Posted on 03/08/2019 10:23:36 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It took man only 20 centuries or so to give up trying to transmute base metals into gold. How long will it take us to stop trying to turn our rubbish into gold? As John Tierney put it 23 years ago in the New York Times, “Recycling Is Garbage.”
It may make sense to recycle a few items for the savings in carbon emissions — paper, cardboard, and metals such as aluminum from cans. Recycling a ton of these items saves about three tons of carbon dioxide. Glass, plastic, rubber, all the other stuff? Not really. We used to send our plastic empties to China, but China has lost interest, as The Atlantic’s Alana Semuels reports in “Is This the End of Recycling?” The subhead reads, “Now that other countries won’t take our papers and plastics, they’re ending up in the trash.” Some municipalities are directing those recycling trucks to the nearest incinerator. A transfer station in New Hampshire reports that sending rubbish to a landfill costs $68 a ton. Recycling it? That costs $125 a ton. Wasn’t recycling supposed to save us money, not cost twice as much?
In an episode of the Showtime series Bulls**t!, Penn and Teller profiled an L.A. mom who averred, of recycling, “It just seems like the right thing to do. . . . I feel like I’m being a good person. I’m doing my part. I’m setting an example for my kids. It’s a way of life.” She worried that not recycling might put more toxins in the food. “Toxins in the food?” replied host Penn Jillette. “S**t, we all eat food, a lot!” To explore just how much bulls**t people would put up with, Penn and Teller’s team sent a crew to one L.A. couple’s house and explained to them a new pilot program that would create several new categories of recycling, each with a color-coded bin. This bin is for lightly soiled toilet paper. This one is for wet food. This one is for labeled metal cans. By the time the crew were done, the hapless citizens had nine huge bins on their curb. How did they respond to this elaborate prank? They not only couldn’t tell it was a prank — they loved it. “I think it’s an excellent program,” said one of them.
Note that people can lose track of cost/benefit analysis if they feel virtuous. What about all the time it takes in the household to wash and sort all this stuff? How much is it going to cost to convert all this rubbish into usable material? Los Angeles estimates that because of recycling programs, it operates twice as many trucks as it otherwise would. “Recycling,” wrote Tierney in his monumental 1996 piece, “may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”
If there is a Saint Paul of the recycling movement, it might be J. Winston Porter, the E.P.A. official behind an influential federal paper, The Solid Waste Dilemma: An Agenda for Action, that advised Americans in 1989 that we were running out of landfill space and that “recycling is absolutely vital.” Possibly no policy change in the last half century has proved so popular: Is there any cheaper way to purchase a sense of virtue? Tossing your Dannon container in the color-coordinated barrel is a lot more convenient than going to church, much less paying attention to the service. Yet today even Porter is questioning the recycling boom, telling Tierney that most kinds of recycling, such as composting, make no sense at all.
The environmental cost of trash has been oversold. All of the trash Americans produce over the next millennium would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing, and lots of rural communities are open for business when it comes to accepting urban rubbish. There is no landfill shortage. If you’ve ever been to the U.S. Open tennis championship in Queens, you’ve seen what becomes of landfills: Arthur Ashe Stadium is built on one. Modern landfills have little environmental impact, although they do produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. New landfills capture that methane to use it for fuel, however.
Americans who perhaps have a bit more difficulty finding ways to certify their own virtue — recycling is really popular in places such as San Francisco and Park Slope, not so much in places where people actually go to church — are going to be stubborn about giving up their recycling habits. But New York City’s recycling program is a costly disaster: It runs New Yorkers $300 more to recycle a ton of trash than it would to put it in a landfill. When the next budget crunch hits New York — and that’s due approximately ten seconds after the next stock-market crash — recycling would be an excellent program to cut. Recycling that empty bottle of Poland Spring is so expensive that it’s cheaper to simply manufacture a new one.
As for emissions benefits, Tierney notes that to offset the impact of a round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle 40,000 plastic bottles. If you fly coach. That’s if you don’t account for the effects of rinsing out the bottle before putting it in the bin. Use hot water, and your recycling habit might actually be adding to total emissions.
