Recycling is stupid

Actually, it isn't.

I'm not "green ignorant" either. I earned a bachelor's degree in Environmental Sciences.

Recycling is a manufacture-based process that requires lots of energy input. Subsidized labor to sort the plastics from the glass from the paper. Additional costs of recycle trucks putting off more diesel emissions to travel from door to door and sort all this stuff out. Landfills actually create energy to power thousands of homes and neighborhoods via methane. And no, there is no landfill shortage contrary to popular indoctrinated belief.

Recycling Is Garbage

AS THEY PUT ON PLASTIC GLOVES FOR THEIR first litter hunt, the third graders knew what to expect. They knew their garbage. It was part of their science curriculum at Bridges Elementary, a public school on West 17th Street in Manhattan. They had learned the Three R's -- Reduce, Reuse, Recycle -- and discussed how to stop their parents from using paper plates. For Earth Day they had read a Scholastic science publication, "Inside the World of Trash." For homework, they had kept garbage diaries and drawn color-coded charts of their families' trash. So they were primed for the field experiment on this May afternoon.

"We have to help the earth," Natasha Newman explained as she and her classmates dashed around the school collecting specimens. Their science teacher, Linnette Aponte, mediated disputes -- "I saw that gum wrapper first!" -- and supervised the subsequent analysis of data back in the classroom. The students gathered around to watch her dump out their bags on the floor.
Do you see any pattern as I'm emptying it?" Miss Aponte asked.

"Yeah, it stinks."

"Everybody's chewing Winterfresh."

"A lot of paper napkins."

"It's disgusting."

"They're throwing away a folder. That's a perfectly good folder!"

"It's only half a folder."

"Well, they could find the other half and attach them together."

Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. "We've been learning about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle," she said, and pointed at the pile. "How does all this make you feel?"

"Baaaad," the students moaned.

Miss Aponte separated out two bottles, the only items in the pile that could be recycled. She asked what lesson the students had learned. The class sentiment was summarized by Lily Finn, the student who had been so determined to save the half folder: "People shouldn't throw away paper or anything. They should recycle it. And they shouldn't eat candy in school."

Lily's judgment about candy sounded reasonable, but the conclusion about recycling seemed to be contradicted by the data on the floor. The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a landfill than the two bottles.

But the press isn't solely responsible for recycling fervor; the public's obsession wouldn't have lasted this long unless recycling met some emotional need. Just as the third graders believed that their litter run was helping the planet, Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental experience, an act of moral redemption. We're not just reusing our garbage; we're performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess. Recycling teaches the themes that previous generations of schoolchildren learned from that Puritan classic, "The Pilgrim's Progress."

John Bunyan's 17th-century allegory features a character not unlike the garbage barge that left Long Island: a man dressed in rags who flees the City of Destruction, desperate to find a place he can unload the "great burden upon his back." Guided by the Evangelist, the pilgrim wanders the world trying to reach the Celestial City. His worst trial occurs in Vanity Fair, a village market founded by Beelzebub and inhabited by noblemen named Lord Luxurious and Sir Having Greedy. The market offers tempting wares, but the pilgrim bravely practices the first R -- reduce -- by shunning the products of the "merchandizers" and continuing on to the Celestial City.

Today's schoolchildren, though, might be confused by one character encountered on Bunyan's road to salvation: a man, the source of our word "muckraker," who is busy raking together a compost pile. This recycler of household waste isn't presented as a role model for the pilgrim. He's a symbol of moral blindness because, instead of looking up to see the heavenly rewards awaiting him, he "could look no way but downwards, with a muck-rake in his hand." In Bunyan's time, it would have been hard to imagine that pilgrims would one day be taught to search for salvation right down there in the muck.

The Day of Reckoning Foretold

"All I've been thinking about all week is garbage. I mean, I just can't stop thinking about it. . . . I've just gotten real concerned over what's gonna happen. . . . I started feeling this way . . . when that barge was stranded."

-- Opening lines of the 1989 film "Sex, Lies and Videotape," spoken to a psychiatrist by a woman whose real problems -- sexual and marital unhappiness -- have nothing to do with municipal solid waste.

AT THE TIME AMERICANS BECAME RACKED WITH GARBAGE GUILT, businesses were already recycling millions of tons of trash a year. They were voluntarily -- and profitably -- recycling newsprint, office paper, cardboard, aluminum and steel. But the barge's plight convinced everyone that voluntary enterprise was not enough. As Newsweek noted, the Mobro's saga was "to the trash crisis what the sinking of the Lusitania was to World War I." The magazine's cover story, titled "Buried Alive," warned: "With rare exceptions during wartime, Americans have not been adept at making individual sacrifices for the common good. That mentality will have to change. Otherwise, the dumps will cover the country coast to coast and the trucks will stop in everybody's backyard."

