often with profile lines there are continuous screening systems that pull anything foreign out of the flow of plastic anyway. Cross contamination just isn’t a big deal.

Personally, i think that the public should look into how plastics are handled and how cost effective recycled plastics are. I doubt the trading system has changed much in the last 10 years, it use to be you took a really big gamble when you bought recycled polymer. You never knew if the product in the boxes had been recycled more then 4 times and would make nothing but garbage, or someone had a couple of pails of stones in the bottom of the box. Often you never got to sample the boxes prior to buying it and in my experience you might have 1500 pounds of good product and then 1500 pounds of scrap. Regrind that would not run got put into products that where expendable, pool noodles are one of those expendable products which often end up in the land fill anyway.

I would encourage everyone to check out Bjorn Lomborg

I was reading an article recently on how green friendly it was to stave off throwing plastics into a land fill and just how many plants and animals this action saved. But what I guess this person never looked at was how much carbon the act of recycling actually produces. I believe that recycling is something you do with plastics but having worked in that environment for so many years I think the media only really bought in on the fluffy parts of the recycling business and fell asleep to what it actually costs.

So lets follow the life cycle of your average plastic container, for our example we are going to use a classic styrene container. Probably a nice clear one, that contained a salad and was bought a a store with a nice paper label on it.

1. The consumer removed the label and puts it in the paper recycling bin, then washes out the plastic container and put it in the Styrene bin because it has a 6 in the triangle under it.
2. The consumer then takes a trip to the recycling depot which I might add results in them burning fossil fuels and adding to the carbon on the planet.
3. The container is put in with other containers like it which in turn are housed in a building that might require storage of those containers and thus also contributes to carbon.
4. The container then gets compressed and baled and placed on a truck. The act of compressing and baling it takes fuel and electricity which also contributes to carbon.
5. The truck transports that bale and others to a depot or even to the plastics recyclers which I might add takes fuel which in turn results in more carbon.
6. The recyclers has to remove the glue that is stuck to the containers that use to hold the label, if they do not this results in wastage of plastic and pressure problems when they re-melt the plastic and extrude it. So the containers have to be cleaned of the glue.
7. The containers then get chipped back up so they can be re-melted in the extruder and re-pelletized. All this taking large quanitieis of energy and thus more carbon.
8. the repelletizer then deposits the pellets into a bin which is either used in house if that company makes plastics products or is packaged up and shipped to a products manufacturer.
9. If the pellets are shipped to a products manufacturer a clear product can not accept a recycled ploymer into it without clouding the final product so it has to be tinted. This taking more energy to extrude as the melt is thicker.
10. The little triangle under a plastic signifies how many times a plastic can be recycled, but what it fails to tell a person is that the plastic can not be used at 100% in a new product but only in the case of Styrene at 30% or in some instances 40% with virgin resin. This is because as you use the recycled polymer more and more it losses it’s abllty to be elastic and ends up no longer being usable.
11. So now that clear clam shell container went from being clear to now ending up in a tray that is black and only 30% of the orginal clear reprocessed container could be used in the new black tinted tray which I might add still has to be packaged up again and trucked which takes Carbon.

So ultimately if you really look at recycling you might want to think about plastic containers a bit differently, your doing the world a dis-service by recycling them because your contributing almost 3 times to the carbon bank. Yes, the plastic is out of land fill but from a capitlizum point of view when you bring back a product to be recycled you do not see a dime for that return but the people that drop off the bales get paid for that material. Recycled plastics are often bought and sold on their own market and the consumer through their grace brings these products back free for the stores and agencies to sell. Which in turn pumps more Green house gases into the environment throgh the processing of them.

My idea would be to build a home repellitizing unit for your plastics that you can bin your own recyclables and sell. Because a lot of the carbon costs are around trucking around air spaces in bales.

When thinking about saving the planet you might want think about the planet and do your due dilligence.