For some time now I have been sitting back and watching the management of money in the world. And I think a majority of people actually do not know what money actually is and why it came to be used in the first place. So I am going to endeavor to paint a picture of what money was initially used to do and why it becomes a integral part of life, as well as why restricting it’s flow can be exceptionally bad.

The infancy of Money

Money or rather currency has been in use as a means of evaluating work and skills for thousands of years. But really how does it compare to what essentially is to happen?

Here is a scenario to equate how money began to be used and why it was important to life:

We are taken back to a small community of people found on a secluded island. These people are rather industrials and they work to build things within their community, and they see the value of helping each other to better enhance the quality of life. So you have one family that builds things, they love to build structures and are the primary menders and builders in the community. Another fixes things, and mends metals, and yet another works with stone and clay. And on and on the skills expand as each does tasks for another and in turn those tasks are shared. You have farmers, and potters and fisherman and carpenters. And they all exchange skills for another’s services. But as the community grows it is found that there are needs for others and these people are not in the community but in neighboring lands. The only recourse is to communicate with those lands and see if those particular people would come and help out, but then how do the members of the community re-pay these travelers? There needs to be a universal means of exchange that is valued in terms of the skills communicated. And thus money was born and widely used as a means of equating skills done and skills shared. As the community grows skills are traded to money and money is traded for goods and services (skills) and this worked for the most part well.

The Maturity of Money

The global economy is built around the transfer of funds for services (Skills) and thus we use these funds to communicate our thankfulness for offering those skills. However, with the advent of recessions and housing bubbles it has become apparent that people are not totally in understatement of what money actually is. And why over leveraging money is more of a gamble then of a sure thing. Also the lack of payment and exchange of money has pushed the globe into a state of insecurity and placed millions of lives into flux and despair because others have refused to share with them their skills.

It is said that money is the root of all evil, but technically that would mean that me working and being willing to share my skills with another is the root of all evil. Money should be seen as my skills, if money was not in place for this transfer of skills then I would be working in your yard for you doing something you can not or will not do. Same value. But if you for example decide, “Hum I am not going to buy that item because I am scared for the future” now the person who is sharing his skills to make that item is being punished. I know punished sounds like a strong word but technically it is like looking into your neighbors eyes and saying, yes your valued but no I do not want you to work with me anymore. This places your neighbor in a bind and his family and pretty much 100 people surrounding him, it also put into a bind people he is associated with and anything he buys, or is already paying for. The snow ball affect of not gracing your neighbor with sharing his skills is nearly endless and often comes around to affect you as money is connected to money.

I know people that have money, that have contributed skills and shared expertise all their lives but deliberately seek to get things free. When I first meet them I thought maybe they where in dire need but this isn’t the case and they have gone out of their way to locate free things and to break the laws in areas to assure they could do things cheaply. Being thrifty is one thing but denying your fellow man the right to live is quite another and I believe that this couple is setting out to deny their fellow man with funds because they seek to be greedy. Now biblically speaking, your to love your neighbor as your self and as I see this if I love my neighbor I should want to do things for them that would grace them. Thus if I buy something from my neighbor or a merchant in a lot of respects the God given skills and talents I posses are being shared with someone else to bless them, the assure their families can also be blessed. So ultimately limiting or turning off the flow of money is placing focus on the money rather than the skills graced you by God to be able to share them with others.

Gracing others

If tomorrow money became worthless and we where back to gracing others in exchange for goods and services I do not think we would have many people understanding how to act. With the advent of money I think many people have decided to separate themselves from society and to equate their fellow man as more of a Dollar sign then a person. This can be really seen with any kind of funds allotted for outreach and to help a person get back on their feet. Money has to be wrestled out of the hands of people through government demands and shared at a premium to those struggling. But really if people understood the mechanics of money they would see that everyone is entitled to a honest days work and a honest days pay. And that so many are working to provide a life for their families and themselves. Payment is often defined in terms of what a market place can bare, so within that community if you had two black smiths and they where competing for business the market would bare lower pricing as there is an abundance of skills. However, I find that people and companies do not always evaluate the cost of a person’s life or the market value when determining what skills are worth. If a person becomes a master in his skill, then he can be exceptionally focused and efficient in what he does. Time is saved and more work is done with less effort. This should warrant better pay as the skills are at such a high level that a company saves by leaps and bounds with this person, however I see companies run by penny pinchers who strive to limit a person’s life but still demand the same output of skill. This would be the same as asking that person to work for free or forced charity.

A person who openly seeks charity while knowingly hoarding finances will find themselves facing their maker to explain for why they did nothing to grace their neighbor with the ample resources assigned to their stewardship. We are stewards of those things we are given and it is up to us to manage those things to best bless others so they can equally manage things. But i so find that when we are given things we do not see them as gifts daily but as things to abuse and destroy only to expect more to be given. Like the spoilt child who always has their hands out of more and more candy, ultimately has their teeth fall out and dies.

So the moral of all this is to see yourself as a steward of the things your given, your skills and the money that those skills convert into, because your given these things to bless others.

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.