Posted on 06/18/2004 7:51:55 AM PDT by annyokie
Recycling Madness Suffering from Marquand’s Aunt Syndrome.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Herewith a King Klassic on the lunacies of recycling, from her May 3, 1999, "Misanthrope's Corner" column. Lady Florence fixes the Al Gorean sacrament atop the ash-heap of modern-day idiocies, charging that "The recycling movement has now passed through the cute good-citizen phase and progressed to the point where it is virtually impossible to throw anything out." It's a great and typically funny read (particularly Florence's recalling of the good old days of garbage disposal, when sane people stuffed furniture down the incinerator shaft). Enjoy!
Also a great read is STET, Damnit, The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002, a wonderful book in which NR has faithfully collected and republished each and every one of Miss King's beloved columns. STET, Damnit is available only from NR, and may/must be ordered (securely!) here.
The spirit of recycling in all its vainglory was expressed by John P. Marquand, author of The Late George Apley. He did not live to see recycling as we know it, but as a scion of Old Yankee Massachusetts he was an expert on the battier aspects of New England thrift.
Engraved on his mind was a boyhood chiding he received from an aunt. One day as he was cleaning out his desk he found half of an old pair of scissors, a single rusty blade with a single rusty thumbhole. He was about to toss it in the wastebasket when his shocked aunt told him that it would make a "perfectly good" letter opener.
This woman walks among us today. We have all heard her condescending voice, seen the high-cut nostrils of her long, thin nose flare with indignation, watched her go so stiff with righteousness that you could pick her up by her feet. Though she is long dead, she has been reincarnated — another form of recycling — as the star of a comedy of errors that has taken America by storm. The play is now in its sixth year and expected to run for ten more, so we might as well open the envelope. Ladies and gentlemen, the winner is...Al Gore in Marquand's Aunt!
The recycling movement has now passed through the cute good-citizen phase and progressed to the point where it is virtually impossible to throw anything out. I grew up in an apartment building where old appliances, venetian blinds, and the like were disposed of in one sentence: "Leave it out for the janitor." We put it beside our door and the next day it was gone. What the janitor did with it we neither knew nor cared; some janitors sold stuff for parts, some sold it by the pound to junk dealers, and Mr. Fix-It types had a nice little sideline in secondhand goods. Castoffs were an unwritten fringe benefit of being a janitor and everybody was happy.
The alternative was "Throw it down the incinerator." I would give anything for an incinerator now. They were a wonderful invention; there was one on each floor and all you had to do was walk down the hall. You could throw anything down them provided it fit, and if it didn't you could chop it up. We threw a whole armchair down the incinerator when my mother set fire to it with a cigarette. First the pillows, then the stuffing, then the wood a few pieces at a time, then the springs a few coils at a time, until it was all gone.
Our chair's cremated remains took up a lot less room than today's environmentally correct burials. To get rid of useless furniture today you must hire a trash hauler to take it to the landfill, or else take it yourself, provided you own a truck and, if a woman, can lift a bureau and don't mind driving to desolate places like landfills. Otherwise, you have to rent a truck and find two strong young men you aren't afraid to let into your home. The only guaranteed way to get rid of old stuff is to buy new stuff from a store that takes your old stuff to the landfill for free.
Then again, the landfill may not take it. Environmental guilt is so widespread that your landfill could be run by someone in the last stages of Marquand's Aunt syndrome. I bought a new air conditioner from a store that promised to take the old one off my hands. I thought it was a free service but they said they had to charge me $25 labor to take the condenser out before they would be allowed to throw the AC away; otherwise the landfill "wouldn't accept" it. Waste not, want not condensers.
My attic storage room is full of 15 years' worth of fritzed appliances and electric fans, but with neither janitor nor incinerator I am now faced with taking them unspayed to the landfill and finding out what it feels like to be rejected by a dump.
To encourage people to recycle cardboard, the garbagemen will not pick up cardboard boxes — but neither will the recycling truck. You have to cut them into flat pieces, which is why every hardware store now sells box cutters, a particularly vicious instrument once used only in warehouses but now de rigueur for every good little recycler — and the weapon of choice of preteen inner-city thugs who do not yet own guns, who would not now own box cutters if hardware stores did not stock them for good little recyclers.
The one item I was glad to recycle was newspapers, not for patriotic Gore but for personal convenience, but this too shall pass under a bureaucracy. You can't tie the papers with string and put them directly on the ground by the curb. You must use the recycling boxes provided by the city, which have themselves been recycled from what feels like old bus tires; they're heavy even when empty and their handles, instead of being rolled or flat, are so sharp that lifting a week's worth of three daily papers is like getting a good grip on oyster shells.
I have to take the box down first, then make two more trips with the papers, which intrigues the local liberals who teach at the college up the street from me, who gaze at my struggles from their car windows with quizzical, pensive expressions, obviously thinking, "How come she's recycling?" followed by, "Maybe she's not so bad after all."
Recycling as a political litmus test goes back to the late Fifties when Vance Packard published The Waste Makers and made "planned obsolescence" the buzzword of the decade. Packard, the darling of liberals since his earlier attack on advertising, The Hidden Persuaders, now became the darling of beatniks and other hippies-in-waiting eager to flaunt their capacity for needing nothing, wanting nothing, and living like the "real people," i.e., Europeans.
They hated anybody who bought anything and quoted Packard's findings on how much whipped cream went to waste in the bottom of the aerosol can because They want to make you buy more! Their heroes were people who took the trouble to puncture the can, like Packard's son, and get all of the whipped cream.
