Buffalo Rising Online

Recycling is great, and I fully support it, but we need to redesign the blue bins to include so the crap doesn't blow all over the place!

Can someone clear something up, too? I've heard on MANY MANY occasions that the City doesn't actually recycle. Everything goes to the same place. Is this true? An urban legend?

I need to get one of those free bins. We've had ours stolen! Actually we just had one of our garbage totes (we should have 2 as it is a 2-family residence) stolen... 3rd time in only a few months. What the hell would posess someone to steal garbage totes?

my bin disappeared 2 weeks ago, but I blame it on the high winds we had that week.

the issue of stuff blowing around all over the place can be solved if people stack their bins correctly. there was a 3 week time span where the city came a day late to pick up the recycle-bins and as a result there was stuff blown all over the street. I sent in a complaint through the city's website but never heard anything.

OK seriously, the recycling program in Buffalo is a joke. For the past several years my recycling was picked up occasionally. I would make bi-weekly calls to the Mayor's Complaint line. Usually that would get them to come get it the next business day. Two weeks ago I called because a recycling truck had not been down my street since the week before Christmas. That got them to come get it, but the following week they took all of my neighbors', but not mine. Obvious retaliation. So I called to complain again. This week when they came, the left my recycling bin in the middle of the street, yet all of my neighbors had theirs on the grass. Who is running this recycling program anyway?

Not to be too melodramatic, but...bottled water is evil!

There are economical, environmental, health and even moral reasons to not consume bottled water. By now most everyone knows that if the words "Spring" are not on the label then the water source is most likely from a municipal water supply. Great, so it's been filtered a couple of times, my fridge does the same thing. Transporting springwater is anything but green. The following is an excerpt from a study investigating what it takes to get 1 kg of Fiji springwater to the US.

In summary, the manufacture and transport of that one kilogram bottle of Fiji water consumed 26.88 kilograms of water (7.1 gallons) .849 Kilograms of fossil fuel (one litre or .26 gal) and emitted 562 grams of Greenhouse Gases (1.2 pounds).

Ethically, a lot of this exotic springwater comes from places where the locals don't have enough clean water for themselves because their government has contracted out most of the freshwater for bottlers outside of their country.

There are stricter regulations on the quality of municipal water than there are on anything bottled. FDA regulation covers things like minerals and particulates in bottled water but not e.coli or other bacterial contaminants.

I read an article, which I can't find again, that calculated that not consuming bottled water is the equivalent of taking over 100,000 cars off the road every year when everything is factored in.

"Think before you drink" isn't just about alcohol anymore.

A $0.25 deposit is a joke. Don't tax me just because I'd rather recycle conveniently at my curb than truck in my cans to Wegmans. I can handle losing five cents on every can that I put in my recycle bin, but not a quarter.

When I lived in Tacoma, we had Buffalo-blue-sized recycle totes. The garbage totes were green, and much more expensive than Buffalo's. How is it that I pay only $18 a month for two huge totes for my double? That's nuts.

Increase the cost of garbage totes (offer a 1/2 size tote for the current quarterly charge for the big blue totes). Give us large totes for recycling. The recycling numbers will go up dramatically.

OK, let's clear some things up on recycling. To place usable materials into a landfill is a huge energy sink that, aside from some methane, is not recovered by humans for use. Most of the methane by the way leaks into the atmosphere and contributes to Climate Change events. To effeciently capture the material and energy in a recyclabe item allows us humans to get the further value from the processing we have already put into that item. Say a recyclabel bottle for example, required us to search for the oil underground, drill the hole to extract the oil, transport the oil to a refinery, refine it, and eventually make a plastic bottle from it, then fill it with a product, transport it for sale, purchase it at a store and then comes the decision. Tremendous pollution is generated all through this process. So now,recycle or not when the bottle is empty? Each time we elect to throw it out and landfill it, we have to go right back and repeat the entire process, with all its steps to make another bottle. OR, we can recycle the bottle and either reuse the materail for another bottle or at least reuse the material in another recycling loop that allows for the use of this type of plastic in the making of that product. Extending the use of the item does yield considerable savings over the life span of most prodcts. Virgin paper fiber, for example, can be used soetimes over ten times in recycled products. The total amount of energy and pollution saved as we recycle more products is staggering when compared to the energy used in raw material production. Oh, and we must not forget the environmental damage we do as we remove more materails from the Earth in our search for more virgin, raw materail for products. Yes, energy is used in the recycling process, but it is far less than the energy and pollution we generate by making products from their raw materials.