[Chickensoup]

I read a few years ago that a Scandinavian country had discovered that recycling was bad for the environment because of all the pollution from vechiles

[Right Wing Assault]

all the pollution from vechiles

Yeah, I see these 500 hp diesel trucks idling all day while they pick up plastic recycling bags full of mostly air.

[JudgemAll]

The bleaching of recycled chemical filled paper alone is a nightmare of water pollution. A recycling businessman speaking at a University Paper actually said clean water is more valuable since polluted waters in the end kill far many more trees whose immune system to bugs and diseases suffer as a result, but the hype being good for his business, he shrugged shoulders.

Recycling should be market and condition oriented. It’s been used in war time effectively.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

A Swedish environmental group admitted that recycling is environmentally counterproductive, but useful nonetheless because it trains the public to obey the mandates and ukases of the environmentalists. In other words, recycling may harm the environment, but it’s good for our souls.

When I lived in Acton, Massachusetts I used to get a dump sticker every year for about $100 bucks. One year the Great and General Court (the Massachusetts legislature) passed and Governor Weld signed into a law an act making it illegal to dispose of metal cans, glass bottles or newsprint in a landfill or incinerator in Massachusetts.

So the next year when I’m at the dump writing my check for $100 bucks I mention (jokingly) to town treasurer who was there to collect the checks, we ought to get a discount that year since we were now saving all that dough recycling. She, in all ernestness, shot back that recycling was costing that town of 20,000 at total of $60,000/year. Seems all the bottles and cans and newsprint was being shipped by BFI to a landfill in Michigan. So apparently trucking Massachusetts waste to Michigan was one way to save the world. (Ontario, with vast stretchs of wasteland, was doing the same thing, shipping waste to Michigan in order to pretend to be saving the world.)

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I should mention that I so deeply resented the whole pantomime of recycling that I made sure that as much residual waste as possible remained in the cans and bottles. We were supposed to clean them before disposing of them. Instead, I switched from my usually frugal habit of wiping the last grams of cat food or tomato sauce from the cans and bottles and casually tossed dripping messy cans into my recycling bin. I'd always save the last ounce of a soft drink for BFI before replacing the cap. Then when I stood in line to toss them in the BFI collection bins, they reeked of putrefying food residue. A petty, small thing, but the only way I could fight back.

[driftless2]

"recycling"

In 1991 one of my LIBERAL! physical geography profs did a study on recyclying. His conclusion: it cost more and used more energy to recycle than to simply bury the stuff.