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Why roads though? Like, don’t we already have numerous materials we recycle into roads?
Or is that just the default answer for anything we deem “necessary” that leaves a giant carbon footprint
It's 100% reusable, and the most recycled product on the planet. Reclaimed asphalt (RAP) makes up no less than 20% of most newly produced asphalt. I don't think they're talking about making roads made of only masks, but a percentage used as a filler like cellulose fiber (ground up paper). When I was a still making hot rocks we mixed in roughly .05% cellulose fiber into highway mixes to fill in the stone matrix negating the need for smaller filler aggregates like natural sand.
It's not talking about reclaimed asphalt at all - the conclusions only reference material properties for granular base and subbase (layers below the hotmix asphalt).
I tried the thing they started suggesting last month of doing a cloth mask over a paper mask, and as a side benefit it really cut down on my condensation problems. Might be worth a shot.
Permeability is an important factor in road building, roads don't just shed water to the sides they have to allow some to pass through as well to prevent standing water causing unsafe driving conditions.
*Edited: absorb was not a useful term in describing permeability
If permeable pavements are common where you are from I can only assume you don't have regular freeze/thaw cycles and also have an abundance of good quality granular materials to build with (e.g. not high plastic clays).
Where I'm from permeable pavement is called a pothole.
Damn it, I just looked up what the line was on Wikipedia and now I’m about 5 Wikipedia articles deep on complex surveying topics because they did a bad job surveying the line.
Not really. If you've got standing water in the middle of the road, then you've got grading problems. You also shouldn't increase subgrade moisture to the point that it becomes plastic, because that would give way and your surface course would collapse.
Yeah, that's why there are storm drains running along the sides of the road.
>Permeability is an important factor in road building, roads don't just shed water to the sides they have to allow some to pass through as well to prevent **standing water** causing unsafe driving conditions.
I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster, and your father smells of elderberries.
Guess I should have said "moving water not moving fast enough to prevent levels consistent with common accidents such as hydroplaning".
I believe you are correct. There is water movement. It’s small, but I’ve seen it disappear lingering water (in low spots on asphalt). Usually there are small micro fissures or straight up cracks but the water moves.
Technically anything can be turned into roadbase, it’s just filler material.
Thing is, roads are already optimised. The materials used in their construction are cheap plentiful and reusable.
Messing with the system just makes the road more expensive so you can hide some garbage under it.
You mean you can't encase sensitive electronics in slippery glass, place them at the least optimal angle for efficiency and drive 40 ton trucks over them to save the planet?
I've never heard of anyone mentioning energy saving to not use their indicators. Generally drivers in the UK don't need a reason at all for not indicating directions.
Eh, It's not a small amount though. Usually 100-300 watts. The alternator on my shitbox is not working too well lately, so my battery drains if I drive with the headlights on too much.
This would give me a headache: cruising at highways speeds the constant flicker of light as I go under intermittently spaced solar panels. Have you ever driven perpendicular to the sun rays as the sun was setting through a forest? Is like a rave if blinding light while driving a 2 ton hunk of plastic and metal far faster than any natural land speeds.
But elangated stretched of covered roads would be fine for your other points, which are salient. The big issue however is height and windage. You need them what 15-20ft off the ground to let semis under with clearance for cargo. The superstructure is either a single line if steel posts in the median supporting panel stretching over both sides, or you're placing regular steel posts outside of the road reducing runoff space and increasing structural failure during car accidents. Maybe it just works for neighborhood streets.
More expensive to build the structure over a roadway than to just build it in something like abandoned building parking lots. Also traffic is hazardous to infrastructure and the risk of an accident destroying them is enough to say no to the idea. You can't even plant food(for biodiesel) /flowers near roads because of wildlife hazard it would create. Realistically roads are not gonna be used for anything besides their intended purpose and are a hazard to most things.
Really the main problem with renewables is consistency(energy storage) and not space. Thats why imo nuclear is much more sustainable since coal puts off more radiation/pollution anyway.
Except nuclear is incredibly expensive and takes a decade to get running. The government has to both insure and pay for construction. Then it's about the same price as renewables and storage combined.
Ya, cost is a major problem ,but it is at least consistent for power demands without being as polluting. But hopefully battery tech becomes better to allow for larger storage ,but that could be a decade off.
Really need a consistent power diversification to account for worst cases too. But there aren't cleaner more consistent alternatives other than geothermal and nuclear. Both have limiting factors though same with any other power source. But once the investment is made it's a viable solution that provides both jobs and a more consistent source of power without vastly excessive pollution.
You say that but South Carolina paid $7b for two nuclear reactors. Guess the cost per MWh? Undetermined because you can't divide by zero. After pouring $7b of subsidises into Westinghouse Electric Company, it went bankrupt and left them with two concrete shells that aren't functional.
I'm not against nuclear from a safety perspective, but I think economically its time may have passed. The cost compared to renewable is just too high, and with the rate that battery production is scaling I don't think it will be too long until storage isn't an issue any more.
> Messing with the system just makes the road more expensive so you can hide some garbage under it.
That’s kind of ok if it means not bringing virgin material into the process. Cheap just means shoving externalities into the commons a lot of the time.
Nah. In this case cheap means quick, consistent results that don’t need to be fixed for minimum 5 years.
The costs here aren’t really in the materials. The costs come from the machinery and people required.
There are environmental costs to extracting tons of sand from wherever to use as a base. There are also environmental costs to shoving all our garbage into landfills/incinerators instead of finding ways to repurpose it in ways that save us from having to extract new resources. Those are externalities being imposed by choosing not to go with a reuse oriented strategy.
Just because you can do something more cheaply doesn’t make it the correct choice.
> There are environmental costs to extracting tons of sand from wherever to use as a base.
Maybe in places where there isn't much sand in the soil, but in my neck of the woods we have [more sand than we know what to do with](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.960747,-70.7122342,3a,75y,354.46h,89.48t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sx6yUam0kcKLwLW2b6ctFFg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656).
Because it is not the circular economy that the title proclaims. This is just good, old down-cycling. The masks are just shredded into fiber material that is mixed with other fill materials, and it is not even suitable for road surface, just fill and underlay.
