September 29, 2005
Thursday PM

Are  you sick of me yet? Well I always feel good about complaining about things if I can come up with a better plan. I have said before we need to do something about our trash. OK let's turn Ward Cove into a garbage recycle plant. We're shipping stuff south by the van loads. We're paying not the tourist. What if we were getting paid for our trash and all of Southeastern Alaska's trash? Heck, we would not even need to start taking trash to Gravina and making some hazardous waste area out of our wetlands over there. We need to be responsible for our trash. We might even get famous instead of laughed at by the rest of the world.
 
If we took our trash and separated it properly. These are just my ideas... we take all the plastic, chop it all into little bits and pile it up till we have a barge load. We take all the tin cans and other metals chop it up in shreds, stock pile it up till we have a barge load. We take all the glass and run it through a crusher and turn it into sand - we could sell it to Ketchikan Ready Mix for concrete or sell it by the barge load. I have an experiment going on with my beer bottles I have been throwing them into a barrel and crushing them down with a sludge hammer. I have never had to empty it yet although it is getting full and harder to crush. There may be two thousand bottles in there. I was going to mix this into the concrete I have been pouring around the house but it is too heavy to move any more. I was out on Prince of Wales, do you know what they do in some places? They throw their beer cans in the bay. They try not to buy bottled stuff and they try to burn their food waste because they have no garbage haul out from some of these little communities.
 
But keeping on track with the recycle thing, we could grind up all wood waste from homes that are torn down or remodeled and we use that for fuel to incinerate the food garbage. Old oil could also be used for this. Then the only thing going out of town is stuff ready for recycle factories and we're getting paid for this and maybe we would not even have to pay for trash any more. Oh well, maybe now I can go back to sleep instead of thinking about trash.
 
Robert McRoberts
Ketchikan, AK - USA

 

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