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By Larry West, About.com Guide to Environmental Issues since 2005

Why Stop Using Plastic Bags?

Tuesday December 4, 2007
Americans throw away almost 100 billion plastic bags every year, and only 1 percent to 3 percent are ever recycled, leaving the rest to clog streams, foul landscapes, and kill birds and marine mammals. Learn how you can help the environment by reducing the number of plastic bags that are produced and discarded each year.
Photo by David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Comments

December 4, 2007 at 11:59 am
(1) duke says:

I have been changing oil for over five decades. In the first two I found a SERVICE station that would accept used oil in their tank. That I got fuel there helped. In the four decades in our house the first one included the above, and since then the county had recycle tanks at the drive in waste station. In fact they have tanks for other messy fluids like antifreeze as well. At the trash chutes they have an oil tank at each bay. And it does get used.

Recent laws require fuel station to have double tank walls with monitoring. Most local stations use these. One that didn’t took five months of pumping ground water through filters and absorbents to remove the “lost” leakage. I don’t have eve a guess what it might have cost, but four trucks were there the whole period with operators in attendance. It has now reopened with new tanks in place.

When I was working we used large amounts of hydraulic oil. For practical purposes it is like motor oil with different additives. We returned dirty or contaminated oil into drums and had excess property people find safe places to recycle it. One big machine had over a thousand gallons in three 550 gallon tanks. Piston was seven feet diameter. Force maximum 12,000,000 pounds.

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