#research request

Harvest Prater, is an undergraduate student at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. They are looking for participants located in the United States who identify as asexual and a person of color between the ages of 18- 35 to interview them about their experiences, for their research- Asexuals of Color: Experiences of an Invisible Identity.

Still {not so} patiently waiting to hear your opinion on the other "goodies" and where you rate them.

I realize that you and John are in the honeymoon stage right now and are having a hard time paying attention to anything else, but you did agree to assist me.

If you have decided it's too difficult for you, just say so and I will find someone else who is more able to help.

You do realise that I have also other more relevant things to do in my life than answering asks on here like solving cases? And that my inbox is basically flooded with nearly 1000 asks? So I can overlook something from time to time, especially if it gets covered by 500 asks. And sometimes I am not able to assess this kind of data due to external circumstances and ensuing consequences.

Maybe it’s 2021 new year motivation.  Maybe it’s late night awake syndrome.

But, please.  Take this opportunity to send me, anonymously or not, something you want to know about or learn about.  A political topic, economic topic, historical one, or something else.

The hardest specific thing I find about making content and writing is having a topic to talk about.  So I’m outsourcing that, just so I can get started.

Recycling is amazingly efficient.  Popular Mechanics wrote a fantastic piece on the matter in 2008.  To quote the article:

Overall, he found, it takes 10.4 million Btu to manufacture products from a ton of recyclables, compared to 23.3 million Btu for virgin materials. And all of the collecting, hauling and processing of those recyclables adds just 0.9 million Btu.

That was 10 years ago.  The problem with this data, though, is annoyingly complex by how many types of recycling there are.  But I want more recent data, so we’ll look at articles and studies published in the past year

So, to pull from the “big 4” (cardboard, plastic, aluminium, paper) types of recycling for more recent numbers:

Plastic:

The net PE yields are close to 100% [recyclable yield] for such a standard recycling process. Additionally, the compositional analysis revealed that contaminants are only partially removed by the standard mechanical recycling process.

Roughly half of the annual global production of solid plastics, or 150 million tons, is thrown away worldwide each year. The United States generates ∼20% of the global amount of plastic solid waste generated (1). Not only is plastic waste residing in landfills harmful to the environment, but it also represents missed economic opportunities. For example, the commodity market value of the total landfilled packaging material waste in the United States has been estimated to be $11.4 billion dollars; $8.3 billion of this is attributed to plastic waste (2). Furthermore, recycling plastic for reuse saves energy compared with producing virgin materials; 1 ton of recycled plastic can save up to ∼130 million kJ of energy. The potential annual energy savings that could be achieved from recycling all global plastic solid waste is equivalent to 3.5 billion barrels of oil, worth approximately $176 billion dollars (3).

Cardboard:

The demand for using cardboard as packaging material has made it the single largest waste product (by weight) in your trash and it is estimated that over 24 million tons of cardboard is discarded each year.  It is not all gloom and doom. The average recycle rate for cardboard in 1993 was 55%. In 2011 that figure jumped to 91% due to the mainstream adoption of recycling. So how much effect on the environment does recycling one ton of cardboard have? It saves us around 9 cubic yards of landfill space, 700 gallons of water, and 46 gallons of oil.

Aluminum:

More than 100 billion aluminum cans are sold in the United States each year, but less than half are recycled. A similar number of aluminum cans in other countries are also incinerated or sent to landfills.

That adds up to about 1.5 million tons of wasted aluminum cans worldwide every year.

Globally, the aluminum industry annually emits millions of tons of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. Although aluminum cans represent only 1.4 percent of a ton of garbage by weight, according to the Container Recycling Institute, they account for 14.1 percent of the greenhouse gas impacts associated with replacing an average ton of garbage with new products made from virgin materials.Aluminum smelting also produces sulfur oxide and nitrogen oxide, two toxic gases that are key elements in smog and acid rain.

Aluminum cans are 100-percent recyclable, making them the most recyclable (and valuable) of all materials. The aluminum can you toss into your recycling bin today will be completely recycled and back on the store shelf in just 60 days.

Recycling aluminum saves 90-95 percent of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore. It doesn’t matter if you’re making aluminum cans, roof gutters or cookware, it is simply much more energy-efficient to recycle existing aluminum to create the aluminum needed for new products than it is to make aluminum from virgin natural resources.So how much energy are we talking about here? Recycling one pound of aluminum (33 cans) saves about 7 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity. With the energy it takes to make just one new aluminum can from bauxite ore, you can make 20 recycled aluminum cans.Putting the energy question into even more down-to-earth terms, the energy saved by recycling one aluminum can is enough to power a television set for three hours.

Paper:

Depending on the type of paper desired, mechanical pulping is for making weaker, yet cheaper paper, such as newspaper or phone book print. Mechanical pulping requires huge amounts of energy, whereas your office paper and most other paper is made using a chemical process, known as Krafting, but requires much less energy to produce. Krafting does require huge amounts of chemicals to turn raw virgin pulp into paper. The chemicals used to produce paper vary from 200-3,000 and include elemental chlorine, hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide. Paper production is the 6th most industrial polluter of air, soil and water and is responsible for 9% of industrial releases to water in the U.S. In 2015, the pulp and paper sector was ranked first in the amount of toxic weighted pound equivalents (TWPE) discharged to water by industry.(EPA, 2015) Worldwide, the pulp and paper industry is the fifth largest consumer of energy.

Using 100% recycled paper uses 60% less energy, 53% less water and emits 40% less greenhouse emissions (Green America.org) Recycling one ton of paper can save 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water, 380 gallons of oil, 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space and 4,000 kilowatts of energy-enough to power the average U.S. home for six months- and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one metric ton of carbon equivalent (MTCE). (EPA)

Here’s the deal, though.  All of this is fantastic, and everyone should recycle as much as they possibly can.  But if everyone recycled everything forever, it still wouldn’t save us from global warming and environmental wreckage.  It’s estimated that of all the environmental damage humanity is causing, a tiny minority of that number is from individual choices.  For example, (at least) 4% of all global gas production is caused by shipping.  

This can’t save the Earth.  But it can certainly be a large part of the process.