So I’ve heard of this a bit before but never really got it. Is the idea that the cable could access all of the channels, but the box had some sort of DRM on it that prevented it from actually tuning into those channels?
You could tune in to any channel you wanted, but the ones you weren’t subscribed to would be scrambled. These boxes would unscramble the signal letting you watch paid content for free.
There are ways to make it harden for bin disposal, but if I’m feeling cheeky I just put used oil back in the plastic jug once it’s cooled down and bin that
I save the plastic grocery store bags and use those. Since they frequently have holes, I double or sometimes triple bag it, depending on how nasty the oil is and how much I’ll regret not taking the time later if it seeps into my garbage bin.
Take it to the recycling center. Even just tossing it into the trash is better than pouring it down the drain. If you toss it in the trash it will just get incinerated. If you pour it down the drain it can clog the sewage system.
The regular trash doesn’t get separated, it’s just dumped. There’s also almost no restrictions on what can go in there, our trash cans are massive, and we have to pay for recycling, so many people just don’t bother (and a second trash can is not much more than a recycling bin).
We do have a recycling service that accepts most plastics (#1-#7), and they claim to recycle it, but they have pretty strict standards (needs to be clean, need to separate caps from bottles/jugs, etc), so I wouldn’t be surprised if most of it just ends up at the landfill anyway. Our area is a “single sort” facility, meaning people just dump everything into one bin and they sort it on their end. This means workers are even more likely to just throw stuff out that isn’t easily identifiable as recyclable.
One big issue is that they don’t accept glass, so to recycle glass, you need to take it somewhere special. I’m pretty obsessive about recycling, so I go out of my way to recycle everything I can (I have a bag of dead batteries in the garage, I make regular trips to recycle glass, etc), but I highly doubt most people bother. In fact, I have a few neighbors with 2 garbage cans and no recycling can.
Random question, where do you take old gasoline? Will auto part stores take a jug of old motor oil and gasoline that’s been mixed? I guess I should probably just call and ask a local store after I’m done shitting on company time.
Where I live, it goes to the dump, they have a space dedicated to hazardous liquids/containers. However, you have to leave the whole container there, there’s no spot to dump it
For separated motor oil (e.g. oil changes), it can go to my local auto parts store, but gasoline and most other car fluids (e.g. coolant, transmission fluid, etc) goes to the dump as hazardous waste. My area does an event once or twice each year to collect all of those hazardous materials, so it’s worth checking that out as well, since it can be way more convenient than waiting in a line at the dump.
Wow weird. May I ask where that is? Not recycling glass sounds WILD to me, it’s one of the most common recyclables, even decades ago when plastic recycling was uncommon, glass “dumpsters” where everywhere.
Being forced to separate caps from bottles of very exotic as well, considering the EU just introduced a regulation that forces manufacturers to make caps that stay on the bottle even when opened.
We do have a few drop-off bins, but I have to drive to each of them. The going explanation is that, since we do sorting at the facility, it’s not worth exposing workers to broken glass, which is inevitable when mixing all recyclables into one garbage truck. So people have two options: drive to a drop-off location (each a few miles away and not on the way to anything) or just toss it in the trash. So, most people just toss it in the trash.
Being forced to separate caps from bottles of very exotic as well
The plastic in the caps is different from the plastic in the bottles and cannot be recycled together. I guess it’s not worth the time for them to separate at the plant (plastic recycling isn’t profitable as it is), so they put that responsibility onto trash customers (in other words, they want an excuse to just toss bottles w/ caps still on them).
I’m talking about these bottle caps btw. They’re everywhere here (milk jugs, soda, bigger ones for pasta sauce, etc).
I’m guessing more urban areas have better recycling policies since they don’t have massive landfills available for dumping.
Here we have door-to-door pick up now, which replaced dumpsters as a way to encourage recycling: you have limited pick-ups for unsorted trash, the bin has a transponder and a barcode, if you go over the limit you pay extra (albeit very little), while recyclables have unlimited pick-ups; but if they catch you putting normal trash in the recyclables they can fine you.
For door to door we sort as follows:
bags: plastic, cans and cartons (such as milk)
paper bin: cardboard and paper, but only if clean (no pizza boxes!)
compost bin: food leftovers and such, as well as used paper tissues
Then we have dumpsters for glass and dumpsters for gardening refuse, such as wood, leaves, cut grass. Now we have one for cooking oil as well.
