What Do I Actually Do?

What do I actually do? Not as much as I'd like to. Let's face it - I'm on the far side of my 60s, on a diso pension, and finding that the things I always wanted to do when I stopped working - are just as much work as work ever was, and then some more... 

It's true. When I was working, it was one of those salaried jobs that meant I was working 50 and 60 hour weeks and getting paid a salary for about 40. Then I left there and went freelance for a year, which was enough to convince me that I should have been a freelancer for a lot longer... Same income, half the hours. Still high-pressure but I liked it. Then my third or fourth health issue struck and I ended up on a disability pension. 

But once I started doing the things I'd always put off for when I "had more time" I discovered the thing that a lot of retirees find - hobbies and favourite things expand to fill a lot more time than a job ever did. I found some reasonably sane advice for old farts online about having a plan - and gloriously ignored almost everything in it except that bit about being kind to myself and not letting any of my hobbies become an obsession. 

But it started me on this trip of a time. I'd been blogging sporadically for a bit longer than thirty years before that, first on BBS's then by hand-writing HTML in Notepad, etc. I also started writing about renewables, AI and the ethics of automating and cyborging, and recycling, and becoming a very clumsy Maker of all-sorts-of-punked jewellery and small sculptures, and machines and recycling gear, and learning the arcane art of programming Arduinos and their endless family of cousins.

https://www.ryrob.com/history-of-blogging/

From The Top Down, From The Depths Of History

Ready for some history? I have some history to impart. Here's a bit of Bulletin Board System history. Skip to "Blogs And Me" if you know all about the online communications software that the Hackers and Wargames kids used. Read the next few paragraphs to find out where the Internet took some form and direction from... 

Blogging. As I said, blogging. 

Only it wasn't, at first. In 1990 I became a member of a BBS ("Bulletin Board System") called Wizard - or something like that. I think. It's kind of a long way back to remember. Sysop's ("SYStem OPerator") name was GAry. I think. Helped me set up the modem and client on my IBM AT clone computer - and I was in this new territory of computing. I worked out how to use Netmail and Echomail (Netmail was close to what we now call email, Echomail was more like an email group) and Filebone. 

Echoes were set up by sysops and were like chatrooms accessed by sending echomails to the echo. Filebone was the collection of folders full of files that people shared. There was ASCII art, there were text files, there were images (no prizes for guessing what many images were of) and there were the program files, all the way from "demos" that specific groups put up to show off their skills with images and music to the more suss things like "hacking tools" that BBSs were famous for. 

Each BBS accepted your files locally, and then at one specific time every day, it relayed all new echomail, Netmail, and Filebone files to an upstream hub, which sent it to a major hub, which sent it to relevant major hubs in different countries/areas which sent the relevant ones to their relevant local BBS at the other end, and there the user you were sending to would receive what you'd sent, usually taking between one and four days to get there by the nightly hops. Your correspondent would send a reply which took the same amount of time to relay-hop back to you. 

This stuff opened my eyes. I was chatting to interns and engineers at NASA. Had conversations in echoes that had participants all over the world. And one day I made a file directory with my name and sent up a file with a recipe. I can't even recall what the recipe was but I also started adding files about life down under. That was the start of oversharing online.

When I got back home (I was interstate before that, hence the reaching out online to a community I could partake in) I set up my own BBS, called "TEdLIVISION" (- don't touch that dial!!!) that the previously mentioned sysop (who might actually have been called Steve, perhaps? It's another name from the era that's scratching away in a corner of my memories) helped me set up. And kept posting textfiles with snippets of how-to, recipes, whatever else came to mind. It wasn't a blog per se but it was online content. 

Then the hard drive of the machine I used as my Windows PC and which TEdLIVISION ran on in the background crashed after four years. I'd bought a secondhand drive because it had a whole 40Mb of space and my original drive was barely big enough to run my pride and joy, Windows for Workgroups. WfW had a thing called "Winsock" that let one access a LAN - or a network connection over a modem. But the stack of floppy disks fitted on the original drive I had but there was no room for the BBS software and all the files that the mail and filebone would put on my PC once I was running the BBS software. And after a few years, it spun its last spin. It took me a while to save for a new hard drive, which came with a newer late model PC, TEdLIVISION was reinstated, and ran another two years until 1997. 

So that's stuff I did. I got Internet-connected in 1995 or 1996 but kept TEdLIVISION going until there weren't even 2 dial-ins a month. 

Blogs And Me

And that brings me back to blogging.

