- PeterMoulding.com
- Author
- Trainer
- Speaker
- Business Coach
- How to write a How To book
- PHP Courses
- Speaking
- Web Architect
- Australia
- Books
- Authors
- Akkana Peck
- Alex Berenson
- Andrew Nugent
- Ben Sanders
- Brock Clarke
- Chris Simms
- David Mercer
- Dianna Mullet
- Don Winslow
- Dori Smith
- Harlan Coben
- Jack McDevitt
- James Wines
- Jerry Yudelson
- John Grisham
- Kevin Mullet
- L. E. Modesitt Jr.
- Laurell K. Hamilton
- Marshall Karp
- Martina Cole
- Michael Marshall Smith
- Michel Roux Jr
- Nadia Sawalha
- Philip Pullman
- Raymond Khoury
- Richard North Patterson
- Robert Masello
- Sally Roth
- Sarah Langan
- Stella Rimington
- Stephen Booth
- Stephen King
- Stephen Leather
- T.C. Boyle
- Tom Negrino
- Tony Hillerman
- Urban Waite
- Val McDermid
- Valerio Massimo Manfredi
- Beginning GIMP
- Beginning Visual C++
- Culturalism
- Fiction
- A Drink Before The War
- A Talent for War
- Bag of Bones
- Blood and Ice
- Burn
- Dark Lady
- Dead Line
- Eclipse
- Empress of Eternity
- Exley
- Flipping Out
- Just One Look
- Nightfall
- Pet Sematary
- Savage Moon
- Skinwalkers
- Starvation Lake
- The Fallen
- The Gardens of the Dead
- The Jump
- The Last Templar
- The Mermaids Singing
- The Midnight Mayor
- The Secret Soldier
- The Summons
- The Terror of Living
- The Testament
- The Tower
- Under the Dome
- Virus
- AJAX and PHP
- Aging with Grace
- Food books
- Green Architecture
- Life Is So Good
- SQL: The Complete Reference
- The Backyard Bird Lover's Ultimate How-to Guide
- The Garden Gurus
- Authors
- Sustainability
- -18 hours left to decide the future of Australia
- Campbells vegetable stock or Massel vegetable stock?
- Carbon Sequestration
- Carbon tax for Australia is a fraud
- Copenhagen will fail
- Cost of living in Australia
- Dick Smith jumps on the population bandwagon
- Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis
- Energy Saving Lights
- Garlic
- How many people can live in Australia?
- Its obsolete, throw it out!
- Julia Gillard offers 9.9 billion dollars bribe to Rob Oakeshott
- Laundry detergent
- Petrol or Diesel?
- Reflective foil batts kill
- RoHS
- Sea level to rise 3mm due to climate change
- Solar power
- Spring again in Sydney
- Sustainable fuels
- The CRUD Tax is back
- The people who make building regulations do not own houses
- Water efficiency
- Which insulation is safer, foil or wool?
- Will Australia reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
- Technology
- Android or Blackberry or iPhone or a flip phone?
- Apple versus Google 2011
- Cameras
- Cars
- Colour
- Burgundy
- Colour Blindness
- Colour Names
- Dulux colours
- Pantone colours
- Safe Colours
- Seculine ProDisk Mini colour balance card
- What Causes Colour Blindness?
- Hardware
- Batteries for the Digital Age
- Cables
- Cases
- Computer reliability
- Computrace
- Disks
- Astone ISO Gear 481E
- Best SSD for your notebook computer
- Disk block size
- Hitachi disk HDS722020ALA330
- LaCie USB 2.0 250 GB mobile hard drive design by F.A. Porsche
- SMART disk
- Samsung 2 TB HD204UI quiet low power disk for mass storage
- Seagate and Samsung merge disk business
- Select the right disk for your RAID array
- USB disk speed
- Western Digital WD20EARX 2 GB SATA 3 disk
- How long should computer hardware last?
