RE: A Day In The Life Of a Land Pirate - Living Free!
One comment ... there is a big difference between "recycle" and "reuse"! Recycling means you take the old things and use it as raw materials when manufacturing new things. Reuse means ... reuse.
With typical bottle recycling, the bottle breaks into fragments as it's being thrown into the bottle bank, those fragments are then used for making a new bottle. The process is quite much inefficient, it consumes big amounts of energy, and the new bottle will never be of the same quality as the first bottle, there is always a limit for how many times things can be recycled like this.
When I was a kid, glass bottles were typically reused. We delivered it back to the shop, got our "pant" money back, the bottles would be sent to the bewery, washed there and used again. (the washing process caused some wear to the bottles, so eventually there was a limited number of times the bottles could be reused. Also, even though they had quite much quality control systems, including an employee that would watch the bottles passing through, I have experienced buying a new bottle with cigarette butts inside.
We used to return just the milk bottles I remember in UK when I was a kid, but long gone are the days of the milkman! There was a survey done (cant remember details) but they were asking kids where milk comes from and they said the supermarket :(
Reusing sounds like your about to start heroin again hahahahahahaha, in english atleast to "reuse" is only for people who relapse back onto a drug :) Much better to use the word Recycle hahahhahahahaha
edit- I think every country should do the "pant" but I know that countries wont all do it because it gives a chance for homeless and beggers etc to make enough money to stay in the cities
Oh, never knew that "reuse" had such a meaning.
In Norwegian we have "gjenbruk" (literally, re-use) and "gjenvinning" (re-winning? More like re-newal than re-cycling). From an environmental point of view, re-use is (almost) always better than recycling. Our local school fleemarket has just gone through a rename, now it will be "gjenbruksmarked" instead of "loppemarked".
I'm often quite concerned about "green-wash", ideas that are sold in as "environmentally friendly" may not always be that environmentally friendly when looking closer at it. The whole word "recycle", with those green arrows indicating a circle, it's quite far from the truth. It's more like a "loop" than a circle ... just like the metro line 5 in Oslo (I heard rumors they had to make the London yellow circle into a loop as well, to be able to throw out people settling down on the metro) ... because the things produced from "recycled" materials are seldom recycled, and in any case they can only be recycled some few times.
About the pant, I do like the idea and think it can and should be extended to more products than only drinking bottles and cans ... and as we've moved from glass bottles to aluminium tins and PET-bottles, the system has also moved from "gjenbruk" to "gjenvinning" - and I believe at some point they completely stopped with pant on glass bottles.
The pant system is not without negative effects, it involves quite some overhead for one thing - particularly when we end up sort bottles after country of origin at home.
We had "Brødboksen" for a while, but they eventually went bankrupt.
They were delivering bread, juice, milk and other breakfast products to the door, in the early morning, internet orders could be made all until midnight for next-day delivery.
The milk was the typical pasteurized and homogenized stuff delivered in the typical milk carton, but the juice was freshly made and delivered in milk-style-bottles, and the bottles was supposed to be returned by placing them outside the door (inside their thermo-insulated delivery-boxes).
We rarely used it because it was expensive and because my wife typically would haul things from the shop, but I loved the service, it was really nice to get fresh bread. I miss the service, and I'm quite sure it will reappear. Indeed, the brand was bought by a competitor "Morgenlevering", but last time I checked them out, they were missing the most important thing in their assortment - milk!
So I believe on the return of the milkman, just a slightly more modern variant, delivering more things than only milk (particularly freshly baked bread and juice) and accepting orders all until midnight.
I just rememebred I was an "assistant" milkmen for some months around the age of 12 ('96) must have been, and i guess that was the last milkman eras in Uk until like you say it become "expensive" (thinking now, the wages proberbly just didnt go up) and then suddenly there were supermarkets!.. That sounds great with fresh bread every day, hey wait this is still running in Norway?! anyway time I watch some documentry and relax.. tec 7 tomorrow?
In Norway the milkman was gone long before my time, and Brødboksen got bankrupt, so they're not running anymore.
I was in Russia first time in 1998, and then they still had another kind of milk delivery service - every morning people would be queuing by the milk delivery tank truck, with their own containers! I believe this service lasted into this millennium, maybe it still is a thing on the remote country side.
I think the thing that really killed daily milk delivery (and the tank car delivery) was not the supermarkets, but improved hygienic conditions at the farms and good pasteurization at the diaries. It's no point with daily milk deliveries when the milk can stand for two weeks in the fridge without getting bad.
The flipside is that one cannot easily make sour milk at home anymore. The milk from the diary doesn't go sour, it goes bad. Milk directly from the farmer is a big no-no here in Norway due to laws and regulations, one has to know a farmer (or be a farmer) to get real, fresh milk.
According to wikipedia, "reuse" is about using something again. Even when I google for "drug reuse", I find articles on how to put unused medicines to good use.
Great :) Well you might have already known that English people speak the worst English ever available! Hahahaha 😂