I should change the name of this blog

To "Hi! You're an Idiot." Because that's my favorite thing to do. Point out how idiotic people are. One major difficulty I have with the internet is stupid people. Really really. They just kill me. Might literally someday ... you never know. I read a few blogs because they're entertaining and smart, and the bloggers aren't morons! They don't talk about what they don't understand. usually. When they talk about what they don't understand, you just can't prove them wrong, and don't even *try* to prove the commenters wrong, cuz that's just silly. I have come to the conclusion (which perhaps you have already attained) that the people who write blogs and comment are ... well, mostly unwaivering in their beliefs. They either know what they are talking about or have such specific research that they are certainly right (which I like), or they're morons who infer and have nothing to backup their claims and don't understand the full situation (which I do not like). And while it is moderately hilarious to read people making moronic asses of themselves, they are reenforcing the misinformed ideas of other morons who also don't understand everything. I try not to do that ... I also try to be devil's advocate which doesn't turn out very happy for me usually ... I would also say that I'm a rare blogger who doesn't resolutely stick to her position. Maybe that's why I have a small readership ;-)

Anyway here is just one example, but it's the simplest one to pick out and explain. We're back on BPA, btw. Hooray, Bisphenol-A! Anyway, as I have said before, the FDA said BPA is cool, and that's good enough for me thus far. They have some pretty good guys over at the FDA, one of them being one of my old professors from MIT who is smart as shit (seriously, how do you think he got where he is). He didn't work with BPA as far as I know, but still, if they've got him, they must have some big guns. The FDA said it wasn't harmful, but people are still complaining, (that's what happens when morons explode on the internet) and the consumerist wrote this post about an article printed by the Washington Post. About the 4th comment down, someone decides to post this graph. Let's see if we can point out everything wrong with this picture ...

So first of all, there's no reference and it's done in excel! If s/he wanted to make all this up, s/he totally could have. But I'm very clever and actually found the main site where the picture is from, and it looks to be a biotech company, but I still have no idea what this graph was intended for. I just got the URL of the pic, and I bet if you click on my pic you'll get the URL as well. So now you've got about as much information as I do. So since it's a biotech company who's obviously hurting for money since they are using excel to make graphs for what I assume are presetations or papers they are publishing, we'll just go ahead and say that the data is not BS. Accept the premise! So let's look at that increase. Whoa! that looks like a 200% increase in the last 30 years. We learned about this the 5th grade, so I make fun of it all the time. These people obviously want to make it look like cancer rates have gone up a lot. If I wanted to make it look less like cancer rates had gone up, I might, I dunno have started the y-axis scale from 0. This is actually only about a 27% increase. Which by itself is still a little disconcerting. I guess it just didn't look scary enough on the 0 graph, which, incidentally, excel defaults to. I'm just saying that they obviously had to do some work to make it look like that.

What next, friend? Well futher down, other people (thank god) start talking a little sense and point out that people are living longer and that by itself means there will be more incidences of cancer. Also that there are millions of carcinogens out there, and how do we know which causes what? And there's absolutely no evidence on that chart relating cancer rates to BPA use! There's not even a 'use of BPA' chart alongside it going up with the cancer rates ... that and we've been using BPA since before 1975. come on, buddy. And then some one made another lovely excel chart relating global warming to the number of pirates on the high (and low) seas. See, now that's funny.

The internet is such a vast and informative place. Where you could actually read the FDA review and the papers published examining the BPA as a carcinogen and actual scientists' responses to these papers. Why would you listen to the dumbass that posts on consumerist with a fake chart that is designed specifically to look like cancer has gone up dramatically more than it has? Or even the Washington Post or your local news? So many people have pointed out over time that these people know about as much about science and technology as you do. If not much much less (if you are one of my friends, you probably know what I am talking about). I never understand it ...

Don't clean your recycling!

I was reading this blog (sorry guys that blog is kind of aimed at women, but this post is estrogen free!), and I decided that's a really good topic, because I love recycling and it sort of goes along with the polymer theme. Plus now I can explain something I mentioned I would say before, that is, why some environmentalists are to blame for the fact that we can't recycle styrofoam in this country! (I'm excited, because I know you really wanted to hear that story!) Well, if you read the blog I linked to, she's right, and so is ideal bite--you do not have to wash out your bottles and cans before recycling.

In fact, you don't even have to peel the labels off of the bottles/cans/whatever. I really have know idea why your 4th grade school teacher decided it was important to teach you to wash/unpeel everything! It seems like a great big deterrent to me! We're trying to encourage recycling, not make it so difficult no one will participate. Plus, it's kind of a stupid idea if you think about it. If every recycling plant were set up to only take nice clean, peel-free bottles and cans, one bad bottle in the mix could majorly mess up the whole process!

So here's how it works: You take your stuff to a collection center run by folks who probably don't know how the actual plant is run, but that's ok (they mean well, just don't ask them questions about how it all works, or you may get the crazy-plastics-girl stare). They take everything, and remove caps and such, because the caps are made out of stuff that's generally not recycled. Then they send them off to the plant where everything is shredded. So if there was a label on your can/bottle, it is now labelless. Then, they wash all the little shreds to make sure there's no left over mountain dew or bush's baked beans stuck to the side of anything, because that would make for a not so polymerized batch of polyethylene terephthalate. Anyway, after they wash everything, they sort it all out to keep the paper wrappers out of the PETE out of the aluminum cans out of the glass bottles. There are many ways of doing this: there's the float/sink method, which is used for some plastics. They can use magnets to make certain types of metal 'jump' into a proper bin. There's even some very high-tech work going on in the area. Some plants even use 'on-the-fly' spectroscopy and other forms of detection to pick alloys out of other alloys hurtling down a conveyor belt, while using precise air blowers to blow the scraps into the correct bin.

All in all, recycling is pretty darn cool, and I love it! And now I think I owe you a story about what kind of impact McDonald's has on the recycling industry, and why we can't recycle styrofoam. I should start by givin away my source. I heard this story in a polymer processing class at MIT. David Spencer, who was then CEO of wTe Corporation, was giving a guest lecture, and this is where I received most of my knowledge of the recycling industry. Anyway he told us that away back when, McDonald's food containers were made mostly of styrofoam. Apparently some environmentalists were a little upset that McDonald's was using this awful, awful material, and demanded that they switch to something more environmentally friendly. Mickey D's gave in after a while and switched to a plastic coated paper, which it turns out, is completely non-recyclable, thus, just looks environmentally friendly. "So where did the environmentalists go wrong?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you. What they perhaps didn't know or look into was that all the waste created from many happy American children and families eating at McDonald's all the time, was enough styrofoam to keep many styrofoam recycling plants open and doing well. When the massive fast food company switched to plastic coated paper, all these styrofoam plants pretty much went out of business . . . good job, friends . . .

And as a closing to this veritable smorgasbord of recycling information, I'll leave you with one more anecdote from David Spencer's guest lecture. He told another fun story about hippies . . . I mean . . . He also told another fun story. This one's about hippies and also shorter. Back in the 60s, we were discovering that the chlorine in PVC is not so good for the environment, so naturally the hippies started protesting that as well. Until, he says, they were informed that their 'vinyl' records were actually made with PVC . . . there were no more protests after that.

Happy Recycling!