- Keyboards
- Mainframe
- Memory cards
- Monitors
- Netbooks, notebooks, tablets, and xPads
- Network Attached Storage
- OLED Displays
- PC's are a thing of the past
- Printers
- Quiet
- Samsung Galaxy S
- Speed
- Television
- Tools
- USB
- Worst computer movies
- Xserve is dead. What next?
- Your backup will not work
- Z68 motherboards
- iPad or Acer Aspire One?
- IQ
- LG Intello Washing Machine
- Lack of a challenge
- Networks
- 802.11n wireless networking
- D-Link DIR-655 wireless router
- D-Link DWA-160 Xtreme N dual band USB adapter
- D-Link DWA-556 Xtreme N PCI Express desktop adapter
- MIMO
- NBN spends another $12 billion of our tax money on nothing
- National Broadband Network
- Netgear wireless modem router DGND3300 with 300 Mbps 802.11n
- Refrigerator kills wireless broadband
- Small Wireless Network
- TP-LINK TL-SG10005D 5 port gigabit switch
- TP-Link TL-WR1043N wireless N gigabit router
- Telstra Pre-paid Mobile Wi-Fi
- Where are the router plus proxy server combinations?
- Open Source documentation
- Software
- 7-zip
- Accounting
- Asterisk
- Audacity
- Backup software
- Bloat only in Windows
- CAD
- CDex
- Disk imaging software for copying and backup
- Exact Audio Copy
- Filezilla
- Firefox
- Java
- LibreOffice or OpenOffice?
- Linux
- 1 in 5 servers will ship with Linux
- Android phones outsell iPhone
- Another Move to Linux
- CentOS 5.5 installation on SSD and RAID 5
- Debian
- Debian 5.0.5 AMD64 installation
- Debian 5.06 installation
- Fedora
- Fedora or Ubuntu?
- Gnome or KDE?
- K9copy
- Linux 2.6.38
- Linux Gnome login settings lost
- Linux Mint
- Linux RAID, a rant
- Linux Speed
- Linux Time
- Linux reliability as demonstrated by Ubuntu 10.10
- Linux reliability as demonstrated by Ubuntu 11.4
- Linux still a struggle in 2011
- Linux workstation disk RAID 1
- Linux, NT, Windows, and SETI
- Linux, three years of progress
- London Stock Exchange switches to Linux
- Mandrake Linux 9.2
- The partition is misaligned by 48128 bytes - warning from Linux RAID
- Ubuntu
- How to fix the scroll bars in Ubuntu 11.4 Gnome
- Kubuntu 10.10 alternate installation on desktop with RAID 1
- POWbuntu
- Ubuntu 10.10 after 6 months use
- Ubuntu 10.10 alternate installation
- Ubuntu 10.10 desktop RAID 1
- Ubuntu 10.10 desktop RAID 5
- Ubuntu 10.10 desktop install on a netbook
- Ubuntu 10.10 desktop installation
- Ubuntu 10.10 netbook install on a netbook
- Ubuntu 10.10 server AMD64
- Ubuntu 10.10 upgrade to version 11.4 beta 2
- Ubuntu 10.4
- Ubuntu 11.10
- Ubuntu 11.10 first upgrade
- Ubuntu 11.4 after one month use
- Ubuntu 12.04 beta1 desktop amd64
- Ubuntu One
- Ubuntu by Microsoft?
- Ubuntu desktop upgrade 10.4 to 10.10 failed because I did not check the media
- Ubuntu strikes again
- Upgrade Ubuntu to Linux Mint 12 LDXE for extra speed
- Yes, use Linux but not that distribution!
- Nero
- OpenOffice
- OpenOffice is now Apache Office
- Project management
- Scribus
- Software for Windows and Linux
- Text editors
- Time
- Todo applications
- Tomboy notes
- Top text editors
- Version control
- VideoLAN VLC media player
- Visio
- Webmin
- Webmin installation on CentOS for Web development
- Webmin installation on Ubuntu
- What is the most popular open source software today?
- Windows
- Another Windows person goes Linux
- BAD_POOL_CALLER
- Cygwin
- Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool cannot find a common virus
- One of the developers of Windows XP is criminally insane
- There are unused icons on your desktop
- W32time
- Which Windows version?