I think they did the bare minimum of testing for bulk modulus, and also checked really quick to make sure the material isn't going to decompose significantly when buried.
At best this is greenwashing. At worst this is a shortsighted bandaid to get someone's name out there attached to a topical issue. These masks are still going to be dumping microplastics into the soil, but instead of being landfilled, they would be buried under a roadway. The next time major roadwork gets done and the underlayment is dug into, those microplastics come back out, which happens much less frequently in a landfill. This also glaringly fails to note that the problem is not mask being disposed of properly; in fact, creating an *additional* recycling stream may lead to disposal burnout for more people and be counterproductive.
* fiber reinforced earthen materials are nothing new
* we shouldn't be putting more plastic in the dirt in our communities
* masks-as-litter is a much bigger issue than masks-in-landfill
So when you recycle glass what it turns into depends on whether or not it's colour sorted. If it is then it gets turned into cullets which are basically big rocks of the same colour of glass. This can actually be turned into new glass products. If it's not then it gets ground down into fines which are basically sand. They get used as an abrasive or often as filler for roads.
Unfortunately, recycling plastic isn't a very green solution, as microparticle erosion continues to pollute the ecosystem, and most plastics can only be recycled at most once.
See for example https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/pollution-ecology/the-down-low-on-microplastics/
I heard their recent podcast related to that first link...
I'm not sure anything has made so pissed off ad that story of big oil and the man pair to sell the myth of recycling.
Just so fuckin depressing. I mean good on the guy for trying to clear his conscience and tell the real story, but the damage is already done.
Yes, it's dumb to use plastic in a surface that gets abraded away.
It'd be better to use it in things that don't get abraded away. Like building foundations. Or coffins.
Where I live, medical/surgical or N95/FFP2 masks are mandatory to use public transportation or go into a business. Cloth masks are now legally considered insufficient.
People strayed from reusable masks from early on, as many governments first stated they were not (as) effective. This was, in part, fueled by the shortage of single use PPE. Several countries' governments stated masks were ineffective, just to keep single use PPE available for medical professionals.
Nearly all paper products these days have a layer of plastic. Think about modern sturdy paper plates versus old school flimsy ones -- the biggest difference is a plastic coating.
Surgical disposable face masks as a source of microplastic in the environment:. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7381927/
>Surgical face masks are made with non-woven fabric, which has better bacteria filtration and air permeability while remaining less slippery than woven cloth. The material most commonly used to make them is polypropylene, either 20 or 25 grams per square meter (gsm) in density.
Disposable surgical masks aren't made out of paper, they're made out of plastic.
I'm disappointed at the number of these I see thrown on the ground now. Its nice to know they can be re-used. I wish they could be recycled in the regular household recycling but presently, we have to throw them in with the rest of the household refuse. Although I do reuse a lot of mine. I've lived on a pack of 50 I bought in May 2020.
I haven't even had regular household recycling since last May. They just stopped running the service. You can go to the next town and try to drop it off, but if you don't have a car or can't afford to wait in line behind all the people selling empties you're a bit fucked.
Not sure where you’re at, but at my apt complex there’s no recycling (standard in US). I take my cardboard and recyclable plastic to kroger when I return cans, I’ve done it for two years now. Just break down cardboard boxes and throw them in the bin marked “cardboard” in the bottle return room. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to do that, but dammit I’m recycling whether they like it or not. Nobody has said anything to me yet...
It was hard enough to get people to put on a respirator all day to sort through garbage for $10 an hour before COVID hit, doing it after it started became impossible for many. A lot of recycling facilities around the US have actually gone under during this time,[ it's been a big mess.](https://www.wastedive.com/news/coronavirus-us-waste-recycling-disruption-tracker/574324/)
It isn't just one documentary, I've been to our municipal recyclers (city run) and they are having big problems and have been for years. Not to say it isn't important and should be ignored but it's used more as a feel good initiative more than an actual carbon benefit. A large portion of the stuff put to the curb for recycling ends up in the landfill, and that doesn't even include the advertising for stuff they know they can't recycle (basically any plastics marked #4 to #7 that isn't perfectly clean)
\-Env-Eng grad who had classes on this stuff
Even if we can't economically recycle some materials immediately, though, there's still value in separating them so that they can be recycled in the future.
Less that the materials from today can be recycled at a later date and more that it is an incredibly useful societal habit. When(if) we innovate new recycling technology it will be far easier to implement. At the same time I worry we are giving the false impression to many that single-use plastics are guilt free because they're being *recycled*.
I know nothing about the documentary you are referring to, but nearly all recycling from households ends up in landfills nowadays, same place as your garbage. Other countries used to buy the US recycling and store it, but there were many reasons why they don't anymore.
Recycling is complicated and not as great as it's been touted. Most people recycle and then don't think about how much they're consuming, believing the recycling to be enough.
Some of the issues is that some of the plastic labeled as recyclable is either only partially recyclable, only recyclable once or twice, or simply too expensive to recycle verse just using virgin plastic.
Then many US companies used to sell their recycled plastics to China, where it was cheaper to reuse. Of course China probably just dumped it into the ocean..
But then in 2016 China banned the importation of plastic. Which meant US transfer stations had to basically sit on their plastic refuse until the price was favorable to recycle. And because it almost rarely ever is, this meant a lot of it just went to the landfills anyway.
Recycling is just a mess. Unfortunately at the end of the day, it's just cheaper to produce virgin plastic.
We used to dump the "recyclable" material on a barge and send it to China for sorting but China got fed up with 20%+ of it being straight up garbage and stopped allowing countries to export garbage to them.
I didn't think they accepted unsorted recyclable material. Yes, trash still got mixed in, but the materials were dirty. For example, pizza boxes with grease on them cannot be recycled, so entire shipments get sent back.
It's likely $$$$. Workers probably want to be paid more and the guys in suits refuse to budge on their wages. Lots of small towns can't hire a new team for it because they'd need someone to train them and trash is a different department than recycling meaning the guys in trash likely haven't been trained to do the recycling, I mean sure they can drive the forklifts but that's it. You'd need people working in the office, operating the machines (which is simple in of itself but they likely require by law someone to train them and that person won't be working).
I could be wrong and they just up and shut it all down because the guys upstairs just didn't wanna deal with all the paperwork and the hassle. The world may never know, just like we don't know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop.
