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.
Next door in Bedford, our transfer station pays *slightly less* to have the recycling items hauled away. I question if the overhead of maintaining a recyling center pays for the slight savings.
Interesting, I'll have to do a bit more research.
It makes sense to recycle Aluminum because it's cheaper to melt it down and re-use it than it is to mine new Bauxite. It's also handy (though not economical) to re-use plastics since they take an incredibly long time to degrade and give off toxic fumes when burned.
Given how much Methane they produce, I'm suprised that more landfills aren't used as an energy source.
Ann Arbor, Michigan has a methane power plant on their closed landfill, built at least 15 years ago. I'm not sure how it's working these days or the price of the power it produced, but I'm sure that could be found on the web.
I imagine collecting the methane is not economical yet.
BTW, my former boss loved using the phrse "Zero is a number".
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| City of Ann Arbor Landfill Ann Arbor, MI - 1600 kw | ||
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Landfill Energy Systems worked with the City of Ann Arbor and The Detroit Edison Company to develop a small landfill gas utilization project for the City. The City’s Landfill is a one hundred and thirty-two acre site located within the City limits. The landfill stopped accepting trash in 1992 and the final cover was finished in 1993. |
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If I knew I would tell you. In the world the number is undoubtedly thousands. The question was rhetorical really. The point I was trying to make is the mechanism for a dump to cause any harm to the blessed environment or humankind has never been shown. They have polluted water in the old days and that can cause health problems, but today that's a non-issue.
Dumps are unsightly when operating but innocuous when closed, except they will break wind occasionally like a big herd of cows if they aren't plumbed to collect the methane.
Your grandchildren and mine won't be bothered by our old trash. They'll have bigger problems to deal with I'm sure.
Did she tell the truth about how to work the copier? ;-D
What about parks? Do you have too many of them?
It is not as though we are really running out of room for landfills. One can put lots of trash in a relatively small landfill. Then you can get methane gas out of the landfill and use that for energy.
"I wish McDees/BurgerKing would have some type of program that if you brought back their wrappers/bags you would get money back."
Wish in one hand...
Sorry, but you are as liberal as Ted Kennedy.
"it generates methane gas which is narcotic, toxic and flammable" and can be sold as fuel, just like gases like butane and propane which are just as toxic
"It's a real problem, particularly in densely populated areas."
Not really. There is plenty of space for landfills.
bump
Those were the days!
"Give a hoot, don't polute. SINK your beercans."
"More landfills, less land available for living."
More landfills, more land available for parks, which make live worth living.
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