Polamca’s Recent Comments

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  E-waste recycling is a giant boondoggle

  How did the gullible environmental public come to accept e-waste as some kind of progress?

  E-waste is the biggest gift to the garbage industry since the invention of the garbage incinerator.

  The name says it all: anything that is described as intrinsically "waste" is a garbage designation.

  Zero Waste is the name of the theory that has made  the recycling story obsolete. Instead of creating garbage, then picking thru it for a scrap here or there, redesign all products so that no waste is produced in the first place. Is there anything difficult about that idea?
  
  What is needed is not more garbage to be sifted thru for the merest, most minor and insignificant materials (a little steel, a bit of glass, a smidgeon of gold and a cupful of copper) but to demand the redesign of all electronics so that their high level functions can be reused over and over.
  

  The recyclers are collaborators in this boondoggle because they depend on a surcharge on garbage and so the more garbage there is, the more money (a pittance only) they make.

  When are people going to wake up and stop falling for these recycling/garbage inspired programs of gross waste.

  So long as the public is thrown into a tizzy, from which all rational thought is banished, the moment the word "toxic" is uttered, the propaganda will work just fine.
  Paul Palmer
  
  www.zerowasteinstitute.org
  http://gettingtozerowaste.comOn Greenpeace releases another ranking of tech companies' environmental records posted 2 years, 2 months ago 1 Response

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  CFL's and ballasts

  All of this euphoria about converting to CFL's misses a huge environmental negative. The kind of CFL they are trying to force down our throats is the most wasteful kind they can build. Each bulb has two parts, a ballast (at the bottom) and a bulby thing (the glass corkscrew). The ballast lasts much longer than the bulb. The CFL's could be made in two separate pieces (modular design is a core principle of Zero Waste) so that a burned out bulb could be replaced while its ballast continued to be used (the bulb would just plug into the ballast). That's how the government specifies its CFL's. They do exist. But wastefulness of every kind is built into all the market choices we are given and if they can sugar coat it with "energy saving" so much the better. The gullible public never questions these "environmental products" at all but just cheers. The same wastefulness is built into the biodegradable boondoggle, recycling in general and much more. See this website for a discussion www.zerowasteinstitute.org/ and go to Mainstream Shenanigans.
  Paul Palmer
  On Wal-Mart to sell its own brand of compact fluorescent light bulbs posted 2 years, 2 months ago 4 Responses

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  Is regulation always the best approach?

  This story came from a Grist email that honored green entrepreneurs who can do better than regulation. Regulation usually means that some portion of the commons is roped off and assigned to be polluted, raped, exploited etc. but legally, based on the erroneous notion that we can only live by exploitation and pollution. On my website at www.zerowasteinstitute.org I point out many ways to REDESIGN products and processes to be far superior to standard products and methods because they are designed for perpetual reuse. When you tell an industrial designer that there is a new constraint: there is no place to throw anything! Design without producing any garbage! The dump is closed! it is amazing what can be done. New designs, that should have been found 100 years ago suddenly emerge due to necessity. Note that recycling accomplishes nothing like this - it just perpetuates garbage and dumps with a desperate, last minute, ineffective attempt to reuse the least important part of a product - its materials. What we need to reuse over and over is every product's function, not its materials.On Industry to Bush administration: "Please regulate me" posted 2 years, 2 months ago 2 Responses

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  Fluorescent lamps and ballasts

  Have you noticed that all of the breathless urgings to adopt compact fluorescents ignore the whole subject of ballasts.
     The consumer versions are made in an egregiously wasteful way. A CFL consists of a bulb and a ballast. The ballasts could typically outlast five bulbs on average (see internet resources). Yet these consumer versions wed the ballast to the bulb, so that the perfectly serviceable ballast will be discarded with the bulb. There exist designs for separated ballasts and bulbs.
     Note that there is no design for reuse associated with any of this. The ever welcoming garbage can is the favored destination, according to the manufacturing philosophy. Why are the environmentalists not up in arms about this? Does energy saving trump every other environmental assault, no matter what? The waste of one-time trip manufacturing is also a horror.
     This kind of discussion is continued at the website www.zerowasteinstitute.org.
  Paul Palmer
  On Bill to phase out incandescent light bulbs gains steam in U.S. Congress posted 2 years, 2 months ago 3 Responses

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  All the aids for waste

  It is not easy to just change your own behavior or, for the same reasons, to get other people to change theirs.
     We are locked in wasteful systems that we can barely tweak, much less eliminate.
     Products are designed to be discarded, early. Repairing and reusing are made difficult. The yawning dump and garbage can are always there. And cheap and subsidized. We are given almost no choices of perpetually reusable alternatives. The low mpg car is forced on us.
     We need to collectively design new systems and put them into place so we don't need to individually struggle. But don't ban anything until some good alternative is in place or else the commercial alternative may be even worse.On We've all got planks in our eyes posted 2 years, 7 months ago 60 Responses