Posted on 07/07/2026 6:22:41 AM PDT by Red Badger
Looks like another “conspiracy theory” just came true again!
To quote Yogi Berra it’s like “deja vu all over again” these days with conspiracy after conspiracy being proven 100% true.
The latest is the Myth of Recycling, or as John Stossel put it: “the Green Religion” otherwise known as Gaia Worship.
I’ve been telling people for years that Recycling is a scam.
Recycling is “garbage”, no pun intended….
I have no doubt some people mean well by it, but it simply doesn’t work!
Most of it does not end up actually getting recycled and the time, energy and “carbon dioxide” that we put into Recycling is far greater and does far more harm than if we’d simply throw the stuff in the garbage.
People have laughed at me when I’ve told them that, but now it’s proven 100% accurate.
A big thanks to John Stossel for his excellent video and for Elon Musk who amplified the message on X this morning:
And in case you need a backup, here is the same video on YouTube.
I will also post the full transcript of the video below in case that’s easier for you.
Please enjoy — and then share this to wake some more people up to the scam of the Green Religion:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Do you recycle? For sure, absolutely. Absolutely everything I possibly can. For decades we’ve been told Recycle America. Don’t just throw it all away. Because recycling will save the planet. You’re saving the Earth!
And that’s what people believe. We have to do it for the kids, for the next generation. This will all be back on the shelf as a cracker or cereal box in about 4-5 weeks. This recycling company is run by Lynn Hoffman. If we’re not using recycled paper and cardboard we’re cutting down more trees.
Recycling paper and cardboard does save trees. Recycling aluminum does save energy. But most of the other stuff is impractical to recycle. That’s right.
This is material that came into the recycling facility from people’s recycling carts, but is going to leave as trash. Huge amounts of what people send to her recycling plant will never be recycled. The worst is plastic which for years has been marked with a recycling symbol. We see stuff like this all the time, recycling arrows on it, “please recycle.” It’s not recyclable. Even worse, plastic bags clog the recycling machines.
We have to climb in for a couple hours every day and cut them out with the box cutter. But people think most of our plastic is recycled. Yeah, I do think so.
Is it not, you gonna tell me it’s not? That’s the trick? The reality is that The amount of plastic actually recycled is around 5%.
Wow. I figured there was something coming, but I’m, I’m, I’m shocked right now. I didn’t know. It’s sad.
[Cans tossed] All my life, I’ve heard about how important it is to recycle. It’s not. Science writer John Tierney debunked recycling claims years ago. His New York Times Magazine story “Recycling is Garbage” set a record for Times hate mail.
And yet What you said is still true? It’s even more true today. In fact, the economics have just gotten worse.
Now my city would save more than $300 million a year if it just stopped recycling. Recycling is an industry that is using increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less. Because it’s not worth recycling here, much is shipped overseas to countries like Malaysia where it’s just piled up.
A vast field of plastic. Two stories high. Some of it from America. See if we can look on the back here. Marysville, Ohio.
Look! Walmart bag. That pollutes even more and what they don’t burn, they sometimes dump in the ocean.
One garbage truck of plastic is dumped in the sea every minute. Barely any of that plastic comes from American shores so [Dolphin noise]
If you care about saving Flipper, you should put your plastic bottle in the garbage. [Truck running over garbage] The garbage? But then it would go to a landfill. And aren’t we running out of space for landfills? I’m sure we are. People believe that because for years the media said We’ve about run out of places to throwaway our throwaways. They think that because years ago there was so much publicity about this barge. A symbol of this country’s growing problems with trash. The barge travelled thousands of miles looking for a place to dump its load.
But it wasn’t because there wasn’t room. States turned this barge away because alarmist media scared people about what it contained. There could be infection waste. Dripping brown ooze of possibly infectious material. We don’t know what kind of tropical vermin is in that garbage. But the EPA later found it was normal garbage. And landfills had plenty of room for that. Today they have more space than we’ll ever need. If you think of the United States as a football field, all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one inch line. Really!? Oh, that’s surprising.
