Some thoughts on recycling

I have been recycling for about a year now and I still don't seem to understand exactly what I am doing. I get confused between some materials. When you have a layer of paper with some foil on one side and plastic on the other side what do you do with it? I have taken to just not buying things with composite materials in them but sometimes it is unavoidable. A friend of mine said if it has paper and plastic together then I should throw it in the plastic bin so at least the plastic is recycled but even that is a fine line. I know I will stick my foot in my mouth again and create another unpopular thread. I guess I just don't care if people respond or not as long as I get my point across. Though responses are nice and welcome. It does hurt being ignored but it would hurt even more kowtowing to ignorant people too.

So here goes the foot in the mouth. I wonder what color a communistic world would be? Red? Green? Blue, yellow, orange etc? Well there is a clear answer. Not not "clear"... A communistic world would be either brown or gray. Because all these colorful advertisement inks that are printed on everything from toilet paper to tampons would no longer be necessary. I suppose the actual label directions and information could be in color because black ink and color ink are both about the same price to print. Imagine a silver coke can with coke written in black letters.

That is how I have always thought of a communistic world. I remember being taught as a child that this was bad. There would be no competition in the markets and the government would supply everything for us. So what do we have instead? Composite materials so flashy that we can't figure out even what it is and so much ink on paper that it might just as well be called plastic rather than paper. This paper often ends up in our landfills, the ink is dissolved in the soil and seeps down into our drinking water and we drink it and it gives us cancer.

In hind sight (doesn't hind sight have something to do with sheep or goats?) a gray or brown world might have been more green. Now when we buy tinfoil it is not enough that we have ink on the box but we also have to have silver colored paint on the box. So is the packaging on tinfoil, paper, petroleum (ink), or metal? And how does the consumer decide in each instance? I can see that sometime composite materials are useful but not after they are discarded. These seem to be the only thing that these days I throw away rather than recycle.

I have hesitated in writing this thread because I know it was NASA that invented these composite materials and they are so proud of this achievement. I have a profound love for NASA, almost childlike and obsessive. I can see the value of these products for space but in this new age of recycling clearly many of these composite materials are being overused in packaging. Manufacturers are not considering the impact that their packaging is having on the environment globally.

Consumers have no idea of what to do with them when it comes to deciding where they get recycled. I would almost prefer a gray and brown world (the color of wood and recycled paper) then having all these flashy colors so I can rip off the flashy color package look at it and say wow then throw it away. Do I really need metal painted on the outside of a tooth paste box?

I have decide to look at packaging and decide how I will recycle it before I buy it. We would never go to a colorless packaging unless we run completely out of oil but consider if even half of these inks were reduced this could cut our dependance on foreign oil by a great amount, Perhaps 10% and also the inks would not be seeping into our water supply.

When I buy frozen broccoli florets instead of seeing a picture of broccoli on the front if the bag was clear I would already know what was inside. Come on people, it is a bag of frozen broccoli... I am not saying we need to become a communistic society. I love free enterprise, I am just saying this color thing is destroying us. As consumers become educated, manufactures may use colorless packaging to entice consumers to their "green" products rather than the color itself.

There I said it, one more reason to thumb down my thread.