flacaltenn
Diamond Member
Incredible.
Styrofoam can be replaced with paper products and newer biodegradables.
If anyone in this discussion deserves to have 23,000 tons of styrofoam dumped in their front yard, it would be poster PoliticalChic. I have never in my life met someone who appears to be as ecologically irresponsible. Her(?) commentary is so unreasonable it makes me suspect she is actually trolling.
BTW, before implying that styrofoam waste is insignificant because it only makes up 23,000 or 3 million tons, one might look at the obvious. The volume of 23,000 tons of styrofoam is 18,400,000 cubic feet. That would be a cube 264 feet on a side. That would be roughly one third the volume of one of the World Trade Center Towers. Every year.
Now just for comparison purposes, let's estimate that trash has the same density as water (since it's routinely dumped at sea, that's being conservative). Three million tons of water has a volume of 96,154,000 cubic feet.
So, athough the styrofoam makes up less than 8 ten-thousandths of the waste's mass, it makes up almost one-fifth of it's volume. Successfully reducing the waste volume of a major urban area by 20% would have an enormous impact.
So who cares? I do. Who doesn't? PoliticalChic. She seems to be content to lie in her own waste, so to speak.
Unless you have a way to reduce the VOLUME of the waste, your comments about weight are somewhat self defeating. Replacing with MUCH heavier plastic or starch justs gives you heavier garbage with additional enviro costs to dispose of it. Styro is mostly air, you compact it well and its less volume and less weight...
You didn't follow the conversation. Ms PoliticalChic was implying that the styrofoam waste was insignificant because it only made up 23,000 tons of the city's 3 million tons of waste produced annually. I pointed out that represented 20% of the city's trash VOLUME. Compaction will not effectively reduce its volume as the material is durably elastic and closed cell. Bloomberg's action WILL have a significant, positive impact on New York's waste disposal issues.
Oh I WAS following the convo just fine.. Don't think you were however --- because you missed the part where changing the COMPOSITION of cups and containers would NOT decrease that volume and only create DENSER, heavier waste streams..
And I think you and Lord BloomBerger needs to learns the interwebs.. As FoxFyre points out. His Lordship needs to buy a few compactors and start using the results to build some safer traffic barriers on the East Side Hiway..
My Nascar buds can give him some tips on barriers that make 200mph crashes surviveable.