It led to a veritable stable of blogs, the oldest of which (that are still going) are sixteen years and counting old, but have their roots in some of the old BBS files I'd managed to hang onto and some old hand-coded HTML. (All written in Notepad so: "<body><h3>The cat was being cute yesterday</h3><p>He worked the electric can-opener all by himself last night. There wasn't a tin of cat food in it, he was just gently reminding me that the food bowl was empty by making that noise he associated with food.</p>" etc etc etc.  And yes it's true, the cat really did that. The can opener was on the kitchen counter and my desk was on the dining room side of it, he jumped up and nudged the lever because he felt his bowl was too empty. . . )

And so my first hand-coded Internet blog was called "TEdALOG Lite." It included some of my few surviving BBS texts, and pretty soon I found some software that let me edit files on my PC and link them in a blog structure with an index and all the good things right there on your own hard drive - and then uploaded the whole blog by FTP to your webserver. EVERY TIME you wanted to add or edit a post... It was still better than hand coding. So TEdALOG Lite moved to this software, losing quite a lot of data in the process. 

It was joined in quick succession by "TEdAMENU Tuckertime" and "TEdADYNE Systems" but these two were on a new site called Blogger.com, aka Blogspot.com, and as blogger started in 1999, I guess that dates the first edition. (*sigh* yep there were losses. Again.)

I started "The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook" on blogger.com a few years after it was acquired by Google which was also during my second health crisis, and most of those hand-coded and reposted online ("Surely this'll be a more stable provider. . .") files went away around the same time that the service provider that had been hosting the files - went away. It kind of put a damper on me and I was as said dealing with a health issue - and a personal issue - and still working long hours. Anyhow - by 2007 I was ready to start with blogs again so I found as many of the files as I could, and reconstituted them. Not long afterwards I retired with my disabilities and had more time to start doing things - but that didn't include much blogging. 

I knew I'd have a limited useful life. Wanted to do the Grey Nomad thing - and didn't, because of health. And also because of a new life halfway across Australia, with a woman who became my favourite ever lovely wife. So everything sort of took a pause there, except growing fresh food. I'm going into way too many details aren't I? Yeah, I think I am. 

So anyhow. Jump cut.

You can find my blogs' output at Ted's News Stand - it has the twenty most recent blog posts across all of my blogs and a sporadically updated list of what those blogs are and what their main themes are. I figured if I posted everything on one blog, it would get confusing and chaotic really quickly, so I tend to *try* and stick to themes for each one. 

I know my readership is tiny compared to real blogs but I'd like that to change. On the News Stand there's a link to subscribe to my newsletter. It's not a high intrusion thing, once a week (currently Friday Eastern Australian time) it gets sent out and has the updated list of blog posts. That's it. Sharing the link to the  News Stand would help me. Sharing my articles would help me, help more people get to read them.

Also, I pay for everything related - domain name fees, server fees, subscriptions to the news services I ferret out my stories from, the hardware for the projects I share online - out of my pension. Sometimes I get a donation, and when I do, I put that into the next set of fees and that lets us keep a bit more of my pension for our use. Any help here is appreciated.

The Next Things I Do.

I grow as much of our fresh food as I can. The job has gotten harder and harder due to circumstances beyond our control but I document all the tips and techniques and constructions I use to make our increasingly smaller and smaller patch as productive as I can. I've made mini aquaponics systems, raised garden beds, in-ground worm farms, and systems to support and grow the plants. I've shared all that online. There are reasons other than age and infirmity that I won't go into, let's just say that sometimes, life just hands you lemons and keeps right on pelting you with them. But also some great crops and stories. You can find most of them on the Zen Cookbook or PTEC3D Blog.  

I'm also the unofficial carer for my wife, I do the cooking and most of the laundry. The laundry isn't something that I feel I need to air in public, so to speak (hehehe see what I did there?) but the cooking is. Whenever I develop a new recipe or food health tip or cooking technique tip, it goes up on TEdAMENU Tuckertime recipe blog. 

I also splashed out almost $250 for a 3D printer a few years ago. I have models online at Printables for the most useful and universal of them, and they're also on my Ko-Fi.com pages, mostly for free there but unlike Printables you can tip me for them at Ko-Fi. Most of my prints are designed to solve problems or be tools to solve problems with. 

Designs and so forth for electronics and programming end up on PTEC3D Blog, and my forays into sustainable and renewable on the Grumpy Old Guy blog or Zen Cookbook. Depends on what angles the stories have. 

I also get shitty with supermarket and corporation food crimes on those blogs because I think there should be a special place in Hell for people that adulterate foods or knowingly take the nutrition out so that you'll instead get hooked on excessive sugars salts and fats or other additives and then play into their medical arms. Preferably that place would be a place where people like me get to fry the bastards over and over in very hot palm or corn oil in a teflon pan... Stuff I've turned up on food corporate crimes would turn your stomach, trust me on this. Sometimes the foodie outrage also gets into the recipe blog. Sorry - I wasn't too focused on themes and topics for a long while and it's difficult sometimes to know what to file some stories under. 

I've also made and still occasionally make (when I have spare time or get bored, ha ha HA!) all-kinds-of-punked jewellery and small sculptures, and while lifelong poor eye-hand coordination have limited me to wishing I could make drawing art, a cool new thing (pssst! It's AI...) has allowed me to tell a computer somewhere to make a starting point image for me that I can then edit to my heart's content and that I put on my blogs to fill up white space when pics aren't available or applicable. Some of those images make their way to Ko-Fi.com where again, some are for sale and many you can figure out what you'd like to tip me. 

