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Southdowns Residential Estate Home Owners Association in Irene Centurion partners in August with Open Sky to supply every house with blue bins and a collection service
Residential Recycling collections with Open Sky have grown to over 10 tons a month. We estimate this will grow by 20% per month until year end.
Support our Commercial Collection Partners;
- BAE Systems
- Bert du Plessis Chartered Accountants
- Centurion Eye Hospital
- Clubview Guest House
- Craison Hygiene
- Dunkelly B&B
- Embassy and Residences of Austria
- Embassy and Residences of Denmark
- Embassy and Residences of Finland
- Embassy and Residences of Sweden
- Genop Healthcare
- Greenlea Guest House & Conference Centre
- Happy Hands Nursery
- Inn Joy Boutique Hotel
- Mandevco Consultants
- Midrand Special Steels
- Pete’s Place B & B
- Product One (Microsoft Development Partner)
- Pumpkin Nursery
- Wild Olive Guest House
- Lifestyle Management Centre
What Shade of Green are You?
So what can we do if we are serious about living ethically and reversing the tide of ecological devastation? The environmental movement has several different answers to this question.
Light green environmentalism
So-called ‘light green environmentalists’ (‘LG’s’ for short) see protection of the environment as a personal consumer responsibility and ask us to simply make ethical, responsible choices about how we live.
For instance, given the fact that the global livestock industry is the single largest cause of human-made global warming (bigger even than the entire global transport industry according to the 2006 United Nations report, ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’) the LG’s insist that we should eat either very little meat or no meat at all as a vegetarian or (even better) vegan diet uses as little as 1/20th of the natural resources a standard meat-based Western diet does. In fact, changing to a vegan diet is probably the single most responsible consumer commitment an individual can make to saving the environment and will make much more of a dent in the average ecological footprint than almost anything else currently on the cards.
LG’s also advise us to use our consumer power to boycott companies (or even nations, like China) that are damaging our environment by not buying from them and instead trying to support local and eco-friendly industries wherever possible.
Bright green environmentalism
Going one step further than the LG’s, BG’s recognise that what we consume is important but also attempt to tackle the problem from the other end. BG’s ask the important question of how we produce what is consumed; they thus tend to be enthusiastic about things like renewable energy, hybrid cars, nanotechnology and other ’small footprint’ technologies. Some BG’s have even proposed a novel, if somewhat hare-brained solution to the old ‘methane belching cow’ problem: a machine that is connected to cattle and captures their methane emissions for use as clean energy!
In essence, BG’s assert that through new technologies and sustainable living practices we can stem or even reverse the tide of ecological devastation.
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What happens to the contents of your Blue Open Sky Bin?
Have you ever wondered what happens to the contents of your Open Sky Blue Bin once it is collected?
Mixed Dry Recyclables is the common term applied to the contents of your Open Sky Blue bin. Once we have collected, it is transported to our site in Sunderland Ridge.
Separating the Waste
At the site, a staff sort the waste into separate recyclables. Once sorted, the waste is baled on site and taken to one of four current Open Sky Recycling Partners , Remade , Mondi , Collect a Can or Nampak.
Plastic Journey
- Once the baled plastic has arrived at its destination it is washed and chopped into flakes.
- If mixed plastics are being recycled, they are sorted in a flotation tank, where some types of plastic sink and others float.
- The plastic flakes are dried in a tumble dryer.
- The dried flakes are fed into an extruder, where heat and pressure melt the plastic. Different types of plastics melt at different temperatures.
- The molten plastic is forced through a fine screen to remove any contaminants that slipped through the washing process. The molten plastic is then formed into strands.
- The strands are cooled in water, then chopped into uniform pellets. Manufacturing companies buy the plastic pellets from recyclers to make new products. Recycled plastics also can be made into flowerpots, lumber, and carpeting.
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Aluminum Can Journey
- Aluminum cans are condensed into highly dense, 30-pound briquettes or 1,200-pound bales and sent to aluminum companies for melting.
- The condensed cans are shredded, crushed and stripped of their inside and outside decorations via a burning process. Then aluminum pieces are loaded into melting furnaces, where the recycled metal is blended with new, virgin aluminum.
- The molten aluminum is then poured into 25-foot long ingots that weigh over 30,000 pounds. The ingots are fed into rolling mills that reduce the thickness of the metal.
- This metal is then coiled and sent to can makers, who produce can bodies and lids. They, in turn, deliver cans to beverage companies for filling.
The new cans are then ready to return to store shelves in as little as 60 days, only to go through the entire recycling process again!
Paper/Cardboard Journey
- The recycling process begins by creating a fibrous pulp from the paper. This is done by shredding the paper and combining it with large amounts of water. The mixture is then stirred until all the paper has broken down into individual fibres.
- The next stage is the cleaning process. All foreign objects are removed by using special filters and cleaning techniques. These objects may include paper clips, staples, string and dirt. The paper is then de-inked.
Dark green environmentalism
Like the LG’s, the DG’s believe that we should consume in an ethical, responsible way and, like the BG’s, they believe that innovation in the way we produce is crucial, but they take both of these positions one step further by questioning why consumerism has so fully permeated our lives and our values.
DG’s believe that environmental problems are caused not just by what we buy and how it is made, but also by how we live and function as a society. They see the dominant political and economic ideology of globalised industrial capitalism as fundamentally flawed in that it promotes shallow and unsustainable values based on greed, mindless consumerism, alienation from nature and rampant exploitation of resources.
Not content to leave the analysis there, DG’s go on to state that the basis of all this is an illogical emphasis on perpetual growth at the expense of all else. They call this drive ‘growth mania’ and advocate in its place an egalitarian, anarchist society with a more nuanced value system irreducible to capital, pursuing development and refinement of ideas and technologies in place of growth for its own sake.
Distinct from both LG’s and BG’s, DG’s encourage social activism, protest and radical direct action; in fact some DG’s, like the philosopher and activist Dr Steve Best and the writer and ecologist Derrick Jensen, eloquently defend the necessity for acting in a revolutionary manner even if this means participating in illegal activities like sabotaging logging operations (like the Earth Liberation Front) or sinking whaling ships (like the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society). While these might seem like extremist tactics, Dr Best’s recent anthology, ‘Igniting a Revolution’ legitimates their use admirably, comparing the environmental struggle to historical justice movements and noting that revolutionary direct action has always been employed where more reformist ‘light green’ measures have failed.
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