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Going off-grid can be like a spiritual journey, and I can understand why it's such a hot topic... both pro and against. Discussing anything "different" seems to rile folks up immeasurably. I haven't been able to figure out exactly why (I have Aspergers, so human behavior baffles me at times). Do you suppose that part of the fight is down to envy... that folks wish they did/could do it themselves? Or are they just afraid/suspicious of anything that isn't familiar?
I didn't rail against wood, I just don't like to see absurdities pass unmolested. Like a person who rinses out a soft drink can with tap water and puts it in the recycling bin. I can't let that go. And, buying an electric car with a $5000 battery in it loaded with God knows what horrible heavy metals and costing more to manufacture and operate than gas, because the user does not see the electricity and the battery being produced.
We rinse out soft drink cans because otherwise insect problems are bad. People like electric cars as they are emission-free. Emissions & greenhouse gases being something regular car users (like myself) don't see in the atmosphere once they leave the tailpipe.
I wash out my cans (aluminum and other metals) with greywater or collected rainwater over my compost pile... then I crush them all and take them to the salvage yard for recycling when I go into the city. Is that "good" or "bad"?
Don't have an electric car (not feasible/appropriate in my situation), but I have some pretty serious batteries in my off-grid power system. I do know the amount of lead and other heavy metals and toxins in them, which is why I take them back for recycling and proper disposal when they need to be replaced (about every 7-10 years) and I'll be purchasing refurbed batteries for standalone things like my fencing and freezer once I get them (being on PV chargers and not part of a matched bank, it's not as critical to get new ones). Is that "good" or "bad"?
I think it's pretty common for most consumers to be unaware of the costs (fiscal, power and environmental) required in the material acquisition, manufacture, distribution and disposal of the goods they purchase and use. This becomes a particular problem when discussing ERoEI and "green"-ness... hidden costs are, well, hidden. The problem is compounded when comparisons aren't made apples-to-apples or don't include all those hidden costs and potential offsets. Technology A may be better in X, Y and Z but fail miserably in P, Q and R... where Technology B may be worse in X and Z, better in Y and Q, equally horrible in R and P isn't even applicable. Makes it very difficult for the average person to determine what's "best", especially when there is heavy marketing on both sides that don't exactly tell the whole story.
Recycling even aluminum cans requires a subsidy of anywhere from 30 to 90% of the end value of the cans. To me, that means that valuable resources like electricity and manpower and coolants and lubricants and all sorts of other stuff is consumed to end up with usable aluminum. So you have a can. It has one cent worth of aluminum in it. You give or sell it to a recycling center. They add say three cents to the costs which comes from taxpayers and a total of at least three cents has been expended on that can. It is still worth one cent as usable aluminum. Someone pays one cent for it, but resources totaling three cents have been consumed to produce it. If we did not recycle aluminum that same someone would pay one cent for the aluminum and one cent of resources would be consumed to produce it.
Now I have always thought that eventually when the price of energy is off the graph and technology makes recovery of waste materials more efficient, we will regard landfills as treasure troves of minerals and recyclables.
I could be wrong. And, its nice not to have all that plastic and aluminum under foot.
Ah - so the assumption is that recycling used aluminum requires more resources than getting brand new aluminum? It's arguable that the costs of mining and refining the raw materials requires more if not the same resources. Melting down and reusing the aluminum is less espensive power-wise and pollutant-wise than smelting it from raw... even if marginal.
In that context, metals being a finite resource (no matter how large or readily available) and mining being a rather destructive practice, would it not make more sense in the long run to spend the same resources to reuse what is already available than to spend those resources destroying other resources to get more while wasting what is already available?
(plastic is a different story, since petroleum products can only be down-cycled if they can't be re-used as-is, but useful things can still be made)
From an end-user perspective, the costs are probably the same, since it's the value-add that you're paying for not the can itself. Unless, of course, you're the canner; but I haven't noticed any price difference between post-consumer cans vs fresh cans when I buy mine (albeit in much smaller quantities than DelMonte or PepsiCo!).
I agree that some recycling programs are being subsidized with tax dollars. In many cases, the costs of recycling operations is passed on in the price of the goods... which is the same price that would be passed on for the initial production. Same-same, everything costs resources and everyone wants a profit for their part in production. Recycling isn't the only industry that gets tax subsidy and/or passes the costs of production on... commercial airlines, automotive, agriculture, utilities to name a few.
I don't think there is a right or wrong in the equation, there are pluses and minuses to both... in the end, I think the best solution would be the one that has the least negative impact in the big picture (not just the human picture). It's not the "right" solution, it's just the "better" solution.
I've looked at the budgets for both public and private recycling plants and they all get subsidies. There is not self sustaining consumer product recycling program in the US. So, I infer from this that more resources are consumed to produce recycled products than new. I don't think there is any other answer.
You are to be admired for using gray water for cleaning recycle materials so that they can be stored. And, I am fully in support of separating and shipping recycled items if the real objective is to remove the material from the landscape for aesthetic reasons. I just want to be honest about it and admit that we are paying so many cents per can so we won't have to look at them on the ground. And, with that honesty, we should be willing to store them like tires until we can find an economical use for them instead of wasting more resources to convert them to salable materials.
I agree that there are inefficiencies in the US system. It's unfortunate since there are many self-financing integrated recycling programs/plants in other countries as long as they get enough materials (Saudi Arabia and Netherlands off the top of my head). In some cases the costs are reclaimed by charging for disposal, in others entirely by resale, and still others by providing bio-mass power from the non-recyclable items.
I agree that one can't always determine the "better" solution strictly on a financial cost basis, and that some solutions aren't as good as they might first appear due to the hidden costs involved. That's why I'm a big advocate of research research research. Research every single link in the chain -- before, during, and after production -- before jumping to conclusions and instating a "solution" half-cocked
We lived off-grid for 7 years (we're grid tied now but still produce most of our own power) and heated with propane. We live in a well-insulated cabin that we built about 1/4 the size of our old home. It doesn't take a whole lot of propane to heat it, even though we live in the very cold north Idaho mountains.
I agree that a small and well-insulated home is the most efficient to heat regardless of the fuel used. Our big house in the Seattle suburbs used more LNG to heat than the propane we could have used to heat our barely insulated wall tent simply because it is 1/8 the size. That's a conservative guesstimate based on how much we used in the backup heater. Once we get the cabin built and properly insulated, our fuel consumption for heat will go down even more (even though the cabin is almost twice the size of the tent).
We also cook with propane in the summer when we just want something quick without heating the whole house with the woodstove. Heating with propane alone through the winter isn't a viable option for us since propane is very expensive to get delivered out here if we had a large tank (which we might not be able to bury due to permafrost), but using it for summer cooking and backup heat with the smaller 20 & 40 lb bottles we get filled in the city works out well.
I'd love to build an anerobic digester to generate my own bio-gas fuel in lieu of propane, but it's just a little too cold up here most of the year to keep it going efficiently. When we ran the numbers, we'd end up spending more BTU to keep the tank warm enough to continue digesting in the winter than we'd get back from the bio-gas
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