I may put some of those things online at Ko-Fi sometime - not sure. Is anyone interested in a steampunked Nerf Maverick or a completely fabricated "raygun?" Leather and wire sculptures and jewellery? "Robot assistants?" For an example, a desk lamp I made (out of an old hard disk drive and QH lamp) for a friend in the mid 1990s is still working and she still uses it most evenings. Also I have the originals of my digital/AI art and can supply it in original quality. 
(story continues below)

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Let me know - the image below has a contact link ("Mastodon") where you can reach me if any of these kinds of things interest you. 

Also please subscribe to my newsletter using the newspaper in the image above, it's a once-a-week email that'll keep you informed on all the latest blog posts. If you'd like to help me keep the blogs going, the recipes flowing, please use either 

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(cont'd)

I may dig through the boxes of old bits'n'bobs and take a few pictures - I have a half-completed working Nerf Maverick being steam-punked into a lovely old steampunk prop, several other devices being turned into steampunk props, a lot of jewellery made from brass and springs and stuff. I have one "robot assistant" similar to Gyro Gearloose's Little Helper (does anyone remember Disney comics? And Gyro? He was my hero when I was very young, age five and upwards - and still is a hero of mine . . .) and a few other robot and general sculptures (all small/tiny) made of metals and plastics and so forth that I need to complete, and now also recycled plastics will start making an appearance. 

A Small Proviso

Over the last five years or so, disruption has been a feature of life. First there was setting up a fence to keep our cats safe from a highway just outside our front door, then setting up raised garden beds, then the back fence blew down in a storm and we put it back up and made a gate to the back alley, then putting in a 3m x 3m shed and a gazebo and outdoor kitchen area. And then taking all those things down again... You see, we rent. Our old landlord had told us we were here for as long as we needed a place and to make it what we wanted for long term lease. 

Then across the road from us an old caravan park, motel, and pub/club were demolished to make way for a new - something, vague rumors of something - and our landlord's life changed and he sold the house... 

The new landlord (and a local business owner and secret philanthropist) has turned out to be the most generous and kind person but as he was capitalising on the huge block by splitting it and putting another house on the now rear block, it meant the fence and gate went the way of the dodo, the garden beds (well, some of the garden beds) had to be uplifted and moved into the newly-fenced front yard, the shed had to be moved, and the cat fence and bazebo etc all had to come down. I reckon I aged a decade in those few years. 

But it's still ongoing. The local Shire dragged out proceedings by a year - during which I/we consolidated into the smaller garden space, hacked the shed to fit into a new space, got the gardens producing veges again, - and now that the new garage has been erected - just finished as of yesterday (16 Aug 2023) in fact - I have to move all the shed and old garage tools and materials into the back of it. It's a HUGE garage, will be more than enough - but it's all been taking inordinate amounts of our time. Once I've moved everything into it, I'll have the right space to do more recycling, build more projects and equipment for making new projects, and may even have a better space for electronics and 3D printing. 

That's a 5m or 6m front on that garage. Woo-ee!

Oh and of course COVID-19 and all that panic also happened, and a load of health issues for us both, under stress and ageing as we both are. It gets to the point where all the small cuts add up to a big painful gaping bite out of us. And it's definitely all added up to delays, delays that are now ever more important to us because they're taking away from a steadily-shrinking pool we call "the years we have left..." For example, my self-designed desktop CNC I've been working away on has been in abeyance for almost two years, a planned seed raising hothouse that I wanted to build and put into use right about now, will have to wait another year. And so will more than a dozen other projects. Blogging is about the only thing I can do anytime and anyplace and even that has had to pause for the occasional issue. 

Today is also the eleventh anniversary of our wedding, my lovely wife and I, one day I'll post that lovely tale on TEdALOG Lite II, for now let's just say this has been the happiest twelve (almost thriteen) years of my life. Why? Because tomorrow is the twelfth anniversary of our Facebook marriage. Seems a twee thing to do but it led to us actually meeting in Western Australia, being pretty much smacked over the head with the fact that we were more compatible than any other two people either of us had ever experienced, and so I finished up in Victoria Australia just before 2012 rolled around.

But anyway - an article "What I Did and Do and  Will Actually Do" may be on the cards with a lot more info on the stuff my wife and I have Made and will keep on Making. It's something in our blood I think so projects will keep happening. You can help - there's a little graphic a few paragraphs before the picture of the garage where you can subscribe to my once-a-week newsletter which will keep you up to date with all the ins and outs of doings and catatonic states, or you can arrange to help by making a one-time or monthly donation to help with creative costs, or chat with me on mastodon. Or just share the link to any or all of my articles, the newsletter / News Stand site. It all does help us. 

What Sort Of Channels Do We Watch?