Suddenly, just as central planning was going out of fashion in eastern Europe, America devised a national five-year plan for trash. The Environmental Protection Agency promulgated a "Waste Hierarchy" that ranked trash-disposal options: recycling at the top, composting and waste-to-energy incinerators in the middle, landfills at the bottom.

The E.P.A.'s five-year goal, to recycle 25 percent of municipal trash, was announced in a speech in early 1988 by J. Winston Porter, an assistant administrator of the agency. Even as Porter was setting the goal, he realized that it was presumptuous for a bureaucrat in Washington to tell everyone in America what to do with their trash. "After all the publicity about the barge," Porter recalls, "I sat down with some engineers in my office to estimate how much municipal waste could be recycled. At that time, about 10 percent was being recycled. We looked at the components of waste, made a few quick calculations and figured that it was reasonable to reach a level of 25 percent within five years. It wasn't a highly quantified thing. Some of the staff didn't even want me to mention a figure. But I thought it would be good to set a target, as long as it was strictly voluntary and didn't involve a lot of regulations."



Read more here on page 3 (it's worth it): http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html?pagewanted=3


So why is recycling pushed so heavily on our society? There's money to be made in government subsidies of course.

Recycling paper is probably the most redundant of all because all trees grown for paper are farmed specifically for that purpose. It's rarely seen that pulp from oldgrowth forests are used for paper. Although I strongly believe hemp based paper can be much more efficient than tree pulp. Not only is recycling paper counter-productive, but it's bad for the environment as well. They use lots of bleaching and de-inking chemicals including mercury to break down the pulp and clean out the material so it can be used again. Once the pulp is recycled they incinerate the leftover waste, releasing hundreds of different toxic hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, its either that or draining all the de-inking chemicals into the local watersheds.

 

One thing you won't catch me recycling is condoms. That's a bit over the edge for me.

 

Thats messed up, you could recycle that by donating it to a sperm bank.

 

Reusing and PRE-cycling are much better than recycling--being conscious of what you purchase--the packaging, the life expectancy (eg., disposable this or that) of the product, what can be done with it when it no longer serves its purpose. Those issues become your personal responsibility once the transaction is made. Unfortunately, not enough people think of those things in our new and improved, "must have the latest and greatest," mass-consumption society.

 

I'll take that with a grain of salt until I've verified you and your degree. Not being a dick, but on the internet anyone can claim to be anything.

Actually I'm thinking in terms of a waste water treatment plant. I had a tour at a few (actually, I enjoy such tours), and the worst part is at the air-injected solid separation station (I forget the official technical name). You will lose count of all the condoms floating there. Of course, off to the garbage they go. And I hope they stay there too.

If anything, recycling waster water in that fashion IS ideal. The value of recycling is a matter of what it is you are recycling. Metals, glass, plastic, water, oils, whatever.

And while everyone is busy debating recycling, I'll still be out picking up litter off of the forest service roads, cleaning up where the idiots weren't man enough to pick up after themselves.

 

N-i-c-e.

 

I know, it's difficult to fathom. Someone who criticizes recycling of common products also has a bachelors of environmental sciences.

I also believe man-made climate change is globalist agenda driven propaganda to regulate and oppress the population via carbon tax to fill Al Gore's pockets and the pockets of many other corrupt leaders. I put up with the nonsensical political views my mega-liberal professors spewed from their mouths. The news media shows film clips of ice bergs melting and cracking with the coming of summer at the poles and add scary music and convinces more than half the population. The Climategate incident with the exposed emails was the best thing that ever happened to expose the corruption of the global corporate elite. Makes me wish I'd have still been in college when it happened, just to see the look on my professors' faces. I had only one liberal professor who was open minded enough to listen to other student's viewpoints contrary to his own.
But all this is off topic.

Back on topic:

I worked toward the degree because of my love of nature and the natural sciences. It was a very interesting topic and it didn't get me a job in the environmental field like I hoped it would. Everything I learned covered sustainable living, farming, biology, economics, environmental policy, and all that liberal arts stuff. It was in college while on a field trip touring a recycling center and a landfill which made me question the ethics and practices of recycling. The only thing I never really liked was misguided mainstream environmentalism shared by my classmates and just about everybody else out there.

Granted, I still encourage backyard composting, dumpster diving, reducing, reusing, and the recycling and/or proper disposal of toxic chemicals which contaminate the landfill.

 

I dunno about that. Anytime someone says they have a degree and couples it with how they feel I ask teh same thing. I know people have asked that of myself as they have difficulty believing I have a doctorate.