These points have been made for many years, and they’ll be made for many more, because the warm glow of virtue, especially when it comes at no visible cost to the consumer, is just too hard to resist. As The Onion put it way back in 1997: “EPA: Recycling Eliminated More Than 50 Million Tons of Guilt in ’96.”
where we are we pay more for a ‘regular’ trash bin, and less for a secodn recycle bin- I don’t care where they throw it all- we now have two bins for cheaper than if we had gotten two ‘regular’ trash bins
I remember reading a paper back in the 1970s that did an energy usage study on recycling. The paper’s conclusion was recycling was very high in energy use. Higher then making new material!
It might have been in Science - back when they would publish both sides of an issue!
Well it is...but they NEVER ONCE mention Phuket Christmas tsunami
I mean a quarter of a million people died and whole communities were swept off the face of the earth. Where the h*&l do they think all that stuff went?
If they could EVER just once be honest.
Meh. Penn and Teller exposed this well over a decade ago.
I don’t recycle. I throw away glass and metal and burn everything else. I produce very little garbage.
bkmk
That Penn and Teller episode where they had the guy agree to sorting into 20 bins out front was hilarious...almost as funny as watching my dad rinse out bottles and cans for the recycle bin.
Told him a million times he is both wasting water and time.
“What about all the time it takes in the household to wash and sort all this stuff? Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”
So it keeps them busy between Big Macs. ;)
The garbage company INSISTS on getting clean recyclables.
Yep, that’s why our recycle bill has risen from $90 every 2 months to $115.
I do not mind recycling cardboard and paper...
Fact is, recycling paper is much harder on the environment than just making it from fresh trees. And they now grow the trees like they grow corn. We don’t recycle corn either. Or potatoes. We grow a new crop.
Recycling paper requires the use of harmful chemical baths to remove glue, ink, and color. Creating paper from fresh trees is very environmentally friendly. And the trees they use to make paper are a cottonwood hybrid that grows almost as fast as your lawn. They are grown in rows just like a big cornfield.
When it costs more to recycle than it does to create new, you consume more of Mother Gaia’s resources than you save. People have a hard time figuring that out for some reason. You have better luck arguing the Bible with a religious zealot than you do with these people.
the landfills in our area all resell the methane as fuel.
One of them has an 18 hole golf course on it.
When I was a kid, I lived in a housing projects where we’d stuff our fuel down a trash chute into an incinerator that was used to heat the buildings.
There is an electronics recycler that had a building that all of a sudden was closed. Turned out they moved into a larger ( huge ) facility nearby. They mine the electronics for precious metals..
The rest of the recylers in the area are closing their facilities.
My driveway is 1/4 mile long. It’s literally easier for me to take my garbage to work with me and throw it in a sidewalk public trash receptacle, which is exactly what I do.
We throw all Keurig cups, metal and glass into a wal-mart plastic bag hanging in the pantry and every few days there will be a full bag to take to work with me. The rest goes into the trash cans out back. Every few weeks their content gets burned.
We have no garbage bill. However, it’s not about the money (~$25 a month) It’s about the convenience. It’s EASIER to take a small bag with me to work every day than to haul the garbage cans 1/4 mile to the street.
And I work in a different county where I pay a county income tax. This “garbage service” is the one thing I get out of it. :)
“Metals are the only thing that is viable to recycle.”
Agree, and it’s easy to sort metal from non-metal where the trash is handled. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to do all of this sorting and returning ourselves.
I’ve taken bags of cans to a church that collects and receives the deposit from them. It just isn’t worth my time to stand in front of a machine to get the returns myself.
Saw some of this recycling idiocy when I was doing contract work in Iraq. The military had recycle bins in all the mess halls. The Chinese took all the aluminum cans, but the rest went straight to the landfills as Iraq had zero, zilch, nada recycling capability. It was just stupid.
Recycling is just an indoctrination program like any other. Global Warming, tree hugging, etc.
Designed to give young socialist minds something to think about without actually accomplishing anything.
Recycle metals and use the rest for clean fuel: Magnegas TRNX
Do your own due diligence but this stock is so undervalued right now it’s just stupid.
Around here you can’t give cardboard away for recycling.
I refused to take the contracted trash hauler’s recycle bin and saved 40.00 a year. This offset the cost of a large trash bin keeping 25.00 in my pocket.
Prisoners could be used to sort trash
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.