In an effort to shed light on the chaotic nature of the brainworddumps I make here, this very short article intends to shine light on the channels that we watch on Youtube:

Firstly and probably meaninglessly,

We discovered a few synchronicities in our viewing: 

Many have the name Scott, several are tall mop-headed people, many have blue/blue-adjacent/grey eyes, and quite a few are "odd Stuff" Channels, including:

AJ Gentile (The Why Files) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIZNBTRYj_o 

Joe Scott https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNcHPF_tX3c 

Tom Scott  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE

...and the Scott theme carries over into music:

David Scott (aka The Kiffness) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwLLFbC1H0c 

... and 3D printing 

Scott Yu-Jan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYy8RFcN_ds

Thomas Sanladerer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGUPBoDxmKk

... leading into two mop-headed presenters:

Stefan Hermann - CNC Kitchen  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPxCtMUTuiI

... one of which goes right back into music

Andy - Guitar Geek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPPOIThqRLI

...and then our list also leads into stuff like

Precious Plastic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmHAwxRe4R0

Brothers Make https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zz4P39WeTV8

I've only selected a single video from each of them but you'll get the idea of what ferments in my brain after a few hours of catching up with my videos, posts, and podcasts material for the day. 

We're also avid watchers of Nebula TV videos. This is a site similar to Youtube but created and operated by the creators of the content, and many of the same people we follow on Youtube have their videos on here, often a week before they get to YToutube. Why? Because the group of creators sell the advertising on Nebula and get all the income derived from it. If you want to support some of your favourite YT creators, look them up on Nebula first.

If you like the mix or have found a new favourite Youtuber maybe make a small donation using the banner above, or subscribe to my once a week newsletter.

If you enjoy my articles, share them on your favourite messaging service, social site, or news site. That really helps to get them seen more widely. 

Do You. (Doing Recycling.)

I know - easier to say that than do that. And it's only a part of the waste problem. But it's gotta start somewhere.

This is an article with a lot of links. They all open in a new tab so you won't lose this page. They're mostly links to videos because the concepts are best shown in video essay formats, and you'll end up down a rabbit-hole and possibly spend weeks afterwards following up the further rabbit-holes these videos will present. All I can say is "I hope so. I fervently hope this shows you how recycling can help you and your community and your country and your planet. This is the way." 

The Trash Tripod: 

Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. 

Reduce our use of plastic, re-use where we can't avoid it.
Especially one-shot plastic. Ask for your coffee in your own permanent mug/cup. Carry a few pieces of opp shop (thrift shop) cutlery and refuse the plastic kind. Or keep the first plastic (or bamboo *see Note 1) cutlery you get and re-use the heck out of it. Take your own containers to take-away places. Take a refillable long-lasting thermos for drinks. 

You'll find this is less than welcome in some takeaway restaurants/fast food places. My advice is to stop using them, is that superduper vindaloo really worth it? I'd also take a moment to note that they "don't accept re-use practices" on your food review app of choice. Activism is the ONLY way any company or corporation will take notice of you. If you hit their bottom line.

(We often take a small hamper in the car with us that has enamelled plates, bowls & lids, basic cutlery and a couple of car mugs with lids. When I was still in the workforce I'd take leftovers for lunch in similar re-usable containers with lids, and brought my own cutlery and coffee mug every day. This is how you start seeing how much single-use plastic and crap is foisted on us every day. Even at the start of the century I was appalled at this, and I'm still offended at how few alternatives we have to this day.)

For takeaway places I'd recommend even something like a set of old takeaway containers (one of our noodle places has these hard white plastic bowls and lids - they're easy to clean, seal well, and last for months if you look after them) they're still a single-use plastic, but this gives them several dozen more uses before they finally have to go out, in the process saving you from using that many other, new, single-use containers. And any reduction in personal use of plastics is a gain for the environment. 

Similarly, it's hard to find bread that isn't in plastic. Maybe re-use those bags to carry fresh fruit, veg, and other groceries from the market or store a few times, then use them one more time as a bag for collecting together a whole pack of soft plastics for recycling. 

Remember that if you do have to accept a single-use plastic, be aware that it can be re-used several times thus reducing a few subsequent single-use plastics. The more often and for longer, the better. Or you could try recycling things for yourself. Read all the way down, it's far easier than you think. 

So actually the "tripod" should be just two broad categories:

Replace/Reduce/Re-use, or Recycle/Revert/Re-create.

I'll get to the last two terms in a bit. So for now that leaves:

Recycle the rest. 
In my mind I have a special place reserved in Hell for The Fossil Fuel Cartel (The "FFC" to me) who are maligning recycling and making it seem so awkward and clumsy and wasteful and expensive that even our governments are wholesale swallowing the bullshit propaganda. You need to know that this is propaganda and that recycling has become extremely easy and profitable this century.

RECYCLING BECAME A SOLVED AND 
EASY PROCESS LONG  AGO.

Dr Furgatroyd urges you to watch as many videos
as it takes to demonstrate how easy recycling actually is.

 

Recycling is actually easy.

(Also, here come a lot of links...)

