{"id":558,"date":"2013-06-13T13:13:58","date_gmt":"2013-06-13T20:13:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roomforapony.net\/?p=558"},"modified":"2013-06-14T08:55:21","modified_gmt":"2013-06-14T15:55:21","slug":"where-to-get-rid-of-styrofoam-blocks-in-portland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/?p=558","title":{"rendered":"Where to get rid of Styrofoam blocks in Portland"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have to admit I\u2019ve been feeling somewhat holy about going to the trouble of schlepping our huge Styrofoam blocks out to one of the only two places in Portland that will take them. I feel less holy after what I\u2019ve just found out. …. which I\u2019ll tell you about in a minute.<\/p>\n

But first I want to emphasize that we still have to schlep — because presently there is no better option besides the One and Only better option, which is that this horrible stuff must not be manufactured in the first place. Meanwhile, this is the only acceptable thing we can do with it. Take it to Total Reclaim<\/a>\u00a0on Columbia Boulevard, or to the Foster Road location of another company, called Recology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the sobering part is: then what? What do they<\/em> do with it? Well…\u00a0 I suspected this but I\u2019d never followed it through this far. Are you ready?<\/p>\n

After they densify it, by melting it and squashing it down so that it takes up less space on the ships, they send it to places such as China and Japan where it\u2019s used to make cheaper plastic materials such as: toothbrush handles, picture frames, and…. pen casings.<\/p>\n

Pen casings? eeek! Toothbrush handles? Picture frames? How many of us have those items in our homes?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Go away, Styrofoam. Take a slow boat to China.”<\/p><\/div>\n

So when we buy those items, we\u2019re actually buying styrofoam? I feel stuck in an impossible loop.<\/p>\n

And when we eventually take those items to the recycling center, aren\u2019t we then actually throwing the evil polystyrene into the rigid plastics recycling bins?<\/p>\n

And what happens to it from there? Metro Recycling sends their rigid plastics to China. Is that bad? I suppose as long as we have this hideous stuff, we might as well get as many uses out of it as possible. Eventually it will end up in the landfills, but at least we\u2019ll have used it as many times as possible.<\/p>\n

But it looks like as the items are recycled into multiple incarnations and the plastics are combined with other plastics, the content of the cheaper plastics becomes less and less known. So how do they decide what recycling number to put on the end product? and is that important?<\/p>\n

This is getting really complicated. My brain hurts. I have to stop now.<\/p>\n

Next time I\u2019ll address this nagging question: If China can \u201crecycle\u201d styrofoam, isn\u2019t that a good thing? And, the dumber and more obvious question: Why can\u2019t we do that here in the U.S.?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have to admit I\u2019ve been feeling somewhat holy about going to the trouble of schlepping our huge Styrofoam blocks out to one of the only two places in Portland that will take them. I feel less holy after what I\u2019ve just found out. …. which I\u2019ll tell you about in a minute. But first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[87,29,125,39,23],"tags":[33,30,92,98,36,119,76,118,46,91,35],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":563,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions\/563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roomforapony.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}