SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Intercept has a recent article: Local Governments Increasingly Poking Through Your Garbage:
Civil libertarians are worried about an increasingly common form of domestic surveillance that...has to do with looking through your garbage... [G]arbage trucks now have the ability to record the contents of your trash cans on video to inspect each object. The ACLU says, "While encouraging residents to recycle is commendable, any program involving the government's systematic monitoring of citizens crosses a line. The contents of your trash can be surprisingly revealing." [emphasis mine] In some cities, trash cans are monitored with RFID devices to determine who is actually putting their recycling bin out on the curb. Prizes are given, or fines can be levied if a threshold limiting recyclable content in trash is exceeded, although none have been issued yet. "It's very crazy. Also not entirely surprising given the prevalence of surveillance technologies. Nothing is safe, not even our trash."
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 31 2015, @01:12PM
I imagine a person can bale packaging. A spool of twine and you're set. When I was a kid growing up in the Rockies people used to bale newspaper, cereal boxes, and such to throw into their fireplaces like logs.
Paper waste we solved by shredding it, using it as guinea pig bedding, and then throwing into the compost bin to turn into next spring's garden soil. Food scraps we can put in a special recycling bin here in Brooklyn, but we do that ourselves for our own garden. Metal and plastics we recycle. Packaging is the last thing we have in our regular trash can, and I wish I could dump it back on the grocery stores.
I have been toying with the idea of making a small-scale backyard foundry to melt down the metal waste stream and use it for projects; last time a similar topic came up on SN somebody gave me a link to a good project [youtube.com]. (haven't got to it yet because next in the queue is converting an old DirecTV satellite dish into a parabolic mirror w/ stirling engine.)
I dream of being able to throw all the packaging and plastics into a hopper that grinds it up and re-processes it into feedstock for a 3D printer. I would never buy anything again, just throw it into the hopper when it breaks or I'm tired of it and manufacture something else.
Washington DC delenda est.