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Why the Trash You Sort Isn't Getting Recycled
http://www.americanoutlook.org ^ | December 29, 2003 | Dennis T. Avery

Posted on 12/29/2003 10:07:20 AM PST by stylin_geek

My neighbors are unhappy to learn that the trash they’ve carefully sorted for years into brown bottles, green bottles, cans, and paper is being dumped back into one pile at the local landfill. Except for aluminum cans, no one wants the sorted trash items. Is this bad for the environment?

Probably not. I checked with Dr. Daniel Benjamin of Clemson University (and the PERC Center for Free Market Environmentalism) and he says: First, don’t worry that the trash going into our landfills will take over too much of the land area. People today are actually throwing away less trash (in both volume and tonnage) than in previous, less-affluent generations. Dr. Benjamin says the average U.S. household today generates one-third less trash than the average family in Mexico!

How can this be?

In significant part, it’s because we throw away less food, thanks to commercial processing and packaging.

When chickens, for example, are commercially processed, the beaks, claws, and innards are turned into pet food instead of going into the kitchen garbage can. Commercial processing and packaging of 1,000 chickens adds about 17 pounds of paper and plastic wrap—but turns (recycles) about 2,000 pounds of chicken by-products into useful purposes. Ditto for such things as the peelings from frozen French fries and the rinds from making orange juice. (The “factory” potato and citrus peels go to feed livestock.)

Millions of additional tons of organic waste go down the garbage disposals and so on to waste treatment plants, instead of drawing flies at the landfill.

Companies have also turned to lighter-weight packages (mainly to cut transport costs) and the total weight of the packages entering landfills, says Dr. Benjamin, has fallen by 40 percent. Plastic two-liter soft drink bottles weigh 30 percent less than the old glass bottles. Plastic bags weight 70 percent less than paper. Even aluminum beverage cans now weigh 40 percent less.

Thirty years ago we were told that we were running out of landfill space. New York City wasn’t able to dump its garbage at sea any more, and it got piled up on Staten Island. What happened?

A new rule on ocean dumping and a temporary shortage of landfills with permits basically caused a bottleneck. New York initially started exporting its trash by rail. (Some if it came to Virginia, where we had lots of rural gullies to fill, and were very cheerful about the dumping fees.)

Today, the United States has 25 percent more landfill space permitted than we had 25 years ago. And all the trash we’re expected to dump in the next 100 years would fit into a landfill about 10 miles square.

There are no plans for one centralized national dump, of course, because it’s more advantageous for most communities to save the transportation costs, and turn their completed landfills into parks and tennis courts within their own borders.

What about pollution leaking from the landfills? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), never likely to minimize a pollution risk, says leakage from modern America’s landfills can be expected to cause one cancer-related death over the next 50 years. In other words, the danger is too low to be measured. Today’s landfills are sited away from groundwater sources; built on a foundation of several feet of dense clay; the foundation is covered with thick plastic liners, and the liners are then covered with several feet of sand or gravel. Any leachate is drained out via collection pipes and sent to the municipal wastewater treatment plants.

Won’t we be losing irreplaceable resources if we landfill instead of recycling? Too often, recycling proponents focused on the aluminum or newspaper being recycled, and forgot about the fuel, manpower and other resources it took to turn the trash into something useful. And with new technology, resources such as copper and wood have declined in value.

Franklin Associates, which consults for EPA, says extensive recycling is 35 percent more expensive than conventional disposal, and curbside recycling is 55 percent more expensive. In other words, recycling takes more resources than landfilling.

Why did people promote recycling so heavily in the first place? Lots of people probably misunderstood the costs and benefits. It’s also true that eco-activists urgently wanted everybody to feel a direct stake in saving the planet. Telling us all to recycle was their way to make us feel eco-involved.

Today, however, when environmental concern is near-universal and conservation techniques are far better, we don’t need “phony” recycling campaigns.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: environment; environmental; environmentalism; recycle; recycled; recycling
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To: alnick
I know that the county and city provide this material to those who want it for free or low cost.

