I think you'd be surprised how much the energy bags divert.
I picked up a few today, so time to work them into the trash flow. Still not 100% sure where I'll get rid of them, other than "people I know over there," but I'm hoping one of the transfer stations or such will take them if I call around and ask. The main issue for me is that Boise is outside pure EV range on the car, so I'm burning gas to get over there, which seems slightly silly. We're over there rarely enough (and usually with the full family, so not much cargo room) that it's a dedicated trip to haul stuff, depending on what I find where.
And styrofoam packing peanuts...
Throw... away... packing peanuts? I just save those for reuse and if I have too many, give them to people for shipping needs. Most of the non recyclable packaging (bubble mailers and such) goes into a box for winter shipping and stuff I sell on eBay. I'll even keep USPS boxes and such that are in decent shape - almost all of my shipping lately is with recycled boxes/materials. Even the Amazon boxes can be reused, typically, just reinforce the corner joint with some tape. I was shipping out in new boxes/bubble wrap for a while, but that was hazmat (rebuilt battery packs), and... yeah, the regulations on that sort of thing are stiff and getting worse annually. Perks of the shipping container and shed, I can build shelves and keep an awful lot of stuff around for reuse.
I think you're right about the ferret litter, depending on the litter material. If it's treated cedar, maybe not. If it's newspaper, probably so.
It's pine - so should be fine to spread.
I haven't heard of these energy bag things. I guess they're only available in a few areas. Collecting film plastics to be burned won't gain traction in my state (California).
Of course not, it's California. Say one thing and do the opposite in practice.
The problem with plastics is that plastic recycling is mostly a lie (funded by the oil companies, because the horrible lifecycle of plastics was a problem for further expansion). If you can shred and melt plastic, you generally end up with a labor intensive process that produces a poorer quality material than virgin plastic for the same or higher cost - and that's with dirt cheap third world labor. Get rid of that (which China has, they used to take our "recycling" in the containers headed back and finally got sick of it, so most of it goes to other countries and practically ends up in the ocean), and there's no benefit to the recycled material at all. It's objectively worse material, for more money, than virgin plastic from oil - and it doesn't look like oil prices will make a dent in that any time soon.
For recycling, there are huge issues with sorting, and then even the materials aren't always what's implied on the recycling #s - there are plenty of variations within a type there, if it's not just simply wrong. And there are plenty of plastics you just can't recycle meaningfully - plastic wraps, random bags, etc.
So the energy bag program takes those, and... I think was originally supposed to turn them into diesel fuel, but that process didn't work well. At least currently, they go into a concrete plant and directly offset coal use. I assume the furnace is hot enough to generally break down all the plastics, and it will swallow hard-to-process things like saran wrap and such - because the bags are just going into the furnace, literally.
I would actually be perfectly fine with burning all our plastic waste. The recycling process is mostly a sham, a lot of it ends up in landfills and the ocean anyway, breaking down into more and more microplastics. If we burn it, we (a) have control over where it's being processed instead of shipping it to some other nation to be their problem, (b) we get useful energy out of it, and (c) it removes the optics of "But it's recycled!" that allows people to keep blindly buying plastic. I'll recycle it, but I'd be fine if that turned into "All the plastics go here and we burn them for energy." We've got 20 years or more of coal fired plants that can burn plastic, either for power generation or other processes (concrete being the local one), and maybe we can get away from the stuff by then if people realize just how nasty it really is.
Absolutely should just compost the stuff. If your compost is to be used for growing food, you'll want to do some research on temperatures/time frames to destroy pathogens, but otherwise there should not be an issue. I have clay based clumping cat litter as a major component of my landfill stream. Not sure that I would want to switch to a wood pellet litter for a cat (or that the cat would accept it).
Compost would be for food, yes. One of my spring projects is to try compost again. I built some bins a while back, but I can never get the pit to really heat up - I got one batch hot, briefly, but it just wouldn't stay lit off. I didn't try much this year because I was working on solar, but I should have some cycles next year to work on it. If I bag the greens coming off the leech field (it grows weeds alarmingly well in the spring), I can probably combine those with the dry stuff we have around the property from the rest of the year and get enough nitrogen in the pile to light off. But they dry out and are just a pain to keep going. I suppose some ferret piss is a good supply of nitrogen too... Pick up some more of the pure nitrogen fertilizer in the spring, at least I know it'll get enough nitrogen that way.
