Posted on 07/13/2004 7:43:36 AM PDT by crv16
People are recycling less. In my home State of New Jersey the recycling rate for household garbage dropped for the fifth straight year in 2002, hitting 34 percent according to the most recent statistics available. Nationwide, it's the same. The national average dropped to 27 percent in 2002, the most recent year for such data.
According to BioCycle Magazine and Columbia University's Earth Engineering Center, that is the lowest it has been since 1995.
The justification for recycling is that it permits the reuse of things like paper, glass, aluminum and plastic. What you're not told is that it takes as much or more energy to recycle these things and can be more costly than to just do with them what mankind has done with garbage since it began building up in the caves.
Garbage has either been buried or burned. This is the most practical way to deal with it. Once a landfill has become full, it is covered over with a layer of dirt and becomes property that can be converted to some other use such as a golf course.
There are less obvious costs involved with recycling programs. Since paper, glass and plastic in my hometown cannot be put into the same truck that means the town has to pay crews of men to man the trucks for each. Those men draw salaries and other benefits. There are all kinds of insurance costs. The trucks cost money and must be maintained. In addition, they all burn gas as they start and stop repeatedly, adding to the cost and producing the greenhouse gases that recycling is supposed to reduce.
Then the recyclables have to be taken to recycling centers or, not infrequently, to landfills or incinerators. Where, of course, they become just plain old garbage again.
Recycling advocates say the reason for the decline is that the need to recycle, debatable at best, no longer gets the kind of attention it used to when it was fashionable to shame everyone into thinking they were “saving the environment� by separating their paper, glass, plastic and aluminum.
After awhile people began to wonder whether, in fact, it was necessary and with good reason. Glass, for example, is made from sand. The world is not running out of sand.
Paper is made from trees and we are not running out of trees either, unless you count the ones destroyed by catastrophic forest fires that usually result from bad state and federal forest management. There is still 70 percent of the forestland that was here in 1600 when the Pilgrims arrived. Annually, more than 1.5 billion trees are planted in the US, more than five trees for every man, woman and child and, of those, more than 80 percent are planted by forest product companies and private timberland owners. The rest are planted by federal and state agencies, and individuals.
As for aluminum, the Aluminum Institute says that plastic is crowding out higher-value aluminum cans in recycling bins, making the whole process of recycling less efficient. Many states have stopped mandating buy-back programs for empty cans and bottles. The recycling rate for aluminum hit 50 percent in 2002, its lowest point in a decade.
Similarly, the number of curbside collection programs nationally, which reached a high of about 9,700 between 1988 and 2000, fell to 8,875 by 2003 according to data provided by the Environmental Protection Agency. After 9-11 when New York City was hard hit by the devastation, entire recyclable collection programs were stopped in order to save the millions they cost.
It took a federal court decision to deregulate the hauling of trash out of my home state when it became apparent it was cheaper to ship it to landfills in Pennsylvania. Expensive incinerators that had been built on the premise that the garbage to be hauled to them would be required by law suddenly became a loss for those who invested in the bonds that underwrote their construction. When the market is allowed to function, less costly, more rational rules assert themselves.
Recycling is a waste of time, of financial resources, manpower, and is one more fraud perpetrated on people to further the myths of environmentalism. Bit by bit, they will be abandoned in the same fashion that so many other environmental programs will be when proven to be the same hot air as global warming.
Alan Caruba writes a weekly commentary, 'Warning Signs', posted on http://www.anxietycenter.com, the website of The National Anxiety Center.
Spot on. As the garbage decomposes, it generates methane gas which is narcotic, toxic and flammable. In Austin, TX, they had to condemn an apartment complex and put up a chain link fence around it because of this. The complex was built over an old landfill, and methane started oozing up from the ground. This caused a couple of flashover fires (puff of fire, kind of like when a little too much gas escapes before you get the heater lit, and was a real hazard to small children because of the narcotic and toxic effects.