I'm passing the word about Starbucks and their coffee grounds to a couple of young relatives who want to raise earthworms for bait and gardens. These great nephews want to be big time worm raisers. I think there is a local Starbucks in their area.

My sons, before they graduated to flies and artificial lures would buy a couple of dozen worms, put them in an area and throw our coffee grounds on the top of the soil and cover it with damp newspapers. In a few months they had all the worms they needed.
61 posted on 12/29/2003 11:50:39 AM PST by Grampa Dave (Kaddaffi, "I will do whatever the Americans want because I saw what happened in Iraq. ")
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To: stylin_geek
bump
62 posted on 12/29/2003 11:52:03 AM PST by RippleFire
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To: oyez
This clown will be a big Dean supporter if he isn't.
63 posted on 12/29/2003 11:52:18 AM PST by Grampa Dave (Kaddaffi, "I will do whatever the Americans want because I saw what happened in Iraq. ")
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To: stylin_geek
I don't live in Calcutta, so I always attempt to minimize the amount of time spent playing with my garbage.
64 posted on 12/29/2003 11:55:11 AM PST by Hank Rearden (Dick Gephardt. Before he dicks you.)
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To: Oatka
But glass was sterilized and reused umpteen times. Then somebody got the bright idea to dump the costs on the public and use "disposeable" plastic bottles, which takes years, if ever, to deteriorate. Note that the shift to plastic didn't equal a drop in price.

I don't ever recall 2-liter Cokes being sold in glass bottles, either.

65 posted on 12/29/2003 12:00:03 PM PST by Dont Mention the War
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To: stylin_geek
Please see tagline...
66 posted on 12/29/2003 12:11:11 PM PST by metesky (My investment program is still holding steady @ $.05 a can.)
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To: Oatka

But glass was sterilized and reused umpteen times. Then somebody got the bright idea to dump the costs on the public and use "disposeable" plastic bottles, which takes years, if ever, to deteriorate.

The only reason glass was recycled was because we didn't have the technology to make enough plastic bottles. Now we do, and it's cheaper than hauling all those heavy bottles everywhere. The plastic bottles actually decompose faster than the crude oil they were extracted from.

Even if we run out of fossil petroleum we will still be able to synthesize whatever plastics we need from trees, crops or coal. All it takes is energy -- and we have at least a 4,000 year supply of uranium and thorium.

The most rational way to recycle is to burn trash to reclaim the energy and release the CO2 so that plants can use it.

67 posted on 12/29/2003 12:24:07 PM PST by Dan Evans
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To: stylin_geek
Why did people promote recycling so heavily in the first place? Lots of people probably misunderstood the costs and benefits. It’s also true that eco-activists urgently wanted everybody to feel a direct stake in saving the planet. Telling us all to recycle was their way to make us feel eco-involved.

This is a clueless answer. The foundations that financially sponsor eco groups are heavily invested in selling you energy and water. Guess what recycling wastes in abundance?

68 posted on 12/29/2003 12:26:34 PM PST by Carry_Okie (The environment is too complex and too important to manage by politics.)
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To: Grampa Dave

So now one of the Doctors, a watermelon, has become the Complex's Garbage Nazi. His office has a corner view of the garbage storage area with all of the marked and defined bins. He watches all day and then makes periodical visits to physically inspect the individual dumpers which are different colors and marked for specific garbage. All of the garbage goes into one or two trucks, it is compacted together

Insanity. Like Alice in Wonderland. Like a Monty Python skit.

69 posted on 12/29/2003 12:47:35 PM PST by Dan Evans
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To: Carry_Okie
Notice the last part of the last sentence ..."feel eco-involved." I think that is an accurate summation, IE, the left puts feelings ahead of facts.
70 posted on 12/29/2003 12:48:58 PM PST by stylin_geek (Koffi: 0, G.W. Bush: (I lost count)
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To: Grampa Dave
Some of the best humor in life are these little slices of reality like this one you posted:
"WHITE TRASH ONLY."

