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Waste Disposal Rant
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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 Waste Disposal Rant
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In an underdeveloped country like here you have to inhale toxic fumes every other time.
It starts with the people throwing their garbage around wherever they sit, stand or drive. For rural areas the wind shall take over distribution, whilst heavier stuff si supposed to simply remain. ( Imagine: Can´t find a single green anywhere to walk dogs on. Everywhere, hazardous crap like glass splinters, nails, wires, toxics and what have you.) For suburbs the city admins send out crews who will pile up trash from empty lots, roadside ditches or whatever and set it on fire.
( Not one single educational step to stop the mess. Instead pile & burn squads.)
Road sweepers running around with gas cans ...
For some appartment buildings they even expect the janitor to throw the garbage on adjacent public plots and to fire it up every other time. Producing huge black palls that will cover square miles with stinking odeure. Sometimes lasting for days.
40 western years of gradual development and dealings with trash concern apparently hasn´t left any slightest of traces on the vast of underdeveloped sites. When welcome, latest of modern fashion symbols and gadgets will be noticed and longed for right away after release, but cumbersome matters like reasonable waste handling just can´t dawn to the perfection of ignorance.
From what I can see, the rates of congenital deformity and death rates at young age must be horrific, without the average person here even guessing what the conncetion to inhalation of extreme traffic pollution and before all dioxine containing trash fumes could be. Yet, after decades of international upheaval, folks in most of Asia and Africa do not even have an idea of consequence with biting stinking smoke swirling around and in their homes.
- Not to mention one of pity about burned recycable ressources.
Could be some may think that underprivileged fellow men had too much worries to care for such `negligible frippery´, but that appears like quite a fallacy to me.
A pretty damn annoying one of willful, stubborn ignorance at that. 
Just based on the ever popular premisse of: "What is not looked at won´t exist in the same time".
Rant over.
Ruphus
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Date Oct. 10 2012 11:40:59
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Anders Eliasson
Posts: 5780
Joined: Oct. 18 2006
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 RE: Waste Disposal Rant (in reply to Ruphus)
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Ruphus... I still cant remember where you live...
I live in Spain and things are basically the same. Dirt is thrown everywhere. Its the worst european country when it comes to leave garbadge everywhere. They are simply said a bunch of pigs.
If you go to the countryside and you find a place where you stop and where there´s shade, and that can be pretty difficult, you see bottles, foodrests, paper, plastic, condoms, toiletpaper etc everywhere.
Besides thats, sofas /couches, tyres, washing machines and all other kind of furniture, you just dump in nature. (I mean who cares)
2 weeks ago, I was driving from Madrid and home and in a place near Cordoba there was a "merendero" (a place where you can park and with tables, barbecues etc.) All the tables where full of bottles and crap and foodrests, paper, etc was everywhere. But the thing that annoyed me the most was that in the middle of all that sh*t, there was a family esting there. A normal Spanish family (enjoy nature kids) And they had started a barbecue with what they had found of firewood. It hadnt rained for 1,5 years. Evereything totally dry and it was TOTALLY forbidden to light anything in nature. And this stupid family was just sitting there staring at me with dum eyes. And this in a country where we have enourmous problems with fires.
I didn´t say a word (trust me, I know that it wouldnt have changed anything) I left and told myself that I need the telephone number where I can call and ask some authority to come.
When there´s a heavy rain, like 2 weeks ago. One of the problems is that the water drags all this crap around and then it ends up blogging drain pipes, small bridges, etc. with the result that the water rises and when the obstacle (bridge, whatever) colapses, the movement of the water is a lot more dangerous...
And what do they do about it? yell and ask the European Union for money.........
_____________________________
Blog: http://news-from-the-workshop.blogspot.com/
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Date Oct. 10 2012 15:59:11
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Waste Disposal Rant (in reply to Ruphus)
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Interestingly enough, the situation in the Marshall Islands was just the opposite. The undeveloped outer islands, with small human populations, were much cleaner than the islands inhabited by "civilized" Americans.
I lived for 18 1/2 years on a U.S. military base at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. The Army is notoriously concerned with neatness. The lawns were mowed, the coconuts and palm fronds were picked up, there was no visible trash lying about. Indeed, if you left your trash container at the curb after it was emptied, or if you failed to keep your lawn neatly trimmed, your boss heard about it. I know. I was one of the bosses.
But there was a plague of flies. During the wet season it was almost impossible to linger out of doors, much less have a picnic. You would be engulfed by a swarm of flies.
I lived on a small island at the north end of the atoll, with about 200 other Americans. There was a substantial stand of jungle, covering nearly half the island. Not only were there flies, the whole island was overrun by rats. During the dry season the rats came indoors looking for water.
