New neighbors with styrofoam

Pearl Sutton wrote:It's not permie, but I use a lot of the stuff. To my eyes, it's being wasted, and anything removed from the waste stream is a good thing. Especially something that is hard to dispose of. If properly constrained it's quite useful. I wouldn't buy it new, and I'd rather it didn't get used for a lot of the things it's used for (like packaging material, that's a TOTAL waste of a high energy embodied product) but I will happily harvest a bunch of it that is headed someplace worse.

Greg Martin wrote:Pearl mentioned the high embodied energy....yup, it's pretty much a solid version of oil.  If you have a rocket mass heater you can drop some small pieces in onto the burning wood once the system is going good and hot.  It will flare up as it thermally depolymerizes back into liquid fuel....lots of heat given off so if you can use the heat that would be my way of using it (since I live in the cold north).  

Nancy Reading wrote:I wonder if it could be encapsulated somehow and still make use of it's properties...Do you have a use for a floating island perhaps? I'm imagining it either mixed in concrete or encapsulated in a concrete box.  Other than that anything that needs keeping hot or cold?  Pity it isn't practical to ship it to Arthur for his foundations.

John F Dean wrote:Well, I haven’t looked at it yet, but this thread tells me I should have a look to be polite.  I will take the lead from Doug and take some hot homemade bread with me ( hey, those canning jars are getting hard to find). Frankly, prior to this thread, I wasn’t going to look.

Dan Boone wrote:
 But for me, the key phrase is "properly constrained".  I simply don't know how to do that with styrofoam.  Every piece of stryo eventually breaks down into those horrid little white pellets.  If it's built into the wall, then when my building rots, falls down, or blows away in a tornado, those little pellets go everywhere.  If I sew it up inside textiles, those textiles eventually rot or fail, then, same story.  It might work for me this week, this month, this year, but unless I get lucky enough to die before my containment systems fail, I'm going to meet those dreadful little pellets all over my property eventually.  

I went through this with plastic containers for my container garden in the early years.  I was desperate, I would use anything.  Some things (like 2l soda bottles) fail gracefully, and can be reintroduced to the waste stream when they get too broken down to use.  But most plastics (unless built thick or with UV blocker chemicals) eventually turn into little shards.  I'm still dealing with the hangover of those little shards in my soil, from milk bottles, garage sale ice buckets, any kind of dollar store buckets or pails, any kind of cheap plastic containers at all.  I had real good reasons to use cheap plastic containers and I might do it it again in similar circumstances, but it taught me to be careful about taking stuff out of the waste stream if it won't last forever and I'm gonna have a fight trying to pick up the little pieces when it's time to send it on its way to wherever "away" is.  

Minna Gantz wrote:I have used styrofoam peanuts (recycled from shipping) instead of pebbles at the bottom of containers pots for my balcony garden to reduce weight.

John F Dean wrote:
I dont have a problem with plastic. If it had been high density styrofoam in 1 ft by 4 ft  pieces and not mixed with garbage, I would have been all over it.  I am not anti plastic.   I agree that it is better that I use it rather than ship it to a dump. I am not even anti new plastic.  I am anti having virtually everything made of plastic.  If plastic virtually lasts for ever, then why would we make stuff that we don’t want to last forever made out of it?  And of course, disposable products made of plastic makes absolutely no sense to me.   My quite unscientific estimate is that 99% of our use of new plastic would be stopped by using this criteria.

Gary Numan wrote: "I'm not a fan of styrofoam.  Bulky, difficult to get rid of, limited utility after its intended use has finished.  And lasts forever, unfortunately.  What a tax on the environment that stuff is.

That's why there was an abandoned property with a building full of the stuff!  Can't get rid of it.   Could have just as well been an outbuilding full of old tires.

I recommend you stand fast and stay firm with turning them down.  If you show an interest in it, they may start delivering pickup truck loads of the stuff your way!"

Our Farmers Market has a person who collects all kinds of styrofoam on the first Saturday of each month. She has been a Godsend. Could it be used like vermiculite or will it float up and away?

Greg Martin wrote:Pearl mentioned the high embodied energy....yup, it's pretty much a solid version of oil.  If you have a rocket mass heater you can drop some small pieces in onto the burning wood once the system is going good and hot.  It will flare up as it thermally depolymerizes back into liquid fuel....lots of heat given off so if you can use the heat that would be my way of using it (since I live in the cold north).

There are start up companies out there that take polystyrene products and thermally break them back down to their styrene monomer which can then be used to make new polystyrene products.  That doesn't seem like too bad an option relatively speaking, but probably not yet an easy option at the moment for most folks.