On top of that, today’s landfills are not the polluters they once were. Some sensible regulations make sure they don’t pollute. Eventually landfills are turned into ski hills, parks and golf courses. [Clink] Putting garbage here is much cheaper than recycling, so why do towns keep pushing recycling?
They do it because people demand it. It’s a sacrament of the green religion. I rinse my cans, I take my labels off if there’s plastic on, that’s something that’s paper. I take the plastic piece off of it. That’s fine if they wanna do it voluntarily, but we shouldn’t mandate that.
It’s not my religion. I don’t wanna perform that sacrament. I don’t want to either. It’s time consuming and complicated.
My city orders us, follow all these rules. And that’s one of the reasons recycling fails is because it’s so complicated people never learn the rules and why should they be spending their free time learning these rules? Worse, lots of what we do is pointless.
If you rinse a plastic bottle in hot water, the net result is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than if you threw it in the garbage. Even Greenpeace said, most plastic simply cannot be recycled. So what’s Greenpeace’s solution? Let’s stop producing it. You’re saying, don’t use plastic at all.
Ban plastic. I think that’s where we’re headed. No more plastic? But plastic often creates less emissions than alternatives. Environmental groups rarely mention that, or how they misled us about recycling for years. It’s appalling that after telling people for three decades to recycle, they don’t even apologize for all the time and money that they wasted, instead they have an even worse proposal that will make life even worse and even more expensive.
One time-consuming dream of theirs is a “circular economy” where everything is reused. If you’re running out a laundry detergent, you could take your jug back to the store and fill it up instead of buying another one. That’s really the goal. But people don’t want to, you’re, you’re, you’re asking them to do things
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As with all metals.
Every geologist knows this from freshman geology 1301.
“Mine ONCE, use MANY”
All that, and I never said anything about throwing away the cans.
Glass should be ground up into sand sized particles and used for a 1 to 1 replacement for increasingly rare and expansive river sands for concrete aggregates. Desert sand is too rounded to be of any use in concrete you must have angular river sands or offshore sand bar materials which are just river sands that made it down dip to the sea.
Glass of any color when ball milled or hammer milled comes out angular not rounded it’s perfect for concrete as it’s pure silica as is. More pure that even the best river as sands. You can also melt glass and make structural blocks with it Th at replace cement blocks or bricks. But crushing it to sand size is the clear winner.
Remember kiddies sand is a grain size not a composition.
“but now rinse a coke can “
Who rinses coke cans?
“Glass should be ground up into sand sized particles and used for a 1 to 1 replacement for increasingly rare and expansive river sands for concrete aggregates. Desert sand is too rounded to be of any use in concrete you must have angular river sands or offshore sand bar materials which are just river sands that made it down dip to the sea.”
Crushed sand is better.
Only you, would post that.
I have been under the impression - right or wrong - that they can be repurposed with some rehab.
“Only you, would post that.”
Who rinses coke cans?
Even back in the day of returnable bottles NOBODY rinsed them.
I have been in 1000s of homes, people rinse them before putting them in their recycle container in the kitchen.
“In reality (a place that exists even in the face of environmentalist deniers) we should be mining old landfills to fuel garbage to energy plants.”
Ironically, landfills are, according to enviro-whackos, the greenest solution to trash since 1)it produces renewable biogas, 2)it stores plastics as “locked carbon” which would otherwise become climate-bomb CO2.
True but I bet the cost beats the benefits.
12 years ago when I was a county Public Works Director we reported this to the County commissioners that it was not economically feasible to continue to vollect and “sell” recyclable materials to recyclers. The commissioners voted to halt the process, although they directed us to leave our recycle container location open, so that those people who still wanted to “recycle” could continue to think they were doing good.
At the end of the day, we just dumped it all in the landfill.
Birds of a feather - glad there’s at least two of us...
my untra liberal step mom, keeps a bucket in the sink and shower, and dumps the collected water in the flower beds.
My kit sink drains on a tree.
It’s a hard life being “smarter than the average bear”! :-)
OMG - your in my prayers Pocketdoor.
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