triangulum

MailMate https://freron.com/

> MailMate is not the most widespread, the cheapest, or the greatest looking email client, but I also have no aspiration to MailMate ever being any of these. Instead, MailMate aspires to be the most powerful, the most flexible, the most efficient, the most standards compliant, and the most secure email client.

This is very surprising for a country like Germany, which has a long history of providing public services for the common good, rather than profit oriented motives.

On the other hand, a comparably developed country like Australia is seeing many essential services being privatised, but the weather service rightfully remains a sacred government entity, with a high amount of public trust. http://www.bom.gov.au/app/

> With the BOM Weather app you can check the weather—wherever you are—from Australia's official weather source, the Bureau of Meteorology.

Also have a look at Sci-Hub.

That’s a good point: if municipalities want you to recycle, they need to provide the necessary infrastructure, and that means at least three source separated bins (ideally 5-7), and a clean container collection system. Otherwise it just turns people off the whole system. A financial incentive to save money when you don’t throw away as much into the landfill bin helps too.

Any chance you could compost the kitchen scraps in your garden?

Right, I'm talking about technically feasible solutions. And it is entirely feasible to power the world with clean, renewable energy. We have the solar capacity to meet hundreds of times our current energy capacity (using less land space than our existing roads). And over 530,000 potential pumped-hydro sites worldwide to store that energy (of which we'd only need a tiny fraction). For example, there are 22,000 sites in Australia, of which we'd only need 20. The research shows that cost will be a non-issue.

http://energy.anu.edu.au/news-events/anu-finds-530000-potent...

Everything else comes down to barriers in the economic and political domains.

There are plenty of landfill gas capture systems around. Veolia are particularly proud of their so-called "Bio-reactor". These kinds of systems don't work as well as advertised, but if you have a landfill, it's better than nothing. https://www.veolia.com/anz/our-services/our-facilities/landf...

But as others have been saying, it makes much more sense to simply bury the food in your garden. Or collect food waste on a municipal level, which has, for example, been the law in Germany since 2015.

The "dry fermentation" system used in Munich is a particularly good example. They collect food waste in the city, compost and ferment it in a big sealed hall near the soccer stadium, wait 12 weeks for the bacteria to work, collect the resulting biogas to put into their gas network (or power garbage trucks), and sell the leftover organic compost and fertilisers to local residents and farmers. A closed and sustainable cycle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF0gU9ljHo4

https://www.awm-muenchen.de/fileadmin/PDF-Dokumente/awm/Fold...

"I'd be more than happy to support food waste recycling if someone can provide good evidence that it actually is environmentally beneficial."

I'd suggest checking out a resource like "City to Soil": https://www.gerrygillespie.net/city-to-soil.html or "Ecologically sustainable recovery of bio-waste" https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/37... or anything at "Zero Waste Europe" https://zerowasteeurope.eu/.

The key points: Food is the basis of the human economy. Collecting and composting food waste closes the loop and completes the nutrient cycle in the soil we use to grow food.

Not to mention: half the problems we have with traditional dirty landfills is that the unsorted food waste starts to decompose (releasing methane) and creates a hot environment that causes everything else to degrade in a toxic manner. As soon as you take it out, you have a "dry" landfill, where currently unrecyclable single-use things can be stored in GPS-tagged storage sites, until someone finds a better use for them and/or we start to phase them out.

"to me sustainability is about how long you can keep doing something [...] glass is infinitely recyclable, the plastic isn't"

Exactly - it's about reuse (ie. infinitely recyclable), and the shift in thinking that comes along with that.

Burning plastic releases toxic byproducts into the local environment, and requires us to use more fossil fuel hydrocarbons to make new plastic.

On the other hand, instead of transporting glass bottles across half the country, why not refill them in a local bottling plant, using local produce? Glass bottles can be washed 50-100 times, and after that they can simply be remade into new glass.

In Germany today, there are 5 standard glass beer bottles that everyone uses, so they can be refilled by local breweries all around the country. If a country is thinking of implementing a similar system, it would also be wise to invest in container deposit scheme, to ensure the bottles get returned in a good condition for reuse. Return rates in Germany are upwards of 98%.

It wasn't long ago, when our parents/grandparents/great-grandparents were getting milk delivered in glass bottles, to be washed, refilled and reused. We could easily go back to those more sustainable plastic-free times.