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This is an art project, Running the Numbers – An American Self-Portrait by Chris Jordan. There are many more examples at his web site.
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Sorry… But I’m really thirsty.
Wasteful? Perhaps. Aren’t these bottles 100% recyclable?
Either way, we’d all be better off if the only place we got our soda was at the soda fountain in the drug stores. Don’t you kinda miss that?
The recycle industry is failing itself.
Here in Oregon you pay a 5c deposit on soda cans and one particular size of bottled soda. Other bottle sizes of soda and ALL bottled water bottles are not included.
Add to that: Some stores will not take a competitor’s store’s cans or bottles. Few store’s recycle vending machines work and ….
It becomes easier to chuck the stuff in the trash then to recycle it.
So where does all that deposit money go?
2,000,000 X 20 X 24 / 300,000,000 = 3.2 bottles per human per day.
I’m not sure what I think of that number.
#3
In the USA maybe *coughAlcoa*
But in other countries the reciclers take the cans/bottles from anyone as long as it has the raw materials it needs.
It’s an interesting factoid. But so what?
#7 – Hop gave you a fact. You want him to think for you too?
Not my job.
Striking picture, but it’s not a real picture. Take 300 million anything, and you’ll get a lot. Imagine the amount of waste that a billion people produce, and China isn’t at all as environmentally focused as us.
That being said, I’ve always hated how hard it is to recycle, at least in my area. One more plastics bin at each house, and one paper bin for all the junk mail, would help reduce landfill use a ton.
#10, they made it insanely easy where I live, and in several places I’ve visited. This goes a long way – if it’s easy to do, may as well do it.
What I find interesting is that bottled water is one of the top commercial beverages. Yipes.
Why not just have the landfills recycle the sutff on their end?
I wish they would release just one full sized picture to the public. These thumbs are annoying.
I remmeber when ALL pop was in Glass bottles.
Then the companies went to Plastic, but the price didnt go down…
When we had 2 liter plastic bottles, and the 1 liter came out..the 1 Liter took the same price, and the 2 liter went up….
NOW you pay $1(the old 2liter bottle price) for a 30oz +/-….
I wait for Shasta 3 liter to go on sale at $1, which happens 2-3 times a year…
REMEMBER this stuff is 80-90% water…
But, Pepsi and Coke have some BIG adverts you need to pay for..Including that race car.
#14…ECA…in my area, the big boys(Albertson’s and Safeway) sell their own brands of soda at 1.00 for 2 L……coke and pepsi is alternated on sale by them 1 time a month for 1.00 for 2L. A chain called Food Max sells Shasta products for .79 cents for 2L everyday. Wal-Mart sells it’s brand for .59 cents for 2L everyday. They all charge .08 cents for deposit, per bottle.
Recycling is a big deal here, and is fairly easy, plus there are little recycling kiosks that you can take all aluminum cans, plastic bottles and glass to that have automated machines that scans them as you put them through the opening and give you a reciept redeemable at either Safeway or Albertsons for cash.
You see homeless people collecting cans and bottles all day, everyday in dumpsters all over the city, they will have several huge trash bags filled with recyclable stuff in shopping carts…..then they take them to the automated kiosks and walk away with 20 bucks or more a day.
I see 2 little 900 y/o Japanese guys every morning hitting all the dumpsters at the apartment complexes in my neighborhood. They start at 4 A.M. and stop at 5p.m. and take their haul to the kiosks and between them they are pulling down 100.00 a day.
#15 – I hear ya man… Many of those generics are okay. Diet Dr. Thunder is a pretty mean facsimile of Diet Dr Pepper. Others are only fair, and some are just horrid.
But I have yet to taste a faux diet cola that rivals Diet Coke.
That fake Mountain Dew tastes like lizard piss. But then, so does real Mountain Dew. (I hate saying that because in my youth I drank Mountain Dew like some people drink water. I feel like I’m betraying a friend)
Where my uncle lives in Rensselaer Indiana, they charge by the can for garbage pickup, but recycleables are picked up for free.
Their recyling rate is astronomical.
A little financial incentive can go a long way.
I always thought bottle deposits were a complete waste of time and effort. When I was a kid growing up, we got all our spending money walking along the roads and picking up the discarded deposit bottles and returning them. People are just too lazy.
Don
How many Cities is it ILLEGAL, to take recyclibles…
From trash, or from the Bins…
EVEN tho you are Paying for it, to place those items out for pickup…Many cities have made it illegal for anyone to Bother it.
#16…OFTLO…..My brother just above me is a Mountain Dew *addict*, drinks it constantly. I never cared for it. I love Coke, in a can or in a bottle(not the plastic one), we can get bottled Coke in Mexico still when we go down to our place there. It has a sharp, crisp taste that I like. Pepsi has always tasted sweet to me, but all my friends love it.