I watch Insider Business and a few other channels on Youtube. They may have "Business" in their name but they produced some great videos of stuff being recycled. I featured [ this series |  of three | great videos ] of recycling projects in an article each about a year ago and they already weren't exactly hot news scoops at the time those videos were made. 

Also, watch [ some | of these | videos | about | Precious Plastic ] style of recycling. PreshPlast have been working on open source recycling machines for over a decade and have inspired others like Brothers Make as well. 

And here we come to the reason I say that recycling has been quite deliberately framed as a hard problem. In Australia recently we've had a company called REDcycle go belly-up and leave ten to fifteen thousand of tons of plastic bags stuck in warehouses and buildings in Australia. 

Making the easy seem impossible.

REDcycle founder Liz Casell says that a fire in the one factory recycling the soft plastics caused the backup and yet also there's mention that the material the factory was turning soft plastic bags into wasn't selling. You get why there wasn't a flood...

(Okay - that's a reference to a really bad joke that goes like: A businessman arrives at a fairly upmarket resort in the Bahamas to find two other businessmen also there. They get to talking and he asks the other two how come they're here enjoying such a lavish vacation. "Well," says one of them, "I owned a chocolatier company that was barely breaking even, then there was a fire, the insurance paid out, and here I am." The new guy turns to the other one and ask him. "It's a lucky thing," says that guy. "Or unlucky, take your pick. I owned and operated a fireplace shop, but then wood burning fireplaces started to be frowned upon and sales plummeted. Then my fireplace shop - caught fire. Insurance came through though, and here I am." They both looked at the most recent vacationer expectantly, and he decides to share his story with them. "About five years ago," he starts, "I bought a carpet warehouse. It was doing quite well too," he continued, "but then there was a flood."

The other two stare at him blankly and ask "How the heck do you start a flood?")

Please note that there are several varieties and large quantities of bullshit involved in those two articles. Firstly the article claiming that "recycling is a broken system." Note that the word "broken" can be used in a number of ways, and in this case the writer of the article seems to be using it as an adjective, when in fact it should be used as a verb. The system isn't "broken," it's been deliberately broken by those who don't want it to work because it conflicts with their plans. 

"Most single-use plastics produced worldwide since the 1970s have ended up in landfills..." Well of course they bloody well have, because to the FFC there's no profit in recycling because they can't shift hundreds of thousands of tons of petrochemicals that get turned into "virgin" plastic every year. If recycling had been left to produce recycled plastics, there's nothing more certain than that the FFC's profits would suffer a fairly heavy loss. 

"One of the biggest problems with plastics recycling is the massive diversity of plastics that end up in the waste stream — foils, foams, sachets, numerous varieties of flexible plastic, and different additives that further alter plastic properties.
Most plastics can only be recycled in pure and consistent form, and only a limited number of times. What's more, municipal plastic waste streams are very difficult to sort."

I don't know where to start on this mountain of BS. There already exist some really excellent machines now that can sort individual pieces of trash in realtime at the rate of ten thousand pieces per hour using that technology and compressed air jets to knock the identified plastics into their relevant output streams. 

RECYCLING BECAME A SOLVED AND 
EASY PROCESS LONG  AGO.

Don't let the flimflamming deceive you - Recycling
is being systematically demonised and opposed.

Then the total BS about plastics being only able to be recycled in pure and consistent form. That too is crap, and like most of the other errors it's not the journalist's fault for believing the FFC propaganda, but it IS their fault for not researching properly. In fact, as long as you observe the broad plastic types (HDPE, PET, PA, etc) plastics can be quite handily recycled with little loss of functionality. And lastly, the comment about "only a limited number of times" is misleading. Insofar as that this can mean several tens of times. And that would be more than enough times to see the plastics problem eliminated when better decomposition techniques are discovered and developed.

Deconstructing the BS

The problem we have is that on the one hand we can see that plastics are extremely durable - after all we call them a forever pollution - and on the other we have the propaganda machine claim that there's a limit to how many times they can be recycled, the process is extremely finicky and difficult to get the exact composition right, yada yada bloody yada. On the other hand you can see from the PreshPlast and Brothers Make videos that you can recycle plastics with old appliances and car jacks. 

On the one hand some would like us to believe that poor fragile little plastics can be made into complete fiascos by processing, yet on the other hand things like PET plastic bottles are really easily spun into fibres that are made into threads that are used already to make clothing and yarns; and we see the Brothers recycle plastic bags into sheets and also into extremely solid and durable furniture. And that sun-damaged garden furniture can be restored with a wave of a hot-air gun, cracked plastics welded and restored. 

The fact that REDcycle apparently lacked the imagination (or the inspriation) to turn plastic bags into an additive to road bitumen speaks volumes to how totally ass-whipped we've been into this fatalistic losing attitude. There's yet another side to this, too. Whereas this company turning soft plastic into paving blocks makes sense, adding plastics to a material that will see heavy highway use is just re-releasing the plastic but this time under ideal conditions for the wear and tear of traffic to turn it directly into microplastics... 