Yup yup. I never could figure out the carbon footprint crap. I have friends that put hundreds of dollars each month into "green" or "reduced carbon footprint" merchandise. I look at it and I'm thinking "Dude! This product has been around for twenty-thirty years! All they did is fluff it up and change the name!" "Naw man, you got it all wrong! It's better now! We're making a change for the better with this stuff!" In the mean time my eyes are rolling, bevcause I know my friends are getting ripped off, and for what? False hopes and groundless assumptions? WTF? Sometimes I wonder what my friends had happen to their brains. They had to have lost them somewhere....

Which is truly ideal. Amazing how many people out there will look down on you for dumpster diving. Recycle, and they think you're poor and need money. Naw man, they got it all wrong! Maybe it does cost more to recycle a 50 gallon drum of aluminum cans in comparison to processing the amount of bauxite or alunite it takes to make those cans. We still need to conserve our resources. Some of our natural resources will last a long time. Some may not. And last I knew we aren't buddy-buddy with a lot of the nations on Earth. So until we are, we best start conserving.

 

agreed


just recycle dammit...

don't be lazy

 

That question is developed politically because the mountain, though it is publicly designed for the democratic decision of not limiting the costs for the public purse (we're not at profit at this stage), it is transfered from there to the private separator and manager (famous company was Turtle Island; another company was Atlantic "Packaging" and Recycling), and at last it is sold BULK to the SALVAGING company for profits they accomplish by saving on their needed packaging.

You should have more confidence in the urban planning arrangement. The reason Aluminum was the only profitable recyclable at the time was because it was concerned about at mass transfer of the differentiated substance. Cans nevertheless are undecided to the worth of recycling since then as two realizing the consumer market for what we prefer to drink.

In the public decision to develop plastic bottles we found that was at a loss. Why? If the urban planners took an interest it could have been maintained, but now i guess it just doesn't fit into the city's budget. Plastic has decidedly, because of the recession, come to the state of needing more reduction and locally wished for (and this can work even under the principled present conservative mayor of Toronto) re-using of the Plastic containers of various participating private companies. ADVERTISING can work for these companies.

With the recession there are plenty of competent energy programs available. And wind turbines have just not reached their full 'private company' potential.


The question of sustainable development as to the mover and the active server has to be questioned as to the energy Sustainment for the community. Should private companies know about this Public Administration issue before they project greedy unsustainability self-interested turns for service in the community.

All I say to that is "power to the self-interest", and the power of the urban and government planner may become "rationally reactionary". That is still politically correct.:sunny:

 

This century, if humanity needs more and more resources, people will buy land on old rubbish dumps to start mining for stuff...we should not burn resources for future mining.

 

separate my cardboard so someone can collect it and sell it to a processor?

separate my glass and aluminum cans so someone else can collect it and sell it for scrap metal?


fuck that


when i recycle i do it myself and take it in myself...money in my pocket is way better than making some city contractor rich

i recycle about a hundred tons a year by the way..mostly steel and cars

 

truthfully there are some items that are easier to recycle then others. and there are some items that recycle easier. In the case of the paper if more people bought products using recycled paper then more of it would be recycled. Recycling electronics is one of the biggest services the company I work for offers. Computers are the item that we have the easiest time recycling since there is a decent demand for refurbished computers. There is far less call for refurbished cell phones so it often harder and more expensive to properly recycle them.

 

Actually, recycling really does make a difference and you shouldn't rely on the manufacturer or producer to reduce packaging, let alone the materials used in the product itself. The thing is, we're in a recession in part due to the cost of fuel and raw materials, not least because of growth in China, India and Pakistan, all of whom have been buying up matierlas for use in new products. If we don't recycle, then we're going to just pay the EU more in fines for not meeting targets and then pay more for goods just because commodities prices remain high. Now, I'm a recycler and as far as I'm concerned, you can bin all your household stuff, becuase I make money out of scrap materials and the fewer there are going through the system, the higher the prices I'm paid (something to do with supply and demand). So, ignoring peak oil (for plastics) and peak any material (demand outstrips supply from mines because the world's running out of new sources), you're still going to pay more for your new TV, food, car etc just becuase you'd rather landfill or burn your waste and then you'll still pay more in Council Tax (if you're UK based) becuase of the Landfill Tax escelator, carbon credits schemes. Alternatively, you can help keep your taxes under control and cut the cost of new goods by recycling your waste.

 

Start a worm bin and recycle the paper products.

I'm in California, the land where you get to pay twice if you buy anything with a screen on it. It's called the e-Tax and it's meant to provide funding for proper disposal of electronics. What it's actually turned out to be is yet another scam by the state, because we have to pay the e-Tax when we purchase, but THEN we have to pay AGAIN when we actually go to dispose of the product. And if it's something that you're still using...? Well, you still get to pay.

In the meantime shit's so bad out here with the economy that thieves are trying to steal LIVE copper wire and frying themselves to crispy things.

 

"thieves are trying to steal LIVE copper wire and frying themselves to crispy things."


I think Darwin's law comes in here somewhere...