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Bajaboy
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 4375
Registered: 10-9-2003
Location: Bahia Asuncion, BCS, Mexico
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for those too lazy to recycle
just a friendly reminder:
Time it takes for garbage to decompose in the environment:
Glass Bottle.......................... 1 million years
Monofilament Fishing Line… 600 years
Plastic Beverage Bottles…… 450 years
Disposable Diapers………… 450 years
Aluminum Can..................... 80-200 years
Foamed Plastic Buoy……… 80 years
Foamed Plastic Cups……… 50 years
Rubber-Boot Sole............... 50-80 years
Tin Cans……………………. 50 years
Leather................................. 50 years
Nylon Fabric........................ 30-40 years
Plastic Film Container........ 20-30 years
Plastic Bag.......................... 10-20 years
Cigarette Butt...................... 1-5 years
Wool Sock............................ 1-5 years
Plywood…………………….. 1-3 years
Waxed Milk Carton………… 3 months
Apple Core…………………. 2 months
Newspaper………………….. 6 weeks
Orange or Banana Peel...... 2-5 weeks
Paper Towel……………….. 2-4 weeks
Information Source: U.S. National Park Service; Mote Marine Lab, Sarasota, FL.
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DENNIS
Platinum Nomad
Posts: 29510
Registered: 9-2-2006
Location: Punta Banda
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TECATE beer can.......in a burlap bag before the first bounce. 
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Cypress
Elite Nomad
Posts: 7641
Registered: 3-12-2006
Location: on the bayou
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Mood: undecided
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Bajaboy, About those decomposition times? In a warm, humid environment? Maybe you could cut those time-spans down by half if not more.
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Bajaboy
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 4375
Registered: 10-9-2003
Location: Bahia Asuncion, BCS, Mexico
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| Quote: | Originally posted by Cypress
Bajaboy, About those decomposition times? In a warm, humid environment? Maybe you could cut those time-spans down by half if not more. |
Maybe take your "science" to the National Forest Service I'm sure they would
love to see your evidence.
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Cypress
Elite Nomad
Posts: 7641
Registered: 3-12-2006
Location: on the bayou
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Mood: undecided
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Bajaboy, Is that the same National Forest Service that has allowed vast areas of forest to become fire hazards and burn. Along with many homes
etc.?
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BornFisher
Super Nomad
Posts: 2107
Registered: 1-11-2005
Location: K-38 Santa Martha/Encinitas
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What if I toss an apple core out my window in a national forest, and a bear eats it? How long to de-compose?
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willardguy
Elite Nomad
Posts: 6451
Registered: 9-19-2009
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and would it make a sound?
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Cisco
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 4196
Registered: 12-30-2010
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| Quote: | Originally posted by Cypress
Bajaboy, Is that the same National Forest Service that has allowed vast areas of forest to become fire hazards and burn. Along with many homes
etc.? |
Yeah. Growing up in San Diego County it used to burn every three years, good for it, regenerated and all was well. Never had huge
out-of-control-too-much-brush-kind-of-fires.
Now with people building where they should not and allowing the brush to build because they are afraid of burns when we do get one it really rocks!!!
Then they rebuild in the same place.
I saw this phenomenon while cruising a boat on the eastern seaboard. Hurricane comes, blows down stilt house. Government or insurance rebuilds stilt
house over and over again. You and I that don't live in such areas end up paying one way or the other for these peoples desirous lifestyles.
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Cisco
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 4196
Registered: 12-30-2010
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| Quote: | Originally posted by willardguy
and would it make a sound? |
If you ever heard a bear fart after ravaging an apple orchard you would not have to ask that.
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Cypress
Elite Nomad
Posts: 7641
Registered: 3-12-2006
Location: on the bayou
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Cisco, Yep!! About the rebuilding. Not sure about the bear farts.
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DavidE
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 3814
Registered: 12-1-2003
Location: Baja California México
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Mood: 'At home we demand facts and get them. In Mexico one subsists on rumor and never demands anything.' Charles Flandrau,
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If everything came in aluminum cans México would have little trash. Chatarros pretty much police every trash can and every mile of highway of
aluminum. Don't know about the Alzheimer's thing though.