For batteries there are usually bins near some stores or at workplaces.
Everything else you have to take to the recycling center, say metal, building materials, furniture… Usually each community has one, when I lived in the country side, my 3000-people village had its own. For furniture in some places you can arrange a curbside pick-up.
All of this is the same for urban and rural areas, though there are small differences between regions as the recycling facilities can be different. For example in some places milk cartons go in the paper bin instead of the plastic one. Of course rural in my area is probably way less rural than most of Utah.
Yeah, we’re not nearly that fancy. Here’s what we have:
blue bin - all recyclables: plastic (no bags or styrofoam), paper, cardboard, aluminum cans; must be clean
black bin - everything else; I’ll even put in grass clippings, rocks, disassembled furniture, etc
If you want to recycle glass, plastic bags, batteries, light bulbs, etc, you need to find a drop-off bin, which are relatively uncommon (plastic bag dropoff is more common now). Target is my go-to since they have the bins I need the most (glass, plastic bags), but they don’t take light bulbs or alkaline batteries. Since there are no fines for throwing stuff in the trash that shouldn’t go there and recycling bins are inconvenient, most don’t bother (and many don’t pay for the recycling bin). I’ve seen clean cardboard, batteries, and aluminum cans in the trash, and it bothers me to no end.
Black bin goes to the street every week, blue bin goes every other week. Blue bin allegedly gets sorted at the facility, the black bin is dumped straight to the landfill. There’s a weight limit for garbage, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting fined for it, and I’ve certainly gone over a few times (see: rocks).
My city has 35k people, and the larger metro area has over a half million. So we’re a medium sized metro area, with a mix of farms and high tech business areas, with two major universities. There’s no reason we can’t be better about recycling…
Almost guaranteed to be U.S.A. as it sounds almost identical to my area except we have even fewer options. Here it all goes to the landfill, you can pay for recycling cans and pickup on recycling day but it gets contaminated by people putting trash in the recycling nearly every time so it all just goes to landfill and the local government just doesn’t care
The landfill stuff doesn’t eventually turn into dirt. They purposefully make sure that it’s wrapped in plastic in such a way that it never decomposes. Landfills are terrible.
They do it to protect the water table from things like battery acid. But a good chunk of it will become dirt, because there’s enough organic matter in mixed trash to decompose. It’ll just take a really long time because of the mix of plastic and whatnot.
If small amounts of oil that hardens when at room temp, like bacon fat. Throw it in a tin can to cool, garbage when the can fills. Oil that doesn’t harden, personally I put a bunch of dish soap into the oily pan to absorb the oil and wash it down the sink. Not sure if the dish soap does enough but seems safe to me.
If its a large amount, like for deep frying. Local recycling might take it. I know curbside pickup will take used motor oil for me, so I imagine they’d take fryer oil too.
I don’t do it with lots of oil. I mentioned putting bacon fat in a tin can, so we’re talking less than you’d get cooking bacon. See my other reply about semantics of absorb. For small amounts, the oil will emulsify with the soap. Which then can be rinsed away with water. This is how it makes your dishes clean, I’m sure it works the same down the drain.
soap molecules can break the oil molecules into smaller ones and allow the water molecules attached to them to surround the smaller oil fragments, creating an emulsion.
Is close enough in plain english to absorb the oil.
Everyone else is upset about absorbing the oil. I’m way more upset that you’re throwing out perfectly good bacon grease that can be used in any number of dishes.
Tortillas are the number one thing! But if you don’t need new tortillas (I can’t imagine why but some folks don’t have tortillas with nearly every meal, or so I’ve heard) it’s also great for sauteing pretty much anything.
My city actually has us pouring our oil in the compost bins. But in ye olde days, my parents would collect all the oil in the big yogurt containers/milk jugs and then throw it in the trash.
I should have specified: my municipality lets us throw any cooking oil out into our compost, and we have special containers in our compost bins specifically for cooking oils. So I’m assuming they get rid of it some way that isn’t actually in the compost.
My parents could keep that going for a good long time by filtering it through a few layers of kitchen paper, it got rid of a lot of the burnt stuff, came out quite clear each time.
That depends on the dish - a Wiener Schnitzel for example should be able to move freely in the oil (because it should be kept moving while frying), or the breading will be pretty underwhelming. Same goes for most stuff with breading. I always try to be very conservative in my cooking oil usage, but in those cases it’s just not an option.