This is the spirit of recycling: little people elevating little virtues to make themselves look bigger. Welcome to the Age of Marquand's Aunt.
read later
I personally take sort of a perverse pleasure in putting empty soda cans in with the general trash. Does this mean I'm bad?
I bet that if a serious study was done on recycling, one would find that it makes little environmental sense, and no economic sense to recycle.
For example, I wash out cans and bottles prior to dumping them in the recycle bin. That process uses electricity (to pump the water), propane (to heat the water), and obviously -- clean water. Then there's the extra time spent dividing things up into proper bins, the time spent to take it down to the garage, the extra time spent at the transfer station. For those of us with municipal trash pickup, how much extra labor ($$$) is involved processing recyclibles?
I suspect the only consumer items worth recycling are aluminum cans.
I think I'm bad for putting cat food cans and bottle caps in with the aluminum stuff. They just weigh the bags at the recycling place.
Thank God you can still burn your leaves here.
When we lived in SoCal, the city handed out recycling bins, one for paper, one for glass, one for aluminum.
I happened to be up very early on morning with my baby and saw many Asians out dumping everyone's carefully sorted aluminum cans into the back of their pickup trucks. I later learned that the city had to reschedule pickup do to the enterprising Asians chipping into their profit margin.
For folks who still want to recycle their milk jugs, pop cans, cardboard, etc., they can drive it to the recycler place. Still seems like a waste of time and energy to me...
Actually, it's been done. In several ways recycling is bad for the environment. Newspaper recycling uses a lot of fuel to haul papers to distant recycling plants (that would ordinarily be near renewable pulp forests). Furthermore, the chemicals used to process the paper and bleach it are terrible for the environment. In Fairfax County, Va where I live they have a huge incinerator which burns trash, scrubs the smoke clean, and turns the energy into electricity. Yet, because of the recycling movement they have to recycle newspapers. Glass costs a lot to sort and most landfill/recycling locations admit they only actually recycle 20 to 40 percent and dump the rest because of lack of labor. Plastic has yet to find a valuable product that can be made from the bottles so it cost a lot more to recycle it than to dump it. Aluminum cans are the only item worth recycling and explains why you see people collecting them on the side of the road. Recycling has become a cult, immune to criticism and more of a religion that a practical solution to anything.
We only recycle our aluminum cans and we take them to the recycling place only because it is right up the street from the wholesale bread outlet where you can buy three loaves of bread for $1.25.
Has anybody else seen the episode of "Bullshit!" (Penn & Teller, Showtime) where they took on recycling? I never thought that recycling, of all things, would be shown to be just that. Amazing, and I give P&T for tackling the subject.
Heh. Good article. Our city has had curbside recyling for quite some time. We were provided with a small bin for containers: bottles, cans, plastic beverage containers, milk cartons. Paper was to be placed in another container, or in brown paper bags, like grocery bags. Cardboard was to be bundled with no side greater than three feet, and tied with twine. Oftentimes, when we had larger boxes, and lots of them (like when we were doing some remodeling, and had appliances and tool boxes), I just reduced them in size, and tossed them in the garbage bin. Bundling them in the proper size and tying them was a lot of work.
Now, the city has provided us with one 64 gallon bin so that the mechanical arms on the trucks can pick them up. We put EVERYTHING in those bins - smaller bits of cardboard, cans, bottles, plastic containers of all sorts, paper, junkmail. I am wondering if they actually sort it later, or if it all just gets dumped. I haven't watched to see if it goes in a separate truck or not. We also have "lawn trim" cans for lawn clippings and tree trimmings.
The state also recently raised the deposit on bottles and aluminum cans, so that I refuse to toss them in the recyling bins. I save them until I have enough for a trip to the recyling center and can collect a few dollars for them.
Bump for later reading
Composting costs next to nothing, provides nice rich new dirt for your plants. And you don't need the government to do a damn thing.
That's the only greenie thing I do.
Heheh, I love that subversive feeling I get when I throw our 'recyclables' in the regular trash. After all, it's only subverting the Green religion.
In the part of California where I live we have to deal with 3 huge wheeled plastic trash containers: one for 'regular' garbage, one for recycling, one for grass clippings and garden trash. There are dire consequences for anyone foolish enough to put 'politically incorrect' items in the wrong can! I spend at least an hour every week dutifully slicing up cardboard boxes to exact requirements of the recyclers, smashing pastic bottles and aluminum cans, etc. so I don't get into trouble with City Hall.
My new son in law was formerly the manager of a large supermarket in Melbourne, Oz. He laughs when he recalls all the good people who made special trips to the store to deposit their plastic garbage sacks in the recycling container. "We hauled them all to the tip (dump) and left them with the rest of the trash," he laughs.
Anyone who's watched "The Sopranos" knows who's really behind the recycling business and who benefits from the greatly increased monthly trash fees charged by the city. I've noticed that none of our municipal politicians are ever in need of campaign cash -- at election time posters blossom like California Poppies and so do their 4-color campaign mailings.
As one who has worked in the Plastic recycling industry would you care to back up your statement regards worthwhile recycled plastic products.
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
Actually, glass, steel, and aluminum are all good for recycling. But recycling PAPER AND PLASTICS is a fool's errand. The resulting stuff is ugly, dull-colored, and becomes impossible to recycle a second time. But glass and metals have been recycled for many, many years. I used to have an old "one-volume encyclopedia" that featured the ease with which glass could be recycled and what it could be made into (fabric, insulation, more bottles, etc). It was copyrighted 1939.
Iet me put it this way. If the plastic is so damned valuable as a recyclable how come no one is collecting it as they do aluminum cans. Please enlighten me on what products are being manufactured out of old milk containers?
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