Trash and garbage was put into dumpsters by the residents. These were the main breeding grounds for the flies. The residents were regularly harangued to put edible garbage in plastic bags and tie them. Even if they did, the dumpsters were surrounded by clouds of flies, and when you opened one to drop in your trash, you had better not inhale.
The island of Ebeye, where the Marshallese lived in severe overcrowding, was even worse. There were flies and rats, and there was trash in the streets and between the houses.
To my surprise, the uninhabited islands of Kwajalein Atoll also suffered plagues of flies. I learned that the large sea bird populations provided fly food in the form of uneaten fish remains and large quantities of bird sh1t.
A group of us sailed to the next atoll to the south. There were two villages, each with a population of about 300. No flies. None at all. I asked the president of one of the village councils about it. He said, "Let me show you something."
In front of each house was a ditch filled with sand. Any edible trash was first burned, then covered with sand. No exceptions. No flies.
Walking along, I noticed a man trimming the grass quite close to the ground with a machete. I asked him if he were getting ready to make a compost pit to plant taro. "No," he replied,"if you let the grass grow up, you get rats."
Wherever the native culture was reasonably intact, there were no rats or flies, nor trash strewn about. The Americans, adhering rigidly to methods that worked in temperate climates, failed to adapt to the tropics, and suffered the consequences.
RNJ
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Date Oct. 10 2012 17:58:30
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Ruphus
Posts: 3782
Joined: Nov. 18 2010
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RE: Waste Disposal Rant (in reply to Ruphus)
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I am glad that you like it, Stephen. :O)
Thank you, guys, for qualifying the matter and pointing out that this is not just happening in industrially underdeveloped realms. ( Guess I should had rather said something in the way of "in intellectually underdeveloped countries and provinces" or so.)
Anders, I shouldn´t name the place for some reason.
It is in the Orient. It was of very remarkable insight and progress already before the ancient Greeks´ achievements in philosophical / societal respect ( which the Occident traditionally deems as invented in Greece ). It delivered most battles of all to the ancient Rome and today would quite possibly be one of the worlds most advanced places hadn´t it been missionized by the Arabs at some time and basically turned into another Arab sphere, going downhill the way the very conquerors did.
So, considering that environmental private vandalism is not exclusively predominating in underdeveloped countries, what remains is that it is conducted by a mentality incapable of deconstructive thinking. Meaning the inability to integrate further effects into overlook of proceeding.
And frankly: Eventhough considering myself rather strong with associative skills, I absolutely do not get it.
Over here, so I´ve been told, there used to be a traditional instruction of how to get rid of trash. Going like: "Throw it into the water".
Hence, creeks and rivers would be dragging the garbage away, and gone it would be. Everything nice and tidy. Or what.
Dunno.
When I as a teenager returned to Germany in 1975 or so, my mother asked me to exchange her cars engine oil. When done, I asked her where to dispose, and she send me to the drain.
I remember the strong feeling of discomfort, wondering where this oil was going to. Would it be collected in a purification plant, could it be separated from the water at all, or would it just be ending up in the next river.
Disposing toxic stuff that way was common at that time, provided you knew at all of used engine oils toxic property ( many would not, and even used it as wood preservative in their homes and gardens ), years still before the first timid and ridiculed environmental discussions.
Still, there came up questions to me while filling that black stuff into the gully.
And I firmly believe that such is just totally inevitable for any with a normally functioning brain.
How on earth can you be throwing something somewhere without ever asking yourself about whereabouts?
Can you really just not ask yourself? Is that possible? For someone who providedly can manage anticipated action like say opening a fridge to find a cool drink, or use a box to step on to pluck a banana ( you know where I got the latter example from, don´t ya ).
It appears like proven that there exist human minds who really do not come to ask themselves about yet the most of trivial questions, and I do not fathom how people like that are in the same time capable of obtaining a driving license or even graduate in school.
I swear; I am being serious: Intelligence is an uncomprehendable thing ( - and measures and indicators like IQs of absolutely limited use, besides, as we will encreasingly be realizing not only in regard of discovering animal intelligence and its manifold shapes ).
-
Lenador,
Certain mentalities appear to me as if they had no considerable tradition of instruction. Obviously not even expectations from didactical means.
Like here with wordlwide highest death toll in traffic.
Any educational steps - worth mentioning - to teach public of how insane and stupid maneuvers won´t help with reaching targets any quicker? No.
Instead? Plastering roads with bumpers ( sometimes in distance of every ~ 20 meters or so ), which are often built so radically / steep that they ruin cars.
