Marcus Tay's List: Environmental controversial

• The challenge with basing everything off of any single individual matrix is that it cannot fully capture many important factors that contribute to the overall environmental crisis. For example, how does the carbon matrix deal with the pollution caused by toxic chemicals? The carbon footprint of dumping chemicals in a river may in fact be less than if you trucked them to a location where they could be safely disposed.

• that 'source-separated' systems (where waste is filtered at the kerbside) should  deliver better results for the environment than 'commingled' systems, where  everything is mashed up in the back of a lorry and picked apart at an 'MRF' or  material recycling facility.
• it is thought that somewhere between one tenth and one fifth of your waste could  end up in a landfill, forming part of a noxious stew belching methane into the  atmosphere. By contrast, less than 1 per cent of all materials collected through  source-separated systems is wasted

  • Commingled waste the materials that are collected
• 'Recycling is the front line of capitalism,'
• in Britain of the likes of French-based multinationals Veolia and Sita - and,  for commercial firms like these, the most cost-effective model is commingling  plus MRFs.
• Commingling requires householders to have only two containers: one for waste,  the other for 'recyclates'
• 'This user-friendly system offers lower collection costs and encourages greater  resident participation.
• on the amount wasted by commingling, saying it is only 'between 5 and 8 per  cent'.

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• United Kingdom’s Environment Agency released a study showing that you would need to reuse a paper bag three times for its global warming impact to be as low as that of one high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic carrier bag.
• otton bags are not innocent either. Making them uses fuel, water and resources. One cotton bag would have to be reused 131 times to have the same global warming impact as one HDPE ba
• paper bag would have to be reused seven times and a cotton bag 327 times for their impact to equal that of a plastic bag reused once.
• proposed 10-cent levy isn’t meant to defray the cost of producing or disposing of that plastic bag. It’s meant to be a nudge: do you really need that bag?
• fter a carrier bag levy of 50 Hong Kong cents (S$0.08) was imposed in 2009 in Hong Kong, people turned to heavier, thicker garbage bags to use as bin liners. Though the number of plastic carrier bags used dropped 77 per cent, the overall use of plastics in all bags went up 27 per cent, according to a 2011 study by the Hong Kong plastics industry.

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