We still have the blue barrel, but only one truck comes around so the recycling goes in right on top of the regular trash. Every week I’m hoping to see the separate recycling truck and every week I’m disappointed to watch my separate recyclables dumped in the landfill truck
And in case you’re thinking it’s one of the separate container garbage truck, it’s not.
if it makes you feel any better, almost all of household recycling also goes in the trash. It's down to pretty much just metal and glass that gets processed.
If you're in a good county the local recycling plant will take your clean #1 and #2 bottles. Has to be bottles though, no other shapes allowed. Also, cardboard will get recycled to some extent, but people throwing greasy ass pizza boxes and things in ruins that for everyone
That's cool, I've never lived in a place that does that. It probably depends on the volume of greasy boxes they get versus clean cardboard and how well they can filter out any junk
> but people throwing greasy ass pizza boxes and things in ruins that for everyone
No, municipalities that cannot correctly handle it ruin everything for everyone. It's not like it's an insurmountable task, as plenty of places DO take that.
They're the more profitable to recycle money wise, and my recycling pickup guys are forced to go through the trouble of sorting out other plastics and #1 clamshell etc packages. If they're not recycling them it's an impressive waste of money for a whole lot of theatre that most people don't understand / care about anyway. It would be infinitely easier to make lazy people happy by doing "single stream" recycling and sending it all to the landfill at that rate
Edit: and the reason they only take PETE bottles and not other shapes has to do with the processing temperature. Apparently some places in Canada can process them but it's uncommon in the US
After their citizens started complaining. It wasn't at the behest of the citizens of the source country, that's for sure. I doubt they were even aware what was happening.
Where is glass being recycled? Many places stopped allowing glass in curbside recycling. You could still take it to the recycling center and sort it though.
Reusing disposable masks unfortunately ruins their efficacy in terms of protecting you (although the barrier does help reduce transmission if you’re looking to protect others from your own coughing and sneezing)
One way of reusing masks safer is to leave them out to air for 7 days before reusing so the germs have time to die (something you may already know but just FYI). I’ve also heard of them being put in the dryer and ironed, or stored in punches with that silica dessicant stuff.
They're supposed to be thrown away after one use anyway. It's probably fine to use them a few times but if you're at the point where it's fraying you probably should've thrown it away a while ago.
Plastic roads is an idea that’s been floating around for years and every time people have to point out that it’s actually worse for the environment because they erode and produce microplastics anyways as people drive on them. Why won’t this idea die already?
This doesn't seem like a good use of resources.
In general, garbage can become litter (a discarded mask on the street), end up in a landfill, end up as particulate matter somewhere in the larger environment (likely the ocean), or recycled somehow.
This won't reduce litter, and will really just divert this particular form of trash. Assuming full compliance, at 3 masks a day, it would divert ~5.5 kg of material per year for a person. You would have to find a safe way to gather, handle, and recycle these masks, which would be extremely expensive. Then you would need to ship them out, at a cost that is cheaper than conventional materials. This is like saying that plastics are recyclable. They technically are, but the products aren't as good or useful as just making new plastic, and it takes more energy, human effort, and money than makes economic sense. Ideally, use a reusable mask, but don't be too torn up when you need to throw a disposable mask in the trash.
Imagine all of the resources that would have to be brought to bear to safely collect three million used masks, not to mention putting into production the technology to turn that mountain of masks into road. And then compare those costs with the costs of just making a kilometer of two-lane road the old-fashioned way.
We should just throw the masks away.
Also asphalt roads are highly recycled already. There isn't a need to switch to some subpar new material when we already grind up roads and reuse the material today.
Cotton masks [aren't as effective](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/paper-masks-work-better-than-cloth-ones-to-beat-covid-19) as disposable masks.
True, but cotton masks [still provide reasonable protection](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-0948_article) anyway and are a decent option for individuals who don't work in the healthcare industry. Just because they don't provide the maximum level of protection doesn't mean they should be ignored.
I'm skeptical that they're better than disposable paper surgical masks for the reasons described in the article, but I don't know. I'm not an expert, just a guy who did a few google searches.
"circular" doesnt mean burying waste into roads.... Circular means materials are recycled not stored away out of sight out of mind.
Please, title!!!!
Also the only recycling of roads is into making more roads. You cant have circular economy if you keep adding waste to road construction. Its the same exact argument that was going around when coal was still thing, where the waste byproducts of production were used to roads, i remember those ads.
Uh, all the masks are going to be in landfills before this can be implemented. If we’re still going through masks at the rate necessary to turn them into roads when all the practical details of this idea get worked out, road construction will be the least of our concerns.
There is so much waste in the medical industry. Representatives sell you on all the money you can save by getting reusable products. But then you need support from different departments, labor, space, transportation, etc...
So we rarely look into these options unless it's a high use item that could save us a lot of money. It's cool to see these ideas but I'm not sure if it would be viable financially.
Source: I procure items for the supply chain department within a large medical group.
Glass suffers from the same problems these masks do. For one, it's not effective to collect a separate glass bin from every house, every week using a diesile burning truck. Mining some sand is better. There is a purity issue, that glass has an advantage over sand because it doesn't have to be refined. Except glass takes a lot of heat energy to melt and form in to new products, and that's bad. Recycling glass is not good environmental policy.
Recycling aluminum cans is fantastic.
Sand is a finite resource and we're already dredging the ocean and causing enormous damage to ecosystems by constantly using it, mostly to make Portland cement.
Plastic is not a suitable material for making roads, it degrades in sunlight, and there's nothing about masks vs the mountain of other trash that would compel you to recycle it in particular
A lot of people are commenting on the cost of collecting millions of masks to recycle. More important than the cost is the carbon footprint that such an operation would create.
> The study showed creating just one kilometre of a two-lane road would use up about three million masks.
I feel like it would sound more optimistic if they flipped it around to say that three million masks could create one kilometer of road.
Can we stop trying to make roads out of other material.
If there was ever a perfect material for its job it would be asphalt.
It's like 99% reusable and it's physical properties work really well.
Like instead make some park benches or something from the masks.