- Windows 7 Home Premium
- Windows XP Stop 0x0000007B during installation
- Windows XP is a disaster
- Windows processes
- XML
- Zip, bzip, gzip, or 7zip?
- configFree
- Technology Succession Planning
- VoIP
- Web Sites
- Drupal
- Do Drupal themes have to use the GPL?
- Drupal 7
- A better search facility for Drupal
- Drupal - performance or flexibility
- Drupal 7 Fields are hard to fix
- Drupal 7 new features
- Drupal 7 ships on January 5
- Drupal 7.14
- Drupal 7.4 hits PeterMoulding.com
- Drupal function sequence
- The evolution of a module
- Undefined index: headers in DefaultMailSystem->mail() (line 54 of /modules/system/system.mail.inc).
- Undefined index: to in DefaultMailSystem->mail() (line 83 of /modules/system/system.mail.inc).
- implode(): Invalid arguments passed in DefaultMailSystem->format() (line 23 of /modules/system/system.mail.inc).
- Drupal 8
- Drupal Code Load Cut
- Drupal How To
- Drupal Modules
- Backup and Migrate
- Browscap
- CKEditor with Drupal WYSIWYG
- Captcha
- Cel
- Colorbox
- Content Construction Kit
- Content type
- Devel module for Drupal
- Drupal Rules as an automation language
- Drupal Spam add-on module
- Form alter to node
- IMCE
- IMCE Wysiwyg bridge
- ImageAPI
- Jdog
- Lightbox2
- Module variable
- Node Gallery Access
- Node_Gallery
- Path
- Path redirect
- Pathauto
- Pet
- Search
- Service links
- Session Variable
- Statistics
- Taxonomy
- Token
- Token ex
- Transliteration
- Trigger
- Watch
- Other modules
- Drupal Training
- Drupal access controls need a major rewrite
- Drupal coding tricks
- Drupal performance
- Drupal themes for the future
- Drupal.org colours
- Import existing data into Drupal
- Multiple Web sites made easy using Drupal multisite and the right start
- drupal_lookup_path()
- Adobe PDF
- Apache
- Apache Mahout
- Audi.com
- Bleet
- CSS Strikes Again
- CSS or xCSS
- Can you believe Facebook or email?
- Content Management Systems
- Databases
- Facebook scam
- Font
- Fonts
- HTML
- Install Apache, MySQL, and PHP 5 in Ubuntu 11.4 using the Ubuntu Software Centre
- Language Codes
- Marketing
- Memcache
- Nginx
- Open source development hits another roadblock
- Oscars
- PHP
- SPDY
- Search software
- Techoni.com.au
- Theme themes
- Things to hate on Web sites
- U.S. Patent No. 6,985,875
- Virtual Private Server
- Visible Improvement
- Web 4.0
- Web browser usage
- Web browsers
- Web site development
- Bluefish
- Crying over spilt code
- Eclipse and PHP
- Getting a Git client, a story of ancient technology and pain
- HTTrack
- MVC
- Netbeans
- PHP or ..., CakePHP/Symfony/ZF versus ...
- Programming
- Superfish
- Web browser emulators for testing your Web site
- Web development frameworks
- Web site books
- Web site development on your own computer
- Webmin or phpMyAdmin or cPanel for creating databases?
- aiki framework
- jQuery
- Views development - Learn Fields first
- Views development - Learn Actions and Rules
- jQuery .each()
- jQuery .has()
- jQuery .is()
- jQuery and Firefox Firebug
- jQuery children
- jQuery for people not using Drupal - Installation and getting started
- jQuery hover
- jQuery hover de-duplication example
- jQuery or CSS?
- jQuery performance
- jQuery tests
- Web site hosting
- Westpac Web site still broken after two years and ten months
- Wordpress wins another CMS survey
- Drupal
You are here
Home ›Sustainability
Submitted by Peter on Thu, 2010-05-13 15:06
Sustainability is the ability to sustain something forever. If you crop trees for wood, you should be able to take out the same amount of wood every year forever. Our world changes continually but over hundreds of thousands of years. Sustainability should be measured over similar time frames. Instead of talking about sustainability as recycling something for a second use, we need to look at hundreds or thousands of uses.