A Lot To See And A Lot To Do
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cabobaja
Nomad
Posts: 362
Registered: 9-19-2006
Location: South \"O\", Elias Calles, BCS
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Mood: Smiling
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They have started a program to recycle in Todos Santos. Seems to be doing well. It's all about education and the opportunity. Now, I am going to get
hell for this....but, people throw their aluminum cans out on the highway because those less fortunate pick them for $$ to eat. Went to Todos this
morning and saw Enrique on his bike looking and picking-up soda, beer cans.
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Bajaboy
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 4375
Registered: 10-9-2003
Location: Bahia Asuncion, BCS, Mexico
Member Is Offline
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| Quote: | Originally posted by cabobaja
They have started a program to recycle in Todos Santos. Seems to be doing well. It's all about education and the opportunity. Now, I am going to get
hell for this....but, people throw their aluminum cans out on the highway because those less fortunate pick them for $$ to eat. Went to Todos this
morning and saw Enrique on his bike looking and picking-up soda, beer cans. |
This mindset of throwing cans on the ground because someone else will pick them up drives me crazy. I see and hear of it all the time in BA. Problem
is, not only do the cans get thrown out but also the bottles. All you have to do is attend a horse race to view this. But I keep my mouth shut and
pick up whatever I can....
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DENNIS
Platinum Nomad
Posts: 29510
Registered: 9-2-2006
Location: Punta Banda
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We aint seen nuthin yet. Just wait till they start bottleing beer in plastic bags. 
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monoloco
Elite Nomad
Posts: 6667
Registered: 7-13-2009
Location: Pescadero BCS
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| Quote: | Originally posted by cabobaja
They have started a program to recycle in Todos Santos. Seems to be doing well. It's all about education and the opportunity. Now, I am going to get
hell for this....but, people throw their aluminum cans out on the highway because those less fortunate pick them for $$ to eat. Went to Todos this
morning and saw Enrique on his bike looking and picking-up soda, beer cans. |
Have you ever noticed the "Can
Man" who has been walking the highway between Cabo and LaPaz picking up cans for years? The guy looks like he weighs about 90lbs and is usually
packing several full costales. My wife tried to talk to him once and he ran away.
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cabobaja
Nomad
Posts: 362
Registered: 9-19-2006
Location: South \"O\", Elias Calles, BCS
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Mood: Smiling
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Mono, yes.....saw him yesterday. His legs are sticks. I have watched him walk by for years. I do not understand how he walks this coast and carries
the load he carries.
Zac, I do not see bottles thrown on the highway. And, to be honest I see
less soda, beer cans. Remember in the 60's? Oh, maybe your too young.
The highways in San Diego were full of litter. They started an educational
awareness campaign in the schools and media. Seems to have worked.
They are attempting it here.
Poco y poco!
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Barry A.
Select Nomad
Posts: 10007
Registered: 11-30-2003
Location: Redding, Northern CA
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Mood: optimistic
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If you poke around in the old desert mining camps of the southwest, you will realize that tin can do NOT decompose in 50 years in the desert-----they
will be around for 100's of years.
Barry
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watizname
Senior Nomad
Posts: 772
Registered: 8-7-2009
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So, in seven hunnerd years, the landfills will be mountains of glass?
I yam what I yam and that\'s all what I yam.
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bajadogs
Super Nomad
Posts: 1064
Registered: 8-28-2006
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The beautiful thing about glass is it is 100% recyclable. It has value. Much more value than the plastic grocery bags blowing in the wind, floating in
the water.
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durrelllrobert
Elite Nomad
Posts: 7393
Registered: 11-22-2007
Location: Punta Banda BC
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Mood: thriving in Baja
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| Quote: |
Remember in the 60's? Oh, maybe your too young.
The highways in San Diego were full of litter. They started an educational
awareness campaign in the schools and media. Seems to have worked.