I have only tried diet Coke once, and the sweetner taste stayed with me for hours, I didn’t like it. I don’t like anything with the artificial sweetners.
#18 ECA…..it’s not illegal to collect from dumpsters in Santa Clara county. But, if a property owner tell you no….you have to leave and can be cited if you come back. My apartment manager was telling me this.
I have friends that live up in the mountains and they get recycling cans for free and free pick up, so they have a huge response there for recycling.
In the UK, they are now going to charge people by the can for pick up, to try to get more people to recycle. But the biggest offenders are the stores, everything is way over packaged, but the Councils are afraid to go after them to force them to cut back on the packaging. So the ordinary citizen is inundated with prepacked goods and then have to pay higher trash pick up fee’s and the businesses get off scot free.
#19 – I personally pay extra to get the glass bottled Coke sent to me from Mexico… and I recently discovered that some of the larger grocery stores, in addition to some speciality ones, in Mexican neighborhoods stock the stuff!
Personally, I love Coke out of a bottle more than out of a tin can, and out of a tin can more than a plastic bottle…
(And now for the required punch line.)
…and for some reason my wife thinks ordering the glass bottles is a great idea!
19,
Its illegal, in Chicago and new york, for the Homeless and Poor to pull from the Dumsters and Bins…
ALSO, you DO pay for the recycling…In your trash bill.
figure it out. How many homes can a trash truck pick up from in 1 hour.
100? Times that by what you Pay. Thats anywhere between $3000-5000 per hour..
Think about ALL the glass and cans in your neibhorhood, and get the kids to collect them. Take them to a pay location that collects Aluminum and glass…Theres one to TEN in ALl the large cities…
SEE how much you get. Aluminum is $0.45+ per pound, and 1 CRUSHED garbage bag full is 8-15 dollars.
Hate to be the geek, but there’s a problem with the math.
2,000,000 / 5 X 60 X 24 / 300,000,000 = 1.9 bottles per U.S. human per day.
Totally believable.
It get’s ridiculous when you think of these 1.9 bottles * 365 days * 50 years (starts at 20 years old). One person goes through around 35,000 in a lifetime. For a 2.3 person family, I suspect that would come close to filling a 400 sq foot garage.
And that doesn’t include the glass beer and other bottles.
My vote is to tax the plastic bottles, and use the funds to develop industries to use the plastic as raw material. 10 cents each to make it worthwhile, of which 5 cents is a refundable deposit.
When you see a 24 pack of bottled water for $4, it’s easy to see why we in the US are pigs when it comes to stewardship of the planet.
Really true that a picture says more than a thousand words. It would have been interesting if there was a frame of reference (like a person or a house) in some of the photos.
Also, imagine the situation once countries like China and India come fully to the party.
People keep talking about coke, pop, etc in a bottle from Mexico. Every time on vac I had one, it tastes terrible. Is it that fact they dont refrigerate or it’s out of date. Or do they use some different form of sugar supplement that changes the taste of what we know in america?
Buy it in american, just tastes better!
The solution is RIGHT HERE — but the government doesn’t seem interested in appropriating the technology using imminent domain for public benefit.
Significant unalterable events are driving demand for Startech’s Plasma Converter. They are:
* Rising populations in most nations
* General increases in generated waste levels
* Current waste disposal and remediation techniques such as landfills and incineration becoming regulatory, socially and environmentally unacceptable
* A need for critical resources (i.e. power and water) to sustain local economies
* The emphasis being placed upon the production of distributed power and the need to provide alternatives to fossil fuels
Startech’s core Plasma technology addresses these waste and resource issues by offering remediation solutions that are integrated with a range of equipment solutions and services. These products add value to our customers’ business so they can now realize revenue streams from tipping fees, as well as from the sale of resulting commodity products and services. Alternatively, this will allow them to generate the product they need while at the same time using a zero cost basis, or revenue generating, source of raw material (waste).
#22 – When you see a 24 pack of bottled water for $4, it’s easy to see why we in the US are pigs when it comes to stewardship of the planet.
Actually, that 24 pack of bottled water is thne ionly beverage I buy, and only because the bottles are so convienient when I’m bicycling, and because tap water is, well, nasty.
I use a refillable insulated jug for soda, which I refill at the store across the street (because I prefer the taste of soda from a fountain, and you know it tastes different from other forms)
It takes me a pretty long time to go through that water. So while my plastic bottle footprint isn’t zero, it’s relatively compared to the average.
Why am I telling you this? I guess i want a cookie 🙂
#20
It’s a good thing south of the border they’re still using the original Formula (sugat instead of corn syrup)