Part of sustaining our current lifestyle is the move toward recycling. There is a lot of misdirection about recycling. Misdirection is a polite term for lies. Manufacturers want to increase profit by replacing regular materials with cheap plastic plus they know plastic will wear out faster and force people to buy replacements every year instead of every ten years, increasing profits again. As an example of deliberate waste, the Apple iPod where you cannot replace the battery.
The manufacturers tell us lies about the products being easier to recycle because they are made of rubbish plastic. Plastic is harder to recycle than steel, aluminium, or glass, and most plastics can only be recycled a few times instead of many.
Recycling
Reliable use
If a product works for ten years instead on one, the product is ten times better. Compare some Ford cars with Volvos. I drove two new Ford cars as company cars and both needed significant repairs in their first year with one requiring many repairs. I owned a Volvo for ten years and in the whole ten years used only a few replacement parts, about the same as one Ford used in the first year and about the same as the other Ford used in the first month. The Volvo was ten times better for the environment than the best of the Fords and 120 times better then the other Ford.
Using the right materials for long term use is primary conservation of resources.
Repair
We conserve resources by choosing products that last a long time without repairs. The Fords had undersized batteries that broke when trying to start the car in cold weather. The Volvo had a slightly larger battery sufficient to start the car in cold weather. The Volvo battery might be 20 percent larger at the start but it lasted five years instead of one year. If we take the Ford battery as a base measurement of 1.0, the Fords each needed 5.0 units of resources while the Volvo used only 1.2, a resource saving of 86 percent.
We conserve resources by choosing products that can be maintained for a long time with minimal repairs. One of the Fords required several engine replacements because design faults made the engine fail and the replacement engines had exactly the same faults. The other Ford had an engine that was ready for replacement when I stopped driving the car at 120,000 kilometres (70,000 miles). I drive the Volvo for 250,000 kilometres (150,000 miles) and there was no sign of wear in the engine. The Volvo required only the replacement of a small number of engine parts (timing belt etc) on a regular schedule to keep the engine going. The mechanic said the engine was good for 500,000 kilometres (300,000 miles) or more without an engine replacement and his Volvo (the same model) was already past 500,000 kilometres without engine problems.
About one percent of the Volvo engine was replaced each year to recycle the engine as new for another year. Over 20 years I would have completed 500,000 and used 1.2 units of resources counting from the original engine. By comparison, one of the Fords would have used 3.0 units of resources because of engine replacement and the other Ford about 50.0 units of resources.
You can recycle a wooden house by regular painting or oiling of the wood. You can recycle many things by choosing quality at the start and following a maintenance procedure. Maintaining your possessions is primary recycling.
Reuse
Here are common examples of reuse. You will spot many more across a typical day.
You use newspaper pages to wrap vegetable scraps instead of buying plastic wrap. Assuming you are buying the newspaper to read, reusing newspaper for something else use a good reuse. Some people reuse newspaper as cleaning cloths instead of buying roles of paper towels. Paper can easily have two or three reuses before recycling in other ways. I used to work in an office where large reports were printed on one side of the paper and a copy was printed for each reviewer, perhaps five copies for five people. I changed it to printing one copy then distributing the reports by chapter so one copy could be reviewed by five people at once. After use for review and markup, the paper was handed to children for drawing on the other side. Finally the paper went into the paper recycling bin. Some times the paper would go from drawing to use in paper aeroplanes before flying into the recycling bin.
Milk cartons are reused as pots for young plants, pots that can be left on the plant when the plant is placed in the garden. Milk cartons are particularly good in areas where frost is a danger or the carton can protect the young plant against cold wind. The cartons eventually break down to create food for the plants.
Old t shirts make excellent cleaning cloths. They also make excellent bedding for young animals. I use old towels as cleaning cloths for a while then some are reused to wrap baby native animals rescued from accidents, eventually becoming their bedding.