(The paving blocks will only ever see light traffic. The addition of sands and gravels means that there is in effect a layer of sand preventing even that traffic from making contact with the plastic. And the plastic is deliberately burned hard. The asphalt on the other hand will experience hundreds of thousands of times as much traffic, traffic that already wears away large stone aggregates that are included in the material. The tyres of vehicles will make a short snack of the plastic additive and result in more and more re-asphalting to be done while releasing tons of microplastics.) 

All manner of materials can be turned to pavers. There are literally hundreds of small businesses showing that ANY plastics and filler materials can be turned into building materials. Glasss can be recycled back into sharp sand for construction, smooth sand can be turned to glass. One beauitiful thing about using plastics in these ways is that the plastic in pavers and building walls isn't subject to as much abrasion, and with the application of a coat of paint can last for centuries. In the process it sequesters that plastic until some future time when science and technology catch up and fond ways to "un-make" them again, getting (finally) to the "Revert" part of the formula. Revert the plastics back to basic building blocks, atoms and elements. 

That sequestering process is a better aim than recycling - because turning a pile of plastic trash into another pile of single-use-soon-to-be-trash-again-plastic-trash is just rubbish. In every sense of the word. But putting it into buildings and footpaths ensures it stays out of the waste stream for decades, allowing technology to catch up and find ways to permanently disassemble plastic molecules into their constituent parts again. Or completely burn it. 

I honestly could put a clickable link to some recycling success or other on every second word of this article. There are - I don't know exactly - hundreds at any rate - of videos on Youtube alone to unique and profitable recycling projects. There are many more on a web search. (I use DuckDuckGo because it finds more than Google does these days, you might consider switching to it too, to preserve at least *some* privacy online.) 

The only downside to those businesses is that there's more manual labour involved, many are being carried out in "less developed" countries and so lack some basic safety such as air filtering and dust management - but I say both that these drawbacks can be easily fixed for developed nations, and secondly, that the terms "less developed" and "developed" are not clear descriptions to me because it seems that in things that are becoming truly important (environmental stewardship, waste management, and winning the race to change our ways before the planet changes them for us) the "less developed" nations are well and truly leading the way.

The Long Way Round (To You)

With the really terrifying summer of 2023 that the Northern Hemisphere has just been through, there are going to be a few changes, I think. I've said in past articles that it wouldn't be long before a job in recycling will carry some serious clout, and become a valued skill set. I think that 2023 and 2024 will start to see that change happen. 

I listened to a TED talk in which the speaker claimed that the pace of adopting planet-friendly measures is quickening, and I have to agree. While governments might turn a bit of a blind eye to a minor town's water supply being poisoned or a bunch of homeless people perishing in the cold because local businesses have chased them off the last warm spots outside their shops, they can't ignore people perishing in their hundreds due to climate-change-induced storms, floods, fires, and heatwaves now provably beyond a doubt caused by their corporate buddies.

Climate remediation will be the number one topic, if not by the end of this year then by the end of 2024. Just to be clear I'm not suggesting that you stop working at the office and take up work as a recycle truck driver on the basis of my article. Stop panicking. (Although, in a year's time you may find yourself kicking yourself that you didn't...) But I am thinking that we need to accelerate this change.

And if the lure of actually DOING SOMETHING has you in its grip, watch some of the videos - here are the Brothers Make using plastic bags to make a new material for a sling chair using a previous exercise piece, a home-made park bench made from recycled facemasks. Note that this is applicable to any of half a dozen other recyclable plastics too, and that once the molds are made they can be used over and over to make as many park benches and seats as you want.  

06 Aug 2023 EDIT: As usual, another contender shows up AFTER I publish an article. In this case, and as much as I love Precious Plastic, this is NOT a good recycling idea. These trinkets will get used a few times by the new owner, then thrown out. The park bench wins. Would have been better to make the sheets 2-4times as thick and use them as construction materials for longer-term sequestration of the plastics.

Even I can do it

I used a flat sandwich toaster press to make flat sheets out of bottle caps, which can be used to make very unique house street number plaques or any other wall art. I've ironed plastic bags into cotton cloth to prove that I can make a waterproof sheet but that I haven't yet decided to use. When I do, I'll use a plastic welding pen to weld sheet parts together to make more complex objects, or just heat-laminate several layers of sheets together to make material for project boxes and front panels for projects. I've temporarily stopped this because I realised that I need to experiment with an A3 laminator machine that I can adjust the speed and thickness of, to make larger panels. Ironing is okay but if you wanted to make larger projects then you need a machine, and using a ready-made laminator as the base for it saves a lot of expensive development. 

So - I could do with your help to make that particular project. Use the graphic above to support my recycling work with a few dollars, or even a regular patronage of a few dollars a month. Every bit helps, to pay for servers and domain names, subscriptions to news and information sites that I use for research, and to pay for equipment and materials for developing these kinds of inexpensive ways to recycle and b doing such things locally, raise awareness of the corporate smear job that's been perpetrated on the recycling industry for the sake of petrochemical and FFC profits.