Well, I was certainly amused! Every time I lifted the lid I half expected to be regaled by the sight of a toothless redneck, chugging a Miller Lite and chomping on a big wad of Red Man.

71 posted on 12/29/2003 12:52:29 PM PST by Agnes Heep
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To: stylin_geek
Notice the last part of the last sentence ..."feel eco-involved." I think that is an accurate summation, IE, the left puts feelings ahead of facts.

It may describe the useful idiots, but it doesn't do justice to those who fund them.

72 posted on 12/29/2003 1:05:51 PM PST by Carry_Okie (The environment is too complex and too important to manage by politics.)
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To: Hank Rearden

I don't live in Calcutta, so I always attempt to minimize the amount of time spent playing with my garbage

Maybe this is just a big joke and even the greens don't believe in it -- just their way of having fun. Kind of like the way they stopped up everyone's plumbing with the low-flush toilets.

Stupid or evil? Evil

73 posted on 12/29/2003 1:12:35 PM PST by Dan Evans
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To: Monterrosa-24
People certainly don't want dumps near them, thus every single new dump will be fought tooth-and-nail legally, the point is there's no shortage of space whatsoever for dumps, which is absolutely true.

There's immense amounts of open space in this country and dumps will never, ever, make the slightest dent in it.
74 posted on 12/29/2003 1:16:34 PM PST by John H K
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To: Glenn
Not to mention the leak of smelly icky "garbage fluid" that drains out of the truck every time they fire up the compactor on the back of the truck.
75 posted on 12/29/2003 1:26:02 PM PST by Johnny Gage (How does the guy who drives the snowplow get to work in the mornings?)
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To: Ff--150
...AND these phony recycling programs has us paying $2.00+ a month for our planet! Sheech!!....

It gets worst. Because the government makes it illegal for others to pick up your recyclables, organizations like the boy scouts who used to make money by doing it for FREE cannot.

Heck, we used to scour the neighborhood for glass bottles for the $0.05 bottle deposit.
76 posted on 12/29/2003 1:26:24 PM PST by Joe_October (Saddam supported Terrorists. Al Qaeda are Terrorists. I can't find the link.)
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To: KEVLAR
....It is cost effective for me to sort. I pay $2.00 per can for garbage to be hauled away. Recyclables are free....

Yea, no scam there.
77 posted on 12/29/2003 1:30:34 PM PST by Joe_October (Saddam supported Terrorists. Al Qaeda are Terrorists. I can't find the link.)
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To: E Rocc
ER,

"one-time second largest aluminum recycling site in North America (my previous employer)"
By recycling, did you mean that they actually melted the cans down to ingots? If so, what kind and size of crucibles did they do the melt in? And how long did those crucibles last, before needing replacement?

I ask because a dirty little secret of aluminum recycling is that the ratio of aluminum oxide to aluminum is at its highest in the thin sheets used to make aluminum cans. The aluminum oxide is a very good insulator and this causes hotspots in the crucible which results in overheating it to destructive levels. Crucibles are very expensive and the need for frequent replacement can destroy the cost savings of recycling.

Any comment?

--Boot Hill

78 posted on 12/29/2003 1:32:34 PM PST by Boot Hill (Entropy Kills!!!)
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To: Grampa Dave
Last time I was in the local Starbucks, they had a basket full of two-pound bags of grounds. I snagged one for my organic-gardener neighbor. Made my work truck smell great for the rest of the week :)
79 posted on 12/29/2003 1:48:19 PM PST by TexasBarak (aka Captain Cantankerous!!- www.postalbanks.com)
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To: Mo1
"the stupidest recycling story I've heard, was a few years ago when a street near me was repaved using recycled glass"
Actually, that's not as stupid as you make it sound. Recycled glass is crushed to the size of small grains of sand and added to road repaving materials, recycled rubber (e.g., for railroad crossings) and to plastics to make them extremely strong and durable. Pretty standard and intelligent use of recyclables.

--Boot Hill

80 posted on 12/29/2003 1:48:29 PM PST by Boot Hill (Entropy Kills!!!)
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