To prevent suicidal-like U-turns, ways to the left will be closed with barriers, routes therefore not letting you to drive to the left side for miles on end. ... etc. pp.
No counting on reason. A way of either ruling with a hammer, or of leaving alone. ( Folks throwing trash around / routingly coercing traffic participants right before police´s eyes. - Who again will ridiculously focus on requirement of wearing seat belts.)
Richard,
of vermin examples:
Over here with humidity around 30% there should not exist one single mosquito. But there are plenty all year through, and especially now in autumn.
People believe the mosquitos to come "from the trees". Probably for having observed male mosquitos sitting on plants ( those live of plants juice / only females suck blood / needing it to develop ovules).
Truth is that mosquitos need still waters to breed. And the unexpected still water in such a dry country comes how? Exactly, from trash that the country is littered with. Plastic foils, cans and any thing that can hold a puddle make the background for why a country several times the size of Germany is largely populated by mosquitos ( stuffed besides with specially itching saliva ) whilst the place should actually be vastly free of such a pest.
-
Little of info can go a long way, and the question is why it just won´t.
Yet, not after decades. Sometimes not after centuries and even millenia.
Ruphus
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Date Oct. 11 2012 10:56:42
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Waste Disposal Rant (in reply to Ruphus)
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The fish that are given as mosquito eaters are local fish. I like the solutions of using beneficial predators, it is a better approach than pesticide spraying because it pin points the smallest areas where mosquitos can breed. Mosquitos can breed in an empty 1 liter water bottle discarded by the side of the road. That should be picked up and emptied out. Seasonal puddles can produce swarms of aquatic insects.
________________
California has several invasive spieces problems right now. One is the Northern Pike, which some dipshit introduced into a lake in No. Ca. it is speculated in the mid 1990's. The pike eat all the trout, and if it gets further than this lake it could decimate the native freshwater fish populations or bass and trout in the temperate lakes.
The lake the pike live in has been poisoned once with copper sulphate, which was really stupid and it killed all the trout as well. Only the several pike survived and reproduced. Now I'm not against pike as a fish, but it does not belong in California waters.
There is a subspecies of smallmouth bass called the Alabama spotted bass that was introduced here in Southern California by C. Fish and Game in the 1970's. This introduction was carefully studied and the Alamaba bass has not interfered with the native fish population and has in fact become a good gamefish in select reservoirs where the Largemouth Bass would not have made it.
Then there is the crazy Tilapia, the Nile Perch, the Croakers, and the other fish in the Salton Sea of the Imperial Desert. That all seems to work just fine.
Fraking Pike.
We also have this phenomena in the port cities, I suppose this happens all around the world, but because San Francisco bay is shallow and vast, we get ballast tank visitors.
When the big container ships come into the bay they sometimes illegally pump out the ballast water they took on in Korean or Chinese waters and with the ballast water out come crabs and other small organisms that will make a new home in the bay.
The little critters from the East China Sea are good competitors with the local crabs...there is an economic metaphor in there somewhere.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Oct. 14 2012 21:22:40
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n85ae
Posts: 877
Joined: Sep. 7 2006
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RE: Waste Disposal Rant (in reply to Anders Eliasson)
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Oh, this talk of mosquito's in Northern Europe (and they are about the
size of pterodactyl's up there) reminds me that nobody has window
screens up there! Yes, no window screens!
Sitting in the sweltering heat with the windows closed, in the middle of the
night with the sun shining bright (land of the endless sun) I ask - Why in
the f*ck do you people NOT use window screens???
The Answer - Because summer here is short, they do not bother us ...
For very long ....
So I went back to my beer, and vodka, and tried to ignore the constant
bzzzzzz-bzzzzz-bzzzzzz ... Perhaps going in the sauna will kill them I
thought ... You people are really nice, but dumb as rocks about some
things.
Yes I go there often, it's a strange land.
Regards,
Jeff
quote:
The problem with these strageties are that sometimes when we put species from other places into our eco system..... Then everything go wrong. I´m pretty sure that in places with many many mosquitoes like Sweden and Finland, its totally forbidden to put little fish of other origin into ponds, lakes etc. There the idea is that if you dont like mosquitoes, go live somewhere else.
Its not only about respecting other people but also other animals, plants, in final the whole ecosystem of the world.
In this aspect, Spain is also a 3rd world country. Well, oficially its not. We have all the correct rules and laws, lots of organizations etc. But people dont care. Spaniards believe that law and order is very important but they dont think they have to follow them themselves.
_____________________________
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Date Oct. 17 2012 18:04:47
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