Also - please share the hell out of this and other similar articles I post - the more people get to see it, the better the chance that it'll go widespread and help accelerate the change that I think you'll see sweeping government and public thinking in the next few months as the planet starts reacting to all that corporate greed. 

Strap in for the ride, and
KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!

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Note 1: 
This is one of the oddest things I've ever seen. I saw some hair combs or some such beauty product on the shelf in a discount dollar type store, that claimed to be "bamboo-like" and to all appearances were just plastic made to look like bamboo. 

Bamboo is a prolific grass that can grow several feet a day in the right conditions, it's tough and durable and can be carved, steamed, and molded into a variety of shapes. It's hard enough to be used to cut food, doesn't absorb food juices or flavours, and has been used for centuries for everything from building to food bowls. Due to its growth rate it's inexpensive to produce. 

It's a sustainable, renewable, and compostable alternative to plastic and to use plastic to fake it is just Machiavellian. 

Seeing a manufacturer having to produce imitation bamboo tells me that there's a primary production / supply issue here. The people growing the bamboo aren't letting a crop grow in the field for long enough to be useful for anything else, so there's got to be a lag there. Then too there's the problem that the powerful building industry wants bamboo for the increasing number of construction projects using bamboo, i.e. for flooring or wall panels etc. 

No-one wins in that greedy demand process. Growers are reducing the average age (and thus value) of their crop, the building industry is going to get fobbed off with barely-usable bamboo as the growers sell cutlery grade bamboo as construction grade, and the cutlery/general is going to be made with increasingly more expensive bamboo as demand takes it away to construction.

And the irony is writ large - bamboo was used for its environmentally-friendly nature, the ease with which it can be adapted to places where plastics need to be eliminated - and now, it's become cheaper to replace it with plastic again... 

There IS a way around this. Insist on bamboo where it makes sense, avoid plastics at all cost. That's it, that's the way. Insist on a multi-use reusable item over single-use, every time. It's all very well to package something in a magic pressed cardboard container but if it's had to be treated with a chemical to help it retain its shape or to repel water then it's NOT environmentally friendly to put in landfill. And to supply something like plastic, fake, single-use bamboo cutlery with that pressed cardboard container is a crime against the planet and everything and every being on it.

Many Hands Make Waste Less

We all know at least one story about plastic waste - being stockpiled instead of recycled, filling landfills, piling up in great drifts in alleyways, choking oceans and waterways. But what about some good news stories? 

My State of Victoria in Australia is just the tip of an iceberg, with more and more governments taking action on waste. These actions aren't always successful, but let's not always point to the nature of government as being the reason things don't work out as planned. It's not always "isn't it droll how if you want to bring something to a standstill, just get the government to do it?" - often it also needs the populace to pitch in and do something. 

Recycling is not "broken."

Don't fall for the story that plastic recycling "is broken." Sadly, our national broadcaster ABC has joined the wailing chorus of voices that claim plastic recycling is broken. It isn't broken per se. It's been quite deliberately broken. It's been belittled, and beset with imaginary problems and pitfalls, by the one cartel that has the most to lose if we stop making so-called "virgin plastics," the cartel of the petrochemical and fossil fuel industries. 

Don't forget that as electric vehicles make dents in the consumption of fossil fuels, the Fossil Fuel Cartel will lose all that lovely profit, all that shareholder value. There won't be much else left for them except the dirty process of breaking petroleum into hydrogen and pollutants. Their back is to the wall already and the firing squad is loading their rifles. They are desperate for one more suck at the tiddy, and recycling would wrench that away from them.

You'll notice that the other recycling industries are all steaming along at a great rate - aluminium used in manufacturing is almost all recycled despite the large amount of engineering and energy and effort that has had to be made to get it there. That's because aluminium dug from the ground and then smelted from virgin bauxite ore costs more than recycled aluminium. 

Glass is recycled without a quibble, too. While it's easy enough to make new glass basically from sand, there's a little balance here. The building industry needs "sharp" sands, sands that aren't worn smooth by weathering. Round sand grains produce dangerously weak concrete. And guess what? Grinding up glass produces lovely sharp new grains of sand. Glass itself doesn't care if it's made by melting sharp or smooth sands. 

Some things such as the repeated claims that mixed plastics are the biggest impediment to recycling plastics are right - and also wrong. Yes, plastics need to be sorted into their respective classes in order to produce the best quality recycled plastic. It's often said that we "can't afford the manpower to sort those mountains of plastics" but that's not true. 

If we assigned an actual value to recycling plastics and, you know, saving the bloody planet, then we'd have a metric shit-ton of money to throw at people and the actual jobs at recycling plant would have a lot of prestige  and kudos attached to them. (And a commensurate wage, too...)

But that needs us - you, me, the person over there - to realise how important recycling and recovering waste plastics is to us, to our kids, to the other living beings on the planet, and to the planet itself. 