Plastic food containers can store toys for years before dumping them in the plastic recycling bin.
There is a move in Australia to ban plastic shopping bags. Shops want to do it because they can then sell you plastic bags to line your bins. Instead of giving away the shopping bag for free, a 0.3 cent expense, they can sell you the same bags in a pack of 20 for $3.00, a 15 cent per bag profit. I currently use a mix of reusable shopping bags and the store provided single use bags so that I have enough single use bags to reuse in our kitchen bin.
The big supermarket chains will not be stopped by simple logic or efficient use, they are already removing bulk fruit and vegetables from their shelves and replacing them with stale old pre packed goods. Instead of paying $12 per kilogram for fresh salad, you pay $40 per kilogram for salad leaves that are already old by the time the leave the factory. The leaves are packed in bags that cannot be reused for anything and, in many cases, cannot be recycled. The shops want it because their profit is $34 per kilogram instead of $6. The massive waste of plastic is hidden by lies about not using plastic shopping bags. Some products are packed in trays before packing in plastic bags and the trays are often recyclable but are not easily reusable. They are so frail they cannot be used for seedling trays unless you are growing something in light weight peat moss.
Reuse is Secondary recycling.
Reclaim
You can reclaim manufactured materials for reuse as raw materials. When concrete is smashed up for disposal, some is crushed and added to new concrete as a filler. This form of recycling is rarely one hundred percent effective for recycling the component materials but uses less energy than trying to convert the manufactured material back to the raw components.
Large quantities of quality paper can be recycled as quality paper but a typical mixed load of paper and cardboard from a small office is too hard to sort. The mix can be shredded and reclaimed as packing material before eventually going into the recycling bin. When the mixture is recycled, it cannot be recycled as quality paper because of the mix of materials.
Reclaiming should be called partial recycling because the raw materials are not recycled for their original use. You always need a flow of some new material into the system.
Recycle
Throwing things in the recycling bin for melting down into raw materials is last resort recycling. Steel tins and car parts become fresh new steel for making tins and car parts. Some plastics are recycled as new while others are recycled in a degraded form and others are burned or dumped.
The 100 percent recycling of glass and metals is good. The recycling of plastic as degraded material is bad. This is where the move to recyclable
plastic is pure fiction. You cannot tell how useful the recycling of plastic without knowing what type of plastic they use.
Some plastic is recycled only for bulk low quality use including filler material for plastic rubbish bins. The result cannot be recycled again. This single use and low use recycling is not sustainable. Manufacturers should not be allowed to claim their products are green just because the materials can be recycled one or twice. Green labels should go only on materials suitable for sustainable recycling.
Further reading
- -18 hours left to decide the future of Australia
Read more about -18 hours left to decide the future of Australia...
- Campbells vegetable stock or Massel vegetable stock?
Read more about Campbells vegetable stock or Massel vegetable stock?...
- Carbon Sequestration
- Carbon tax for Australia is a fraud
- Copenhagen will fail
- Cost of living in Australia
- Dick Smith jumps on the population bandwagon
Read more about Dick Smith jumps on the population bandwagon...
- Diesel or petrol or?
- Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis
Read more about Dry Run: Preventing the Next Urban Water Crisis...
- Energy Saving Lights
- Garlic
- How many people can live in Australia?
- Its obsolete, throw it out!
- Julia Gillard offers 9.9 billion dollars bribe to Rob Oakeshott
Read more about Julia Gillard offers 9.9 billion dollars bribe to Rob Oakeshott...
- Laundry detergent
- Petrol or Diesel?
- Reflective foil batts kill
- RoHS
- Sea level to rise 3mm due to climate change
Read more about Sea level to rise 3mm due to climate change...
- Solar power
- Spring again in Sydney
- Sustainable fuels
- The CRUD Tax is back
- The people who make building regulations do not own houses
Read more about The people who make building regulations do not own houses...
- Water efficiency
- Which insulation is safer, foil or wool?
- Will Australia reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
Read more about Will Australia reduce greenhouse gas emissions?...