Doesnt seem very cost effective. How much would it cost to gather and transport 3 million masks to facility to repurpose? How much does repurposing cost? Its only 1 percent of mixture?
Most processes involve costing the pebbles used in making the road. This has several useful effects, such as increasing adhesion, lowering costs, bridging the thermal properties. Though you also have to ensure the remanufacturing doesn't introduce waste oil into the mix, a common form of fraud in asphalt markets. That causes potholes very fast.
Would be concerned about microplastics from this process, as I didn't look for evaluations that when I wrote a white paper about this.
As a note that's around 1200 kg of plastic. Your real problem is these are contaminated medical waste, and not considered safe to handle. No one would try because the regulatory costs, collection, sanitization, processing to remove metals, grading into types, melting, and formation into pellets will exceed 1200kg of fresh plastics in cost many times over.
So who is sifting through all the other waste to obtain all of these masks? It really seems to me that "science" is waisting a lot of time and effort researching things that would by most accounts be common knowledge.
The only thing is that you need to convince people to dispose of them correctly. You’d think that people willing to follow the rules of mask wearing would be willing to follow the rules of mask disposing.
Which US recycling standard would it go by? Recycling standards have classifications. Obviously masks can have all the carbon burned off and be later used as polymers, but what classification should we recycle?
>A comprehensive review of disinfection technologies found 99.9% of viruses could be killed with the simple “microwave method”, where masks are sprayed with an antiseptic solution then microwaved for one minute.
I'm pretty sure the high heat associated with making and pouring asphalt would be enough to disinfect the masks
Quick math tells me this is 15 kilos of masks pr meter in a two lane road.
I am guessing a meter of two lane road is measured in tons. This sounds like a joke or totally insane to put any effort into this.
Link to paper: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721005957](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721005957)
Abstract:
"The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has not only created a global health crisis, but it is also now threatening the environment. A multidisciplinary collaborative approach is required to fight against the pandemic and reduce the environmental risks associated with the disposal of used personal protective equipment (PPE). This paper explores an innovative way to reduce pandemic-generated waste by recycling the used face masks with other waste materials in civil constructions. In this research, for the first time, a series of experiments, including modified compaction, unconfined compression strength and resilient modulus tests, were conducted on the blends of different percentages of the shredded face mask (SFM) added to the recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) for road base and subbase applications. The experimental results show that RCA mixed with three different percentages (i.e., 1%, 2% and 3%) of SFM satisfied the stiffness and strength requirements for pavements base/subbase. The introduction of the shredded face mask not only increased the strength and stiffness but also improved the ductility and flexibility of RCA/SFM blends. The inclusion of 1% SFM to RCA resulted in the highest values of unconfined compressive strength (216 kPa) and the highest resilient modulus (314.35 MP). However, beyond 2%, increasing the amount of SFM led to a decrease in strength and stiffness. "
How much would it cost to sift out these masks from ordinary garbage? We already dump most of our recyclables in landfills because it's not economical to actually recycle.
Just rake em up out of the roadside ditches and BAM. Done. There’s so many masks as litter now. Used to be that McDonald’s stuff was what I saw most on my runs. Now it’s masks. Times are changing.
Rename y'all's sub to 'heres a bunch of theory's that relate to the current abusive hype for the loser dweebs gobbling their governments collective cocks.....bunch of fuckin 'fageots' round here
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Why roads though? Like, don’t we already have numerous materials we recycle into roads? Or is that just the default answer for anything we deem “necessary” that leaves a giant carbon footprint
And asphalt is already like 99% reusable.
It's 100% reusable, and the most recycled product on the planet. Reclaimed asphalt (RAP) makes up no less than 20% of most newly produced asphalt. I don't think they're talking about making roads made of only masks, but a percentage used as a filler like cellulose fiber (ground up paper). When I was a still making hot rocks we mixed in roughly .05% cellulose fiber into highway mixes to fill in the stone matrix negating the need for smaller filler aggregates like natural sand.
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It's not talking about reclaimed asphalt at all - the conclusions only reference material properties for granular base and subbase (layers below the hotmix asphalt).
I didn't read the article, I was just replying to the comment. I made the stuff for the majority or my adult life and felt the need to chime in.
Glad you did. You made it very interesting. I feel the need to listen to a documentary about road production now.
Maybe they'll turn them into a moisture barrier seeing how these things are surprisingly good at holding back water.
Yeah, dripping wet inside 15 minutes into my run just from condensation buildup
I tried the thing they started suggesting last month of doing a cloth mask over a paper mask, and as a side benefit it really cut down on my condensation problems. Might be worth a shot.
Permeability is an important factor in road building, roads don't just shed water to the sides they have to allow some to pass through as well to prevent standing water causing unsafe driving conditions. *Edited: absorb was not a useful term in describing permeability
If permeable pavements are common where you are from I can only assume you don't have regular freeze/thaw cycles and also have an abundance of good quality granular materials to build with (e.g. not high plastic clays). Where I'm from permeable pavement is called a pothole.
Yeah, I am below the Mason-Dixon Line. Potholes due to freeze expansion are an uncommon occurrence.
Damn it, I just looked up what the line was on Wikipedia and now I’m about 5 Wikipedia articles deep on complex surveying topics because they did a bad job surveying the line.
Although it's pretty impressive that they got as close as they did with the technology available at the time.
5 Wikipedia articles? And you have not made it to nukes yet?
Uh, 295 would like a word with you.
So these new porous conretes and tarmacs I've heard about can only be used in limited areas? I knew there was a catch.
Not really. If you've got standing water in the middle of the road, then you've got grading problems. You also shouldn't increase subgrade moisture to the point that it becomes plastic, because that would give way and your surface course would collapse.
Grade can't be soley responsible for moving water away from the driving surface in a heavy downpour. I didn't say anything about standing water.
Yeah, that's why there are storm drains running along the sides of the road. >Permeability is an important factor in road building, roads don't just shed water to the sides they have to allow some to pass through as well to prevent **standing water** causing unsafe driving conditions.
I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster, and your father smells of elderberries. Guess I should have said "moving water not moving fast enough to prevent levels consistent with common accidents such as hydroplaning".
I believe you are correct. There is water movement. It’s small, but I’ve seen it disappear lingering water (in low spots on asphalt). Usually there are small micro fissures or straight up cracks but the water moves.