A lot of people do, actually. Seasoning them right for them to come out more “french fry” than “dried potato” is more involved than a lot of people might like, but I personally don’t do it because I’m being picky about the flavor. I don’t own a deep-frier and salted-dried-potatoes are good enough with a lot of entrees.
I did that once, I was staying at a family as an exchange student and immediately forced to help with chores. Now, they ran a large creche from that house so there were a lot of different chores and being on dishes could mean slaving away in the kitchen for well over an hour.
Anyway, I didn’t know shit about how to properly dispose of oil and in the first or second week poured a large pan of oil down the drain. It ended up ruining some stuff and they had a hefty repair bill. I may be cynical, but I never gave a damn about it as they were basically using me as free labor anyway. Helping with household chores = ok. Helping clean up the gigantic daily mess of those shitty kids in your shitty creche = not ok
I am sure someone will have some insight into why this is a bad solution.
😂 Assuming you live in a city with sewer, idk how detrimental it would be…never really thought about it. And sewer stuff, it’s so toxic, and there are facilities dedicated to dealing with it.
I live out in the country, with a septic system. This septic system is a living organism of sorts; it contains bacteria & other life that helps to break down my shit, piss, etc. Idk how good introducing a bunch of this soap into the septic tank would be. Maybe it’s harmless… Or maybe it’ll kill all the buggies.
I do know that if you feel your septic tank is a little ‘sluggish’, lacking in activity, you flush some raw chicken skin down your toilet & that’s supposed to help. 🙂
Right I understand. But OP was saying someone will come along talking about unintended consequences, possibly very negative ones. I…fail to see any real problem. But I’m also not a plumber. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Oils in a septic tank are a poor idea. It floats, so it never gets pumped out as effluent, and it builds up in the tank. When you get the tank pumped, it should go away then as the pumper guy will usually stir it up enough to get all the oils and solids, but in the meantime it’s there interfering with the bugs.
Coming at this from more of a common sense angle, I was always told oil doesn’t go down the sink. For most people, it ends up in the normal rubbish.
Putting oil in the normal rubbish seems like it would have basically no issues at all. I think it would either be incinerated or end up in a landfill. If the energy from burning rubbish is being harvested (it might not be) then I would think the oil would help and that could be a useful way to recycle it.
If it ends up in a landfill, I don’t see any problem with a bit of oil being buried with other junk. A lot of people seem to be saying they would bury it anyway.
The only real concern would be if you have a lot of oil and you’re worried about your bin leaking or something. If you put most oil immediately into the bin then this shouldn’t really be an issue.
Of course if you just have a few little drops of oil in with a bunch of water then you would probably pour that in the sink anyway and it would most likely be fine.
Collecting stuff in a bucket, making soap or using it for something else seems like a lot of hassle to mitigate quite minor concerns. Most people don’t have a serious use for a bucket of used cooking oil.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong about any of this.
We had a grease can under the sink when I wasgrowing up. My fiancee and I use an old jar. I can’t believe people didn’t know better. They probably think it’s fine to dump car fluids in the storm drain too. Idiots.
The shop I worked in, and I assume most other shops in a cold climate, had a waste oil furnace. We’d save oil all summer, and it would keep the shop warm all winter.
French Fry grease will coat your lungs. No reason to be subjecting yourself to that smell if not actively consuming french-fries. I’ve spent enough time frying fast-food and donuts that there’s only the two ways that smell isn’t making me puke: actively cooking or eating. Otherwise, I’m not stepping foot in your fry-scented cancer den.
Nothing burns cleanly in a fireplace, even gas ones except for ventless ones.
Anything you burn in a fireplace like wood, oil, fat etc. will produce organic compounds that the fire is unable to break down into non-flammable substances because it does not burn hot enough.
A wood fireplace accumulates creosote, which can build until it is capable of igniting and cause a chimney fire. Oil and fat combust very poorly and will coat the flue with material that is easier to ignite than creosote. This ends up being a hazard worse than just wood byproducts because they can ignite and then set the creosote burning.
Complete combustion of hydrocarbons is difficult and usually requires specialized equipment for that hydrocarbon. A fireplace is probably for wood (I assume nobody here is throwing cooking oil into a gas fireplace), but it’s not even good at that. Cooking oil will spatter and polymerize
Unless we’re talking deep frying, the cooking fat makes for a perfect base for a sauce. With some flour and some stock you have the beginnings of something beautiful, such a waste just throwing it away.
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