SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Aaron C. Davis writes in the Washington Post that recycling, "once a profitable business for cities and private employers alike," has become a "money-sucking enterprise." Almost every recycling facility in the country is running in the red and recyclers say that more than 2,000 municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around. "If people feel that recycling is important — and I think they do, increasingly — then we are talking about a nationwide crisis," says David Steiner, chief executive of Waste Management, the nation's largest recycler.
The problem with recycling is that a storm of falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a weakened economy in China have sent prices for American recyclables plummeting worldwide. Trying to encourage conservation, progressive lawmakers and environmentalists have made matters worse. By pushing to increase recycling rates with bigger and bigger bins — while demanding almost no sorting by consumers — the recycling stream has become increasingly polluted and less valuable, imperilling the economics of the whole system. "We kind of got everyone thinking that recycling was free," says Bill Moore. "It's never really been free, and in fact, it's getting more expensive."
One big problem is that China doesn't want to buy our garbage any more. In the past China had sent so many consumer goods to the United States that all the shipping containers were coming back empty. So US companies began stuffing the return-trip containers with recycled cardboard boxes, waste paper and other scrap. China could, in turn, harvest the raw materials. Everyone won. But China has launched "Operation Green Fence" — a policy to prohibit the import of unwashed post-consumer plastics and other "contaminated" waste shipments. In China, containerboard, a common packaging product from recycled American paper, is trading at just over $400 a metric ton, down from nearly $1,000 in 2010. China also needs less recycled newsprint; the last paper mill in Shanghai closed this year. "If the materials we are exporting are so contaminated that they are being rejected by those we sell to," says Valerie Androutsopoulos, "maybe it's time to take another look at dual stream recycling."
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Tuesday June 23 2015, @05:26PM
I was still using my Fujitsu Stylistic ST4121 until very recently --- 933MHz Pentium III w/ 768 MB RAM and a 4GB SSD running Windows XP.
Still works fine, except that web sites run too much Javascript for it to manage them (and the lack of security updates makes browsing anything other than known sites w/ adblock chancy).
Still haven't found a replacement for its daylight viewable transflective LCD though, so still using it to control my CNC machine, or to do light editing and design work when traveling by car during the day.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday June 24 2015, @05:21AM
And I bet my last dollar that if you slapped a kill-a-watt on that system and compared it to a system built with this chip [newegg.com] you'd find you are blowing through 5 times the power while not getting 1/20th the amount of useful work per cycle!
I'm sorry but every PC before the Athlon X2 and the Core Duo? REALLY need to be shitcanned, as from 1993-2005 or so we were in the "MHz war" and power usage was not given a single fuck about by the OEMs. The PSUs wasted lots of power as heat, the chips? Just look at the benches of a P4 3.06GHz some time and then look at the power usage (hint: The above chip curbstomps while using a teeny tiny portion of the P4s idle power) or even the chip you named...they sucked.
So I'm sorry but some things CAN be easily kept, like washers or can openers, but PCs and mobile? Yeah...not unless you just like wasting power and time. Oh and FYI that is the chip I use in HTPCs, it does 1080P over HDMI with an average power draw of just 12w, its a truly great chip and miles ahead of what we had back then.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Wednesday June 24 2015, @03:57PM
The thing is, the embodied energy / carbon impact of most electronics is at the time of manufacture, so it's better to keep even older gear running.
If I could pull the display out and use it in something more modern, I'd be glad to --- similarly, I'd be glad to buy a new machine which had a transflective LCD, but no one is making one anymore, save for a few niche rugged units for military/LEO/construction --- but none of them have the stylus which I need.