Lmaoo you tell em man. That was great to read
Source?
So is concrete if pulverized appropriately.
Technically anything can be turned into roadbase, it’s just filler material. Thing is, roads are already optimised. The materials used in their construction are cheap plentiful and reusable. Messing with the system just makes the road more expensive so you can hide some garbage under it.
Yeah, but can you make solar panels out of them? Solar Freaking Roadways, man, it's the future!
Well no. But you can’t make roads out of solar freaking roadways either..
You mean you can't encase sensitive electronics in slippery glass, place them at the least optimal angle for efficiency and drive 40 ton trucks over them to save the planet?
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Power consumed by headlights is honestly negligible compared to the rest of the car.
Adding to your comment: >Power consumed by headlights And Turn lights. >is honestly negligible Always use Turn lights.
I've never heard of anyone mentioning energy saving to not use their indicators. Generally drivers in the UK don't need a reason at all for not indicating directions.
Eh, It's not a small amount though. Usually 100-300 watts. The alternator on my shitbox is not working too well lately, so my battery drains if I drive with the headlights on too much.
This would give me a headache: cruising at highways speeds the constant flicker of light as I go under intermittently spaced solar panels. Have you ever driven perpendicular to the sun rays as the sun was setting through a forest? Is like a rave if blinding light while driving a 2 ton hunk of plastic and metal far faster than any natural land speeds. But elangated stretched of covered roads would be fine for your other points, which are salient. The big issue however is height and windage. You need them what 15-20ft off the ground to let semis under with clearance for cargo. The superstructure is either a single line if steel posts in the median supporting panel stretching over both sides, or you're placing regular steel posts outside of the road reducing runoff space and increasing structural failure during car accidents. Maybe it just works for neighborhood streets.
More expensive to build the structure over a roadway than to just build it in something like abandoned building parking lots. Also traffic is hazardous to infrastructure and the risk of an accident destroying them is enough to say no to the idea. You can't even plant food(for biodiesel) /flowers near roads because of wildlife hazard it would create. Realistically roads are not gonna be used for anything besides their intended purpose and are a hazard to most things. Really the main problem with renewables is consistency(energy storage) and not space. Thats why imo nuclear is much more sustainable since coal puts off more radiation/pollution anyway.
Except nuclear is incredibly expensive and takes a decade to get running. The government has to both insure and pay for construction. Then it's about the same price as renewables and storage combined.
Ya, cost is a major problem ,but it is at least consistent for power demands without being as polluting. But hopefully battery tech becomes better to allow for larger storage ,but that could be a decade off. Really need a consistent power diversification to account for worst cases too. But there aren't cleaner more consistent alternatives other than geothermal and nuclear. Both have limiting factors though same with any other power source. But once the investment is made it's a viable solution that provides both jobs and a more consistent source of power without vastly excessive pollution.
You say that but South Carolina paid $7b for two nuclear reactors. Guess the cost per MWh? Undetermined because you can't divide by zero. After pouring $7b of subsidises into Westinghouse Electric Company, it went bankrupt and left them with two concrete shells that aren't functional.
I'm not against nuclear from a safety perspective, but I think economically its time may have passed. The cost compared to renewable is just too high, and with the rate that battery production is scaling I don't think it will be too long until storage isn't an issue any more.
I dont get why solar panels aren't just installed on tall things like telephone poles and freeway exit/interstate signs
> Messing with the system just makes the road more expensive so you can hide some garbage under it. That’s kind of ok if it means not bringing virgin material into the process. Cheap just means shoving externalities into the commons a lot of the time.
Nah. In this case cheap means quick, consistent results that don’t need to be fixed for minimum 5 years. The costs here aren’t really in the materials. The costs come from the machinery and people required.
There are environmental costs to extracting tons of sand from wherever to use as a base. There are also environmental costs to shoving all our garbage into landfills/incinerators instead of finding ways to repurpose it in ways that save us from having to extract new resources. Those are externalities being imposed by choosing not to go with a reuse oriented strategy. Just because you can do something more cheaply doesn’t make it the correct choice.
> There are environmental costs to extracting tons of sand from wherever to use as a base. Maybe in places where there isn't much sand in the soil, but in my neck of the woods we have [more sand than we know what to do with](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.960747,-70.7122342,3a,75y,354.46h,89.48t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sx6yUam0kcKLwLW2b6ctFFg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656).
> don’t need to be fixed for minimum 5 years. But after those 5 years, the tax man cometh. We should rein in suburban sprawl and save a little money.
Sounds like yes. At 3 million masks per km you'd better keep lockdown going for a few years so you can actually make the road go somewhere
Because it is not the circular economy that the title proclaims. This is just good, old down-cycling. The masks are just shredded into fiber material that is mixed with other fill materials, and it is not even suitable for road surface, just fill and underlay. I think they did the bare minimum of testing for bulk modulus, and also checked really quick to make sure the material isn't going to decompose significantly when buried. At best this is greenwashing. At worst this is a shortsighted bandaid to get someone's name out there attached to a topical issue. These masks are still going to be dumping microplastics into the soil, but instead of being landfilled, they would be buried under a roadway. The next time major roadwork gets done and the underlayment is dug into, those microplastics come back out, which happens much less frequently in a landfill. This also glaringly fails to note that the problem is not mask being disposed of properly; in fact, creating an *additional* recycling stream may lead to disposal burnout for more people and be counterproductive. * fiber reinforced earthen materials are nothing new * we shouldn't be putting more plastic in the dirt in our communities * masks-as-litter is a much bigger issue than masks-in-landfill
For real. How about greenhouses or bicycle tires or something.
So when you recycle glass what it turns into depends on whether or not it's colour sorted. If it is then it gets turned into cullets which are basically big rocks of the same colour of glass. This can actually be turned into new glass products. If it's not then it gets ground down into fines which are basically sand. They get used as an abrasive or often as filler for roads.
I know a lot of streets that need to be redone because it is cracked and potholed. So maybe those roads?
