A new sign at Buck Bay encourages people to pick up some of the plastic debris that pollutes the oceans’ beaches. This trend is picking up in Europe and Scandinavia.
Now, where should all that detritus go?
About the Author: Lin McNulty
Lin has been working on a novel for over 20 years. Working/owning theOrcasonian ensures that she won't ever finish the novel. That may be intentional.
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I read that only about 8% of plastic waste actually ends up being recycled. Which begs the question, why not just burn it? When we were kids one of our jobs was to burn the trash once a week in a burn barrel.
San Juan County should consider a high temperature burn facility like Spokane has done for several years successfully now. They used to pay to ship their trash to landfills but now their plant creates steam to drive turbines to produce power.
Or course, refusing to purchase goods packaged with single use materials would work if companies sales decreased because of their lack of concern for our environment they might finally drag themselves out of the stone age and get with the program of trying to protect our environment for ourselves and future generations.
“Climate” rehabilitation? Is this newspeak for environment?
Good for Buck Bay for reminding people to do what should just be common sense; pick up ALL the plastic you find on your beach walks.
The idea of burning our plastic and trash here on Orcas is one we should consider. Technology has come a long way to allow high temperature burning that can eliminate contaminants. The heat generated can be used to produce electricity and heat water. How cost effective this is process is another question.
I have seen an installation of two high temperature incinerators that batch burn waste to provide hot water. They work and solve the problem of where to dump this stuff on a small island.
If we could produce electricity that we could also use here we would reduce our demand on the electric grid. This in turn would cause the most expensive generating plants on the grid to run less. These plants are coal fired. Not a bad thing in the long run.