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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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Worse - the fake comfort from the delusion stops us from finding real solutions...
Recycling metals is fine in terms of mining and refining costs. The Japanese have done a marvelous job of developing molten metals separation processes. But instead of recycling plastics they should be shredded and burned for electricity. Paper products too.
What we're doing is stupid.
It was recently admitted here by our county betters that the recycling we do separating our trash and cleaning it out of food waste, and putting it into a separate trash can so it can be ‘collected’ on certain days, goes straight to the landfill.
Why?
Because there is no market for the stuff! Nobody wants to buy it!
But we are supposed to not stop doing the separation and cleaning of our trash!.................
We could ship all of America’s garbage to the middle of North Dakota for a Century, and you know what you would get when done?
Finally, a ski hill!
Please Recycle Aluminum cans. 75% of aluminum cans are recycled and it saves an ungodly amount of energy.
Cardboard is also heavily recycled. Usually from cardboard only dumpsters.
Plastic recycling is a joke.
I never fell for this ruse.
Still using the single stream method. Everything goes in the same bin. Everyone around us has a trash bin and a recycle bin. Not at our house. Do I feel bad? Nope.
Same here. My sister-in-law was surprised we didn’t recycle. I said if it was valuable, I would be paid to recycle.
If it's not worth their time, it's not worth my time.
Recycle metals and cardboard. Anything else is a joke.
One of the worst recycling offenders is the general public. No surprise there. People throw wet garbage, wire, plastic bags, plastic garbage cans, paint cans, Styrofoam, all of which spoil the entire container of “recyclables” which is then dumped into the landfill.
Recycling is a scam.
Just try recycling a curly light bulb or fluorescent tube these days. Here, those get trucked over 500 miles to an "appropriate" mercury reprocessing facility. It turns out that "recycling" LED light-bulbs is just as painful. Far WORSE are lithium batteries. In inquiring about "proper disposal" they wanted me to drive 30 miles to the nearest recycling center.
I do these things not because I care all that much about doing it for the planet as I want to learn and understand the current state of the art, so to speak as might be applied to product design. I tear apart all sorts of dead items for reprocessing, just to learn about what it takes. My actual goal here is to use as much as I can without sending it to the landfill. Cardboard especially I put into the wood-stove to slow the combustion. It keeps the thing from forcing us to open windows on winter nights.
Cardboard box technology has made astonishing leaps in recent years with all these interlocking tabs eliminating the need for glue to erect them. As anybody who has operated or maintained a glue machine would attest, the damned things are a total headache. Yet look at what Amazon has done in that realm. They went from popcorn to air bags, to crushed paper, and now are getting rid of boxes in a big way with these heavy paper envelopes because of the bag/bins they have for delivery trucks now. The process has moved forward very quickly.
We just have to get serious about burning the damned plastic.
Long term one could question whether it saves trees. Trees are planted to harvest and if the demand decreases, the price for pulp wood goes down and fewer tress are planted and the ground is used to plant something more profitable.
Living through California water shortages I have often wondered how much water is wasted by the billions and billions of gallons over the decades of meticulous people rinsing every single little drink bottle or can, I hope you don’t run the faucet while brushing your teeth, but now rinse a coke can and imagine that happening billions of times, for no reason, nothing is being done, at least brushing one’s teeth is a must do.
Like solar and electric cars, has anyone run the waste cost of the entire process of everything related to the process of recycling? the ENTIRE process.
What about lead acid batteries?
The left doesn’t care about trees. They will eagerly clear cut forests for solar panels.
I’ve been saying the same for years. My neighbors all looked down one because I refused to pay for a recycle bin.
In 1998 as part of my kids education, we followed our garbage collections from pick-up to end disposition. My children were horrified to discover that it all went into the same landfill. After that, my kids ask for details and “walk me thru your processes” when dealing with anyone. One is a Land Use attorney today.
The only way it ever “worked” was when we could ship it off to China where they had low wage people sort it. China started refusing any more imports of “recycled” material a few years ago. Since then its all gone to either the landfill or the incinerator.
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