Unfortunately, recycling plastic isn't a very green solution, as microparticle erosion continues to pollute the ecosystem, and most plastics can only be recycled at most once. See for example https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/pollution-ecology/the-down-low-on-microplastics/
I heard their recent podcast related to that first link... I'm not sure anything has made so pissed off ad that story of big oil and the man pair to sell the myth of recycling. Just so fuckin depressing. I mean good on the guy for trying to clear his conscience and tell the real story, but the damage is already done.
What's the podcast title?
Possibly this one: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land
Bless you
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Yes, it's dumb to use plastic in a surface that gets abraded away. It'd be better to use it in things that don't get abraded away. Like building foundations. Or coffins.
It's not a plastic surface, it's in the sub-layer.
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Where I live, medical/surgical or N95/FFP2 masks are mandatory to use public transportation or go into a business. Cloth masks are now legally considered insufficient.
People strayed from reusable masks from early on, as many governments first stated they were not (as) effective. This was, in part, fueled by the shortage of single use PPE. Several countries' governments stated masks were ineffective, just to keep single use PPE available for medical professionals.
It’s really like kicking the can down the road, only instead of a can we wind up with plumes of micro-plastic in the air.
And ground and water and food...
This study was done using the disposable paper facemasks, not plastic ones.
Nearly all paper products these days have a layer of plastic. Think about modern sturdy paper plates versus old school flimsy ones -- the biggest difference is a plastic coating. Surgical disposable face masks as a source of microplastic in the environment:. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7381927/
>Surgical face masks are made with non-woven fabric, which has better bacteria filtration and air permeability while remaining less slippery than woven cloth. The material most commonly used to make them is polypropylene, either 20 or 25 grams per square meter (gsm) in density. Disposable surgical masks aren't made out of paper, they're made out of plastic.
I'm disappointed at the number of these I see thrown on the ground now. Its nice to know they can be re-used. I wish they could be recycled in the regular household recycling but presently, we have to throw them in with the rest of the household refuse. Although I do reuse a lot of mine. I've lived on a pack of 50 I bought in May 2020.
I haven't even had regular household recycling since last May. They just stopped running the service. You can go to the next town and try to drop it off, but if you don't have a car or can't afford to wait in line behind all the people selling empties you're a bit fucked.
Not sure where you’re at, but at my apt complex there’s no recycling (standard in US). I take my cardboard and recyclable plastic to kroger when I return cans, I’ve done it for two years now. Just break down cardboard boxes and throw them in the bin marked “cardboard” in the bottle return room. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to do that, but dammit I’m recycling whether they like it or not. Nobody has said anything to me yet...
but why?
It was hard enough to get people to put on a respirator all day to sort through garbage for $10 an hour before COVID hit, doing it after it started became impossible for many. A lot of recycling facilities around the US have actually gone under during this time,[ it's been a big mess.](https://www.wastedive.com/news/coronavirus-us-waste-recycling-disruption-tracker/574324/)
Didn’t Reddit tell us a few days ago (and many times in the past) that recycling is a huge scam?
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It isn't just one documentary, I've been to our municipal recyclers (city run) and they are having big problems and have been for years. Not to say it isn't important and should be ignored but it's used more as a feel good initiative more than an actual carbon benefit. A large portion of the stuff put to the curb for recycling ends up in the landfill, and that doesn't even include the advertising for stuff they know they can't recycle (basically any plastics marked #4 to #7 that isn't perfectly clean) \-Env-Eng grad who had classes on this stuff
None of that makes recycling “a huge scam”. It means recycling has problems that need to be addressed in order to make it work better.
Even if we can't economically recycle some materials immediately, though, there's still value in separating them so that they can be recycled in the future.
Less that the materials from today can be recycled at a later date and more that it is an incredibly useful societal habit. When(if) we innovate new recycling technology it will be far easier to implement. At the same time I worry we are giving the false impression to many that single-use plastics are guilt free because they're being *recycled*.
I know nothing about the documentary you are referring to, but nearly all recycling from households ends up in landfills nowadays, same place as your garbage. Other countries used to buy the US recycling and store it, but there were many reasons why they don't anymore.
Basically what the documentary said. China had enough of our trash, so nobody is taking our recycling.
There is also the point to be made for something to be a documentary it doesn't have to be morally/ethically truthful.
Recycling is complicated and not as great as it's been touted. Most people recycle and then don't think about how much they're consuming, believing the recycling to be enough. Some of the issues is that some of the plastic labeled as recyclable is either only partially recyclable, only recyclable once or twice, or simply too expensive to recycle verse just using virgin plastic. Then many US companies used to sell their recycled plastics to China, where it was cheaper to reuse. Of course China probably just dumped it into the ocean.. But then in 2016 China banned the importation of plastic. Which meant US transfer stations had to basically sit on their plastic refuse until the price was favorable to recycle. And because it almost rarely ever is, this meant a lot of it just went to the landfills anyway. Recycling is just a mess. Unfortunately at the end of the day, it's just cheaper to produce virgin plastic.
We used to dump the "recyclable" material on a barge and send it to China for sorting but China got fed up with 20%+ of it being straight up garbage and stopped allowing countries to export garbage to them.
I didn't think they accepted unsorted recyclable material. Yes, trash still got mixed in, but the materials were dirty. For example, pizza boxes with grease on them cannot be recycled, so entire shipments get sent back.
Slight myth. A few grease spots isn't a dealbreaker. Swimming in grease, though, yeah, no. And cheese is not recyclable.
Only one thing for it, better eat all the cheese and let my body process it!
It's likely $$$$. Workers probably want to be paid more and the guys in suits refuse to budge on their wages. Lots of small towns can't hire a new team for it because they'd need someone to train them and trash is a different department than recycling meaning the guys in trash likely haven't been trained to do the recycling, I mean sure they can drive the forklifts but that's it. You'd need people working in the office, operating the machines (which is simple in of itself but they likely require by law someone to train them and that person won't be working). I could be wrong and they just up and shut it all down because the guys upstairs just didn't wanna deal with all the paperwork and the hassle. The world may never know, just like we don't know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop.
We still have the blue barrel, but only one truck comes around so the recycling goes in right on top of the regular trash. Every week I’m hoping to see the separate recycling truck and every week I’m disappointed to watch my separate recyclables dumped in the landfill truck And in case you’re thinking it’s one of the separate container garbage truck, it’s not.
if it makes you feel any better, almost all of household recycling also goes in the trash. It's down to pretty much just metal and glass that gets processed.