We currently generate an incredible amount of garbage, especially when you consider than in the 1960's, when I was a kid, people bought a lot less stuff and all of the soft drink and milk bottles were hard thick glass and washed and reused. We buy a lot more pre-packaged items. We also double and triple package more now to make things tamper proof. It's a real problem, particularly in densely populated areas.
I haven't seen bricks, but they do make recycled plastic 'lumber' primarily for decking. It is about twice as expensive as wood, but it doesn't need to be sealed and lasts longer. Its a legitimate use, but only financially feasible because of the massive subsidies to recycling. Now they have mountains of plastic, and still can barely compete with lumber on price.
A "Forward this to your friends later" BUMP!
Yeah but your hazard insurance would sky rocket because your house could melt on a real hot day.
But there's NO shortage of landfill land, whatsoever...a mythology that began with the "garbage barge" in the 80s that wasn't allowed to dock anywhere.
I'm glad recycling is on the decline. It is nothing more than one of the "sacrements" of the secular religion that has been foisted on us at the detriment of Christianity.
There was a post yesterday about "longwall" mining, in which seams of coal are removed and the ground above subsequently collapses when supporting columns are removed. It seems to me that packing the voids with compacted recyclables and miscellaneous debris would prevent the collapse and remove the major objection to this kind of mining.
The post I mentioned I saw yesterday, posted by Willie Green; link here, if it works:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1168397/posts
Milk bottles were sent back to the dairy to be used for the thousandth time, soda and beer bottles were returnd to their respective brewerys to be filled again and soap came in boxes.
Leafy garbage and eggshells went to the compost heap, bones and meat went to the dog, other junk was stored for the ragman and the rest was burned once a week in a 55 gallon drum in the backyard.
Very little was picked up at the curb and maybe one trash can a week went to the landfill.
Depends on the situation. Here in Merrimack, the landfill is full, so the trash has to be hauled to a more distant landfill at some per-pound rate. They divert significant quantities of paper, plastic, glass, steel, and aluminum from having to add to the weight of material that they have to pay to haul, instead selling it to interested buyers such as asphalt plants (glass), blanket manufacturers (plastic), and so on.
There is also no town-funded pickup service, you either hire a private hauler or bring it to the facility yourself.
Scrap yards can work well recycling, but municipal landfills do not. Those who want to recycle and make a few extra pennies a week can do so, but those who are required to do this and that won't take the time. Scrap steel, scrap aluminum, still worth something even after shipping if you have enough of it--even from Alaska.
First I need for you to tell me how many people live on reclaimed dump sites.
As for the "forseeable" future, I do keep in mind that I have children who, God willing, will one day have children of their own who, God wiling, will have children of their own, etc. I don't see the population of the US shrinking drastically in the forseeable future, if it declines at all. More people, more trash. More landfills, less land available for living. So what if I recycle? Its not like I'm doing a bad thing, and I'm not wagging my finger at those who choose not to recycle. But I don't for a second believe that landfills can be safely reclaimed.
As for unwanted babies and mobsters, they are dead, or soon dead, once they hit the dumpster or landfill. They didn't die from living there and nobody claimed that they did. I bet their life expectancy would be drastically reduced, however, if that's where they were living.
Like Penn and Teller said on their Showtime show (Bull***t!), it's all about control, and people telling others what to do.
Garbage also generates a tremendous amount of heat as it decomposes. This past winter I forgot to set my dumpster out one week. Midway into the second week, there was steam coming out of it. The steam was so thick I actually thought the dumpster was on fire. We had to leave the lid open until the next trash pick-up day. The squirrels and raccoons had a very good week.
It happens quite often. The major precautions involve methane detection/venting and foundation design which accounts for settling.
Suitable for living? I'll err on the side of caution. If I were offered the 10,000 square foot home of my dreams, free of charge, but it happened to be on a reclaimed dumpsite, I wouldn't budge. Not for a second.
So would most people. Commercial or retail use is much more likely.
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