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It was worse in the '40's-'50's:
L.A. THEN AND NOW
They were open with their littering at Tin Can Beach
California's coastline is full of colorfully named strands like Seal Beach, Pismo Beach and Muscle Beach. However, Tin Can Beach — a wacky monument to
littering — is just a memory.
The nickname for a 3½-mile stretch of sand just north of Huntington Beach, Tin Can Beach reached the heights of trashiness in the 1940s and '50s when
it was the sometime domain of hobos, drinkers, free spirits and vacationers.
They built cardboard shacks, erected tents and thought nothing of tossing used cans, bottles, paper plates and other debris to the ground.
Their symbol was an assemblage of more than 100 rusting beer containers that spelled out Tin Can Beach in the sand.
"This is the last frontier, the last place a man can camp free in these parts," barefooted Ray Torrey, the self-appointed mayor of Tin Can Beach,
proclaimed one August afternoon in 1956.
"I've been coming down here since 1927," he said as he sipped a beer in his cardboard castle. "Got a banjo and we sit around a fire at night and
sing."
Some residents from the East seemed to have ended up at Tin Can Beach because they couldn't go any farther west.
"I'm out of a job," one of the mayor's constituents, a Dover, N.H., man, said as he lay in the sun, surrounded by hundreds of beer cans. "This is a
cheap place to live."
The dwellers fished in the surf and bathed in the ocean. Gasoline stations on Pacific Coast Highway took care of other needs.
And the authorities largely ignored them because the beach was private property, belonging to more than 200 absentee owners who had acquired parcels
during an oil boom in the 1920s. By 1956, many of them had "become wealthy and disappeared," The Times said.
In the meantime, the property was leased by the Signal Oil and Gas Co., which occasionally cleaned up the debris just to keep the mounds of cans from
blocking the view of the ocean from PCH.
Some of the inhabitants were more conscientious than the litterbugs, flocking to the beach to find relief from the sun in that era before air
conditioning.
"It was not uncommon for people to go and stay for a week or two at a time," Ed Sweeny recalled on a Huntington Beach website. "Our families, 20 to 30
members, would go during the summer when it was so hot in the Inland Valley, and pitch Army tents. The men would go off to work every day and come
back to the beach afterward. The adults would sleep in the tents on cots and the kids would sleep out under the stars.... We would have campfires
every night.... It was so much fun."
Of course, not all was idyllic at Tin Can Beach.
Some children would suffer cuts on "their feet from all the tin can lids buried in the sand," Sweeny said.
Though people didn't seem to fear violent crime in those days, theft was not unknown. An unemployed carpenter named Smith told The Times in 1954 that
some of his tools had been stolen, prompting him to devise a makeshift burglar alarm: a marble in a milk bottle hung on his front door.
And, Smith added, he was sometimes awakened by people tearing timbers from his walls to use as kindling for beach fires. (Nothing more annoying than
having your house torn down by the neighbors.)
The weather could also be a nuisance, since building standards were somewhat lax. Chuck Taylor of El Monte complained that no sooner had he
constructed his driftwood manor than the wind started blowing and the roof came off.
By 1956, Tin Can Beach was beginning to face a problem that would become familiar in Southern California: congestion.
"I wish you wouldn't publicize this place," the mayor told The Times. "Too many people come down here now. I wish we had beer cans piled a foot high
to keep them out."
A lot of Orange Countians weren't wild about people coming to Tin Can Beach, either. They considered it an eyesore and appealed to the state
Legislature to buy it.
It took several years, but eventually the numerous owners of the property, or their next of kin, were located. The state acquired the site for $1
million, renamed it Bolsa Chica State Beach and removed the cans, including the ones that spelled out Tin Can Beach.
Nowadays, sleeping overnight on the sand is forbidden. "NO tent camping," a beach website warns, as though in fear of some old-time residents
returning. Owners of recreational vehicles can sleep in the parking lots, but it's not free. Fees range from $50 to $65 per night.
No vestige of Tin Can Beach survives. A reporter walking on the pristine sand between two lifeguard stations on Friday couldn't find a single
discarded beer can.
And the "Bolsa Chica State Beach" sign at the entrance is made of concrete, not tin.
Bob Durrell
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