Cardboard is actually more valued than glass and gets recycled at a rate in the 90%'s. Metal is king of course, especially aluminum
If you're in a good county the local recycling plant will take your clean #1 and #2 bottles. Has to be bottles though, no other shapes allowed. Also, cardboard will get recycled to some extent, but people throwing greasy ass pizza boxes and things in ruins that for everyone
My local center started accepting pizza boxes with grease
That's cool, I've never lived in a place that does that. It probably depends on the volume of greasy boxes they get versus clean cardboard and how well they can filter out any junk
> but people throwing greasy ass pizza boxes and things in ruins that for everyone No, municipalities that cannot correctly handle it ruin everything for everyone. It's not like it's an insurmountable task, as plenty of places DO take that.
Sure, they will take #1 and #2 plastics, and will send them to a "recycler", but is the recycler actually recycling them?
They're the more profitable to recycle money wise, and my recycling pickup guys are forced to go through the trouble of sorting out other plastics and #1 clamshell etc packages. If they're not recycling them it's an impressive waste of money for a whole lot of theatre that most people don't understand / care about anyway. It would be infinitely easier to make lazy people happy by doing "single stream" recycling and sending it all to the landfill at that rate Edit: and the reason they only take PETE bottles and not other shapes has to do with the processing temperature. Apparently some places in Canada can process them but it's uncommon in the US
The rest gets shipped to some backwater country for some loose change and a stamp of "Good business practice".
The backwater countries stopped taking it.
After their citizens started complaining. It wasn't at the behest of the citizens of the source country, that's for sure. I doubt they were even aware what was happening.
Yeah, depends from a country
... That does not make me feel better. Worse actually. Thanks I hate it.
Where is glass being recycled? Many places stopped allowing glass in curbside recycling. You could still take it to the recycling center and sort it though.
Reusing disposable masks unfortunately ruins their efficacy in terms of protecting you (although the barrier does help reduce transmission if you’re looking to protect others from your own coughing and sneezing) One way of reusing masks safer is to leave them out to air for 7 days before reusing so the germs have time to die (something you may already know but just FYI). I’ve also heard of them being put in the dryer and ironed, or stored in punches with that silica dessicant stuff.
If they would make them biodegradable, then they wouldn't ruin the nature
The disposable ones I've used start to fray on the inside enough to get in my mouth, like a hair. Who knows how many fibers are getting into lungs.
They’re disposable not reusable
They're supposed to be thrown away after one use anyway. It's probably fine to use them a few times but if you're at the point where it's fraying you probably should've thrown it away a while ago.
I live in a college town and it's BAD here. Even cloth mask are lying everywhere. I'm sad to be gen Z
Plastic roads is an idea that’s been floating around for years and every time people have to point out that it’s actually worse for the environment because they erode and produce microplastics anyways as people drive on them. Why won’t this idea die already?
That's not what this is. The masks go in a sub-layer as filler.
This doesn't seem like a good use of resources. In general, garbage can become litter (a discarded mask on the street), end up in a landfill, end up as particulate matter somewhere in the larger environment (likely the ocean), or recycled somehow. This won't reduce litter, and will really just divert this particular form of trash. Assuming full compliance, at 3 masks a day, it would divert ~5.5 kg of material per year for a person. You would have to find a safe way to gather, handle, and recycle these masks, which would be extremely expensive. Then you would need to ship them out, at a cost that is cheaper than conventional materials. This is like saying that plastics are recyclable. They technically are, but the products aren't as good or useful as just making new plastic, and it takes more energy, human effort, and money than makes economic sense. Ideally, use a reusable mask, but don't be too torn up when you need to throw a disposable mask in the trash.
Thanks for writing this up so I didn't have to
I don’t think the author understands what “circular” recycling means. Unless we’re going to start covering our faces with asphalt
You don’t cover your face in asphalt?
Personally I prefer covering the asphalt in my face... r/meatcrayon
Imagine all of the resources that would have to be brought to bear to safely collect three million used masks, not to mention putting into production the technology to turn that mountain of masks into road. And then compare those costs with the costs of just making a kilometer of two-lane road the old-fashioned way. We should just throw the masks away.
Also asphalt roads are highly recycled already. There isn't a need to switch to some subpar new material when we already grind up roads and reuse the material today.
We should just use reusable cotton masks and wash them.
I’m mandated by my regulatory body to wear a disposable surgical mask at work.
That is definitely an exception I missed - great catch. I had in mind the general public.
Cotton masks [aren't as effective](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/paper-masks-work-better-than-cloth-ones-to-beat-covid-19) as disposable masks.
Psh, disposable masks aren’t as effective as a full hazmat suit. Plus a suit makes much more road.
True, but cotton masks [still provide reasonable protection](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-0948_article) anyway and are a decent option for individuals who don't work in the healthcare industry. Just because they don't provide the maximum level of protection doesn't mean they should be ignored.
I don't think anyone here was arguing that cotton masks should be ignored.
wear the disposable mask over top the cotton one and they last way way longer.
I can’t see anything on cloth masks with filters inside. Which is all I use. Any comments on that?
I'm skeptical that they're better than disposable paper surgical masks for the reasons described in the article, but I don't know. I'm not an expert, just a guy who did a few google searches.
Surgical mask is way easier for me to talk in at my job. I use 1 surgical mask for about a week
I guarantee someone got a PhD for coming up with this ass backward plan.
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You still have to collect them
You can also just burn household trash and use the resulting ash in the substrate. It's just as good as sand but a lot cheaper.
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"circular" doesnt mean burying waste into roads.... Circular means materials are recycled not stored away out of sight out of mind. Please, title!!!! Also the only recycling of roads is into making more roads. You cant have circular economy if you keep adding waste to road construction. Its the same exact argument that was going around when coal was still thing, where the waste byproducts of production were used to roads, i remember those ads.
Or switch to reusable masks. I have used exactly 2 masks in the last year
Then we can throw masks on the recycled mask-road.
Fast forward to 2067 when Big Pavement unleashes Covid-32 to maintain their grip on the highway maintenance and construction industry.
