Which is greener???

BFG_2

My OH and myself are in disagreement at the moment.

We have a roller shutter garage door, which is opened and closed by a electric motor.

Whenever we have an empty plastic bottle we open the garage door to allow us to put the bottle into a re-cycling crate, then we close the door again.

Are we actually more environmentally efficient by simply throwing away the bottle or does the 'goodness' of recycling a 2 ltr pop bottle outweigh the 'badness' of two lots of 'door motor electricity'??


BTW....we don't need anyone to tell us to
1. Store in the kitchen until you have enough to make it worth opening the door
2. Don't store in the garage
3. Manually open the door...for exercise!!! lol
4. make you own pop

lol

Pippilongstocking

Do you have a garden?

Thinking of the old reduce, reuse, recycle mantra......

Also thinking that if you don't want folk to say 'make your own pop' then obviously not buying it in first place isnt an option ie 'reduce'. We don't have pop in house, but then again we live in a dictatorship! We only get it v occasionally, but the water is good where we live.

Therefore rather than recycling - how about reusing? Mind you, I guess you have probably thought of that one already, but here goes.

Bottles good for gardens, cloches, making your own greenhouse (seen some really good ones) or google for some other sites like this?

http://www.make-stuff.com/recycling/plastic_bottles.html

I can imagine the energy used for opening and closing garage door makes you think about it alot, buy the electricity from a green provider? Then if you are using it at least its 'good electricity'. Or work out how much it uses and plant some equivalent trees?!

Can't in heart advocate putting bottle into bin - hope you come up with something!!

lxpeanut

I don't know how much energy a door opener uses as it opens and shuts. The energy savings of recycling aren't the only benefit so I suspect it is still better to recycle it.

Is there any reason why the bottle can't wait to be taken into the garage when you go in there for other reasons rather than making a special visit? I would suggest doing that or putting in another door so you can get in and out without opening the main garage door.

mech_2

It is claimed that you conserve enough energy by recycling a 2 litre plastic bottle to "light a 60 watt bulb for 6 hours". That means 360 watt-hours of energy saved.

The garage door opener uses, what, 300 watts absolute maximum, surely? And takes certainly less than 30 seconds to open or close. If those figures do apply, that's only one minute at 300 watts for both an opening and a close. Or 5 watt-hours. It seems the bottle wins by a long way. The energy use for the door is tiny as it's on for such short amounts of time.

If the garage door has a wireless remote, the standby consumption of the receiver is probably higher than the consumption of opening and closing unless you open and close a couple of dozen times a day.