On consumerism, compost, camping, framing, high-density polyethylene, recycling, and doing the right thing.
Like most people these days, I order a lot of stuff. I’m big on buying locally, of course, but there are a lot of things that I simply can’t get locally, at least not without significant expenditures of time and energy.
Pretty often that stuff comes shipped in Tyvek envelopes. Tyvek’s great stuff, in a lot of ways: I’ve worn protective suits made of it while mucking out composting toilets at Farm and Wilderness, I’ve used it as an ultralight groundcloth while camping, and I’ve wrapped houses in it during construction.
Even though it’s just a fancy HDPE plastic, envelopes made of Tyvek are not generally recyclable. The same plastic (#2) in bottle form is easy to recycle; some places, like San Francisco, even allow recycling of HDPE tubs; but almost no one will recycle HDPE envelopes.
Turns out, however, that DuPont themselves will recycle your Tyvek envelopes, free of charge. Take one Tyvek envelope, turn it inside out, fill it with other Tyvek envelopes, and address it to:
Tyvek Recycle
Attn. Shirley Cimburke
2400 Elliham Avenue #A
Richmond, VA 23237
I guess that’s not totally free of charge: You have to pay a bit of postage.
And it’s a bit strange shipping stuff back across the country to be recycled. Is it worth the energy use? In other words, is the energy used by the shipping back, and then the recycling itself, less than the energy wasted by simply throwing the envelopes out? Maybe I should write Shirley a note.
2 Comments, Comment
Anthony
What about the suits? Can you ship them the suits too?
Although, I use a Tyvek suit every year to pull up the poison ivy that creeps from my neighbor’s yard and into mine and Tyvek probably won’t take it back with poison ivy juices all over it.
February 12, 2008 at 10:04 AM
Chris Boone
Ha. Surely don’t know. In theory, I can’t see why not. But in practice, everyone who uses those suits uses them for toxic stuff. Like you.
Let me know how it goes if you try.
February 12, 2008 at 11:07 PM
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