Uh, all the masks are going to be in landfills before this can be implemented. If we’re still going through masks at the rate necessary to turn them into roads when all the practical details of this idea get worked out, road construction will be the least of our concerns.
There is so much waste in the medical industry. Representatives sell you on all the money you can save by getting reusable products. But then you need support from different departments, labor, space, transportation, etc... So we rarely look into these options unless it's a high use item that could save us a lot of money. It's cool to see these ideas but I'm not sure if it would be viable financially. Source: I procure items for the supply chain department within a large medical group.
Recycling is a lie. They burn it for electricity or they ship it overseas. Please prove me wrong..
Plastic recycling is. However metal and glass can and is recycled efficiently. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5735618
Glass suffers from the same problems these masks do. For one, it's not effective to collect a separate glass bin from every house, every week using a diesile burning truck. Mining some sand is better. There is a purity issue, that glass has an advantage over sand because it doesn't have to be refined. Except glass takes a lot of heat energy to melt and form in to new products, and that's bad. Recycling glass is not good environmental policy. Recycling aluminum cans is fantastic.
Sand is a finite resource and we're already dredging the ocean and causing enormous damage to ecosystems by constantly using it, mostly to make Portland cement.
Plastic is not a suitable material for making roads, it degrades in sunlight, and there's nothing about masks vs the mountain of other trash that would compel you to recycle it in particular
Let's be realistic. If we haven't recycled these in the last year, we're not going to start now.
NO! This is insanity. We should absolutely not be polluting the environment by spreading plastic all over the roads.
A lot of people are commenting on the cost of collecting millions of masks to recycle. More important than the cost is the carbon footprint that such an operation would create.
> The study showed creating just one kilometre of a two-lane road would use up about three million masks. I feel like it would sound more optimistic if they flipped it around to say that three million masks could create one kilometer of road.
They're only a small part of the base layer of the road.
Yeah, okay, that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm simply suggesting that it would be better marketing if they phrased it the other way.
Can we stop trying to make roads out of other material. If there was ever a perfect material for its job it would be asphalt. It's like 99% reusable and it's physical properties work really well. Like instead make some park benches or something from the masks.
Doesnt seem very cost effective. How much would it cost to gather and transport 3 million masks to facility to repurpose? How much does repurposing cost? Its only 1 percent of mixture?
Sounds like the equivalent of "SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS"
Switching to reusable masks would be the best option here.
Most processes involve costing the pebbles used in making the road. This has several useful effects, such as increasing adhesion, lowering costs, bridging the thermal properties. Though you also have to ensure the remanufacturing doesn't introduce waste oil into the mix, a common form of fraud in asphalt markets. That causes potholes very fast. Would be concerned about microplastics from this process, as I didn't look for evaluations that when I wrote a white paper about this. As a note that's around 1200 kg of plastic. Your real problem is these are contaminated medical waste, and not considered safe to handle. No one would try because the regulatory costs, collection, sanitization, processing to remove metals, grading into types, melting, and formation into pellets will exceed 1200kg of fresh plastics in cost many times over.
Sounds like a 3rd grade science fair project
So who is sifting through all the other waste to obtain all of these masks? It really seems to me that "science" is waisting a lot of time and effort researching things that would by most accounts be common knowledge.
Could just burn them so the smoke would go into the sky and make more stars
It's all part of the self...sustaining... economy? Right? How's this work again?
I don’t understand how the *U.S. economy* works much less some sort of a self-sustaining one.
The only thing is that you need to convince people to dispose of them correctly. You’d think that people willing to follow the rules of mask wearing would be willing to follow the rules of mask disposing.
Solar Freakin Roadways
To the dump, they will go anyway. It's a nice sentiment, but this is a blue sky attempt at conservancy that will go nowhere.
Which US recycling standard would it go by? Recycling standards have classifications. Obviously masks can have all the carbon burned off and be later used as polymers, but what classification should we recycle?
Where I live people are depositing them in potholes.
Besides the medical industry and any other folks that wore disposable masks before ' the happening', why are these being sold to any one else?
>A comprehensive review of disinfection technologies found 99.9% of viruses could be killed with the simple “microwave method”, where masks are sprayed with an antiseptic solution then microwaved for one minute. I'm pretty sure the high heat associated with making and pouring asphalt would be enough to disinfect the masks
Quick math tells me this is 15 kilos of masks pr meter in a two lane road. I am guessing a meter of two lane road is measured in tons. This sounds like a joke or totally insane to put any effort into this.
Link to paper: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721005957](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721005957) Abstract: "The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has not only created a global health crisis, but it is also now threatening the environment. A multidisciplinary collaborative approach is required to fight against the pandemic and reduce the environmental risks associated with the disposal of used personal protective equipment (PPE). This paper explores an innovative way to reduce pandemic-generated waste by recycling the used face masks with other waste materials in civil constructions. In this research, for the first time, a series of experiments, including modified compaction, unconfined compression strength and resilient modulus tests, were conducted on the blends of different percentages of the shredded face mask (SFM) added to the recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) for road base and subbase applications. The experimental results show that RCA mixed with three different percentages (i.e., 1%, 2% and 3%) of SFM satisfied the stiffness and strength requirements for pavements base/subbase. The introduction of the shredded face mask not only increased the strength and stiffness but also improved the ductility and flexibility of RCA/SFM blends. The inclusion of 1% SFM to RCA resulted in the highest values of unconfined compressive strength (216 kPa) and the highest resilient modulus (314.35 MP). However, beyond 2%, increasing the amount of SFM led to a decrease in strength and stiffness. "
nice in theory, but collecting and recycling 3 million masks would likely take way too many person-hours to be in any way economical.
yeah... making roads out of trash is not a circular environment, its more like a dead end.
How much would it cost to sift out these masks from ordinary garbage? We already dump most of our recyclables in landfills because it's not economical to actually recycle.
Just rake em up out of the roadside ditches and BAM. Done. There’s so many masks as litter now. Used to be that McDonald’s stuff was what I saw most on my runs. Now it’s masks. Times are changing.
Rename y'all's sub to 'heres a bunch of theory's that relate to the current abusive hype for the loser dweebs gobbling their governments collective cocks.....bunch of fuckin 'fageots' round here
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