April 7, 2008: Survival Flight

[narcuul]

This reminds me to recycle some beer cans. Why? Here's a longish explanation...

In finland we have a rather effective system for recycling practically every drink container you can buy, be it a soda can, a beer bottle or a rare liquor bottle. When you buy any of those, you pay a small "pawn" for the container. Around 0.1-0.2 euro per item depending on the container. When you return the bottle/can to a shop, you get a receipt from the machine you insert them to, and with that you get your money back. The system works well, since about 97-98% of every purchased packages are returned and recycled.

And.. As you (should) know, Finland is a rather small country considering it's population. Around 5 300 000 citizens atm. So every "large" city does not have enough funds to support the expensive rescue choppers by tax income. Kuopio, the town which I live in, has about 93 000 citizens. The rescue chopper service in this region (http://www.ilmarihems.fi/index.php) has been for a while doing rather badly financially, i guess, so the public has been given a choice to donate the money they get from recycling the bottles/cans to the rescue chopper company. so that's why. I buy beer to support a rescue chopper.

I don't know if there's any recycling system as effective as ours in use anywhere in US. Or any other country, for that matter. I really hope there is.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong. I remember reading from a "State of The World" -book (don't know which year that was) that so much aluminum in soda/beer cans is wasted globally each year, that all of the world's aeroplanes could be remade 1.5 times. Every year. That's a LOT of beer and soda cans....