The best way we can raise that awareness is to share posts like this. The second best way is to use the links in the image below to support me so I can increase the reach of my blog posts.  The absolute best way would be to do both...

There are already machines that can sort 10,000 to 100,000 pieces of plastic automatically, autonomously, without any human intervention needed. They can even sort each type of plastic into colours. 

We have machines that can wash, grind, and wash again all the nicely-sorted plastics into factory-ready stocks of pellet plastic. We can similarly find ways to run autonomous loaders and dumpers that can handle that plastic waste from delivery to those machines, and then from the output of those machines to specific containers for shipping to those factories.

You know how plastic is such a problem because it doesn't break down? That's also the reason it can be recycled and reused multiple times over. And the reason we're not recycling it over and over is pure obstruction and opposition.

Please help raise that awareness.

And is mixed plastic really that bad?

Most of the time, you're looking for a particular set of properties in a plastic, I agree. And for those times, well-sorted plastic recycle product is important. But there are also some uses for plastics that are less demanding. 

Some uses for mixed plastic have been things like the entrepreneur in Africa who's turning mixed plastic and sand into paving bricks. I agree, there's still going to be wear and tear and more microplastics abrading off those bricks, but nowhere near as much as the bucketful of thin plastic that it's made from abrading - on the one hand you have several square metres of plastic bags and takeaway containers exposed to weathering, on the other, all that plastic is now encased in a shell. Still a bit of surface area to abrade, but reduced by a factor of several hundred. And there's sand and other hard material, prevent shoes and wheels from getting even to the outer layer of plastic to abrade it'

Similarly, some mixed plastic waste is melted and extruded into large beams and sheets for constructing non-structural things like park benches and tables. Again - yes there's a surface area that will abrade slowly, but once again the huge surface area of the plastic waste that went into has been reduced by many hundredfold. 

And one reason for mixed plastics is

the manufacturers of those plastics themselves. They need this additive and this plasticiser and that congener, to produce a very specific set of qualities in the resulting plastic. Now that is a danger in plastics, and just by seeing that these additives have been used so irresponsibly and haphazardly you can see that the plastics industry never once had a serious concern that they'd ever have to pay to clean up their own mess. 

Such contaminated plastics can also be detected by those sorting machines and directed to a different pile, the one that I like to call the "kill it with fire" pile. At the moment, burning plastic for energy is all the rage - it's still technically fossil fuel after all - but of course it also produces as much pollution ad coal and oil and petroleum fuels. "Clean green incineration" is currently just so much greenwash.

But as other sources of energy take over from fossil fuels, we'll find that energy will become inexpensive, possibly even considered a civic responsibility governments will once again have to step in and provide. And when it does, extreme high temperature incineration will become possible, to really truly burn plastic with fire. There are no more toxic fumes when the incinerating arc is hot enough to also burn all the fumes to a fine dusting of carbon too... 

Now I'm going to present

a number of good news stories. 

One organisation has done more to change our perception of plastic waste than any other government or organisation in the world. That organisation is of course Precious Plastic. I've just linked their Youtube channel because the links to their website and the websites of the other sub-projects they've spawned are right there for you to follow. And their channel is full of positive examples, education, and technical details for those who want to get a grounding in plastic recycling and then get involved.

Here's a report by PreshPlas detailing how their many small projects and branches around the planet have made a difference in the amount of plastic waste. It's still not enough but it does show how we CAN make a difference, and a very positive one at that. 

I cannot stress enough how great a result that is! And it just needs you to share their video. And this post.

I myself  have done some small research projects in plastic recycling and re-use, and I'm still recycling when I get time, and developing new uses for the new products from the recycling processes. And I'm only following the leads of groups like Brothers Make and then applying my own inimitable brand of pretzel logic and developing other ways to recycle, ways to re-use the products I recycle, and hopefully also inspire more people to "have a go ya mug" as we say.

My hope is that one day we may find it difficult to find petrochemicals to make virgin plastic from. We may get over our bullshit fixation on "convenience" and realise that things are meant to be made to last not thrown away and that our needs for plastic products will be met by bioplastics and mycelium. 

The best way we can raise that awareness is to share posts like this. The second best way is to use the links in the image below to support me so I can increase the reach of my blog posts.  The absolute best way would be to do both...

I've deliberately not added any of my eyecandy graphics to this post because I'd like to be focused on the message, and that message is that we ALL need to get involved and we ALL need to have this conversation with other people and we should ALL consider helping me to get my page views on posts like this one up by sharing it. 

(And I'm sorry, I know some posts have a "Share" button that does this automatically but I've looked for a way and so far not found one I can implement here. Which is where donations are super helpful because I can pay someone to actually make a Share button for me, among all the other things which need money. You know I'll keep looking for a piece of code to do this that's also simple enough for me to "get it" and implement it but life as a retired pensioner doesn't leave as much free time as you might imagine if you have a spouse and pets and blogs and a hobby and a garden as well as a day to day life. So any and all help is always welcome.)