Posted on 10/19/2015 6:40:24 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
I don’t recycle. I stopped recycling in 2001, when I lived in Ithaca, New York, and recycling was mandatory. We had to throw away our garbage in clear plastic bags so that the recycling police could make sure there was no paper or plastic in the trash, we had to pay for every single bag of trash we thew away (we called it our “garbage fine”), and — when we initially labored in good faith to comply with recycling mandates – we found it was tough to keep our small apartment clean and bug-free while piling empty cans, bottles, and boxes in the corner of our kitchen. So when we found there was a short window of time where we could go to the local landfill and get away with tossing out garbage in opaque, thick Hefty bags, we defied the law and never looked back.
Even now — as we live in the free state of Tennessee — when friends come over and ask where we put our recycling, we just say “In the trash” and revel just a tiny bit in our ancient rebellion. But now — thanks to the New York Times, of all publications — I feel vindicated. This month, John Tierney revisited his 1996 critique of recycling, and what he found was fascinating indeed (h/t AEI’s Mark J. Perry):
Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies. The mood is so gloomy that one industry veteran tried to cheer up her colleagues this summer with an article in a trade journal titled, “Recycling Is Not Dead!”
And: While politicians set higher and higher goals, the national rate of recycling has stagnated in recent years. Yes, it’s popular in affluent neighborhoods like Park Slope in Brooklyn and in cities like San Francisco, but residents of the Bronx and Houston don’t have the same fervor for sorting garbage in their spare time. The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. “If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to confront,” says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. “Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?”
Tierney doesn’t claim that all recycling is worthless, but he notes some rather inconvenient facts — like the mere act of rinsing off your plastic recyclables may actually increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And while it “makes sense to recycle commercial cardboard and some paper,” an EPA official said that “other materials rarely make sense, including food waste and other compostables. The zero-waste goal makes no sense at all — it’s very expensive with almost no real environmental benefit.” But do we have enough room in landfills? Yes: One of the original goals of the recycling movement was to avert a supposed crisis because there was no room left in the nation’s landfills.
But that media-inspired fear was never realistic in a country with so much open space. In reporting the 1996 article I found that all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing. And that tiny amount of land wouldn’t be lost forever, because landfills are typically covered with grass and converted to parkland, like the Freshkills Park being created on Staten Island. The United States Open tennis tournament is played on the site of an old landfill — and one that never had the linings and other environmental safeguards required today.
Though most cities shun landfills, they have been welcomed in rural communities that reap large economic benefits (and have plenty of greenery to buffer residents from the sights and smells). Consequently, the great landfill shortage has not arrived, and neither have the shortages of raw materials that were supposed to make recycling profitable.
Tierney concludes with paragraphs rarely seen in the Times — where he compares environmentalism to *gasp* a religion. Yes, he does: Then why do so many public officials keep vowing to do more of it? Special-interest politics is one reason — pressure from green groups — but it’s also because recycling intuitively appeals to many voters: It makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint. It is less an ethical activity than a religious ritual, like the ones performed by Catholics to obtain indulgences for their sins. Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily.
But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly. Seattle has become so aggressive that the city is being sued by residents who maintain that the inspectors rooting through their trash are violating their constitutional right to privacy.
And that’s exactly what started my own little rebellion. Environmentalists, I truly don’t care if you choose to waste your time composting, sorting yogurt packets, and competing with each other to see who can throw away the smallest bags of garbage. Just don’t make me join your faith.
I love throwing dirty dog food cans in the recycling bin, and the occasional piece of plastic....
I have found that separating the recyclables ended helping only the thieves that came and took the valuable items from the cans the night before and sometimes right in front of the collection truck. When I saw that the city had no intention of upholding a law that was supposed to help keep costs down through revenue I said screw it.
My wife and I make bets on how long a discarded item will sit on the side of the road. Our last bet was on a chest freezer that the compressor went out on, it made it 14 minutes before it was loaded into the back of a truck.
LOL
There’s a tax payer paying that $0.10 per bottle, but it’s probably a bit higher than that.
So how would Jesus recycle. Would it be something like give to the earth what is of the earth, give to men what is man’s?
Recycling is practice for knuckling under to tyranny.
The recycling campaign is used as a prime example on how to coerce and motivate the public in my social psych text. Live and learn!
“Paper and plastic are not worth it except as some feel good exercise...”
I will admit that I’ve been brainwashed - and I have a good, strong brain!
I found myself cutting apart a plastic 6-pack holder (BEFORE I THREW IT AWAY!) because I’ve been brainwashed into thinking it was going to end up on the bill of a duck making it unable to feed, or trapped in the gills of a whale.
Um. Hello? I am LANDLOCKED IN WISCONSIN, Fer Pete’s Sake!
But...Wisconsin ships a LOT of her trash to those FIBS in Illinois. And gawd only knows what those godless heathens do with our trash from there on out! For all I know, they ARE dumpin’ it in the Mississippi...which makes its way to the Gulf of Mexico...which has both ducks AND whales.
I can’t win, LOL!
Oh, you are NOT going to be happy with my Post #29, LOL!
Virtue? That ship has SAILED, Sister, LOL!
I once tried to explain this to a liberal who wanted me to recycle paper at the office. I explained that, if nobody wanted to pay me for used paper, at BEST recycling was a break even as far as energy is concerned....but more likely used more. In a free market, cost of just about anything is directly related to the energy needed to make and ship it. If new paper costs less, it must have a lower ‘carbon footprint’.
She shrugged it off.
Amazing, isn’t it?
I had a friend help me clean out the Pole Barn, as she wanted to store some some of her ‘stuff’ in there.
We took an old charcoal grill, an old snowblower (which hadn’t been used in 20 years) and a whole lot of other metal ‘stuff’ down to the road.
All gone within 30 minutes!
Frankly, the energy needed to purify and heat the tap water that the bottles are cleaned with, added to the cost of melting the bottles down, costs more than just processing new glass. If the above statement were not true, somebody would pay you for those bottles.
Penn and Teller’s show BS (real name the cussword) did an episode exposing this truth a few years ago.
Ha! We recycle all the kitchen vegetable waste in my compost heap! About a quart a day! Free nitrogen that helps the pile break down.
You can pulverize egg shells in a blender and reduce them to calcium with white vinegar 1 part egg shell to 2 parts vinegar)or just crumble them and spread them where snails are! (Don’t like them apparently—sharp edges.)
Of course, the more you garden, the less you have to recycle. We have not done any canning lately, but mason jars are glass you do not normally recycle which results in cans you do not have to buy!
Had a cell phone company rep on the phone asking her why they were not sending me an itemized bill...she explaned that “ they were environmental and thats why. I told her that “...if you have to go out and get an axe to chop down a damn tree do it and send me an itemized bill!
They got the message.
In the 90’s Waste Management determined recycling to be a loser, so if you wanted to continue, it would cost $3 a month.
HA!
I don’t understand all the to do over garbage. Do you all not have a garbage disposal? Just put the stuff in there, turn on the water and flip the switch.
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