Posted on 06/02/2012 5:42:17 PM PDT by Chickensoup
Gubbament ‘recycling” programs fail because if there is a amrket for the recyclable material, it is already being recycled. People doing that are easily found in the Yellow Pages under “Scrap dDalers” or the more Libtard “Recyclers”.
In recycling, as in other areas, letting gubbament do anything guarantees higher costs, lower efficiencies and sooner or later, “a swarm of officers to eat out our substance”.
Yeah, the last IS from the Declaratoin. Seems the spirit of King George is stalking America’s streets.
I typed “recycling doesn’t work” into Google and found hundreds of things. Why not try that?
Retirement comes to mind.
Actually the top of the article shows that recycling in NYC does not work. It is not economical. The trash is going to landfill or incinerators becasue it is not economical to recycle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDBO0cSMob4
Here’s a video about a failure of glass recycling.
The amount of energy involved in collecting the recyclables, plus the costs of recycling(wages, benefits of workers, trucks, land for recycling, buildings for recycling,etc. do not work for most consumer materials, with the exception of aluminum cans and steel cans.Possibly cardboard, depending on the demand for cardboard from China.
With the slowdown in worldwide markets, the demand for recyclables goes down.
For many years we had mandatory, sorted curbside recycling in NJ.
We found out that when the markets collapsed in 2001 after 9/11, recyclables had no market, and were dumped onto trains and buried in Pennsylvania, for which NJ had to pay for the privilege.
When I lived in Japan, I had to carefully separate my trash into: burnable, plastic, glass, buried, and food leftovers.
Except in one city.
Kyoto.
I am finding articles about how people dont recycle, I am looking for articles about the lack of benefit to recycling or articles that look at the full impact of recycling like cost of fuel,and carbon footprint of recycling.
The article you asked for, from Austria, was the first one I tried when I typed the words.
Kyoto.
Why?
Generally, if something is worth doing, somebody will already be doing it, because they can make a living at it, e.g. it is profitable. It’s not really more complicated than that.
Glass is recyclable, paper, or pulp can be, and “rag men” used to dot the cities. The problem arises when more energy inputs are utilized to subsidize government mandated “feel good” programs that consume more resources than are returned. Taking the other side of the argument, what is the “carbon footprint” of a mandatory recycling program where huge sums of money are spent in a futile effort to pick up crap that nobody wants, unless they can make money at it.
Garbage is profitable, if government (people who don’t actually want to work) stay out of the way. Seriously. Newspaper has a value, but once it’s required to recycle, at a cost, the there is no incentive. Textbook 101.
Why humans constantly have to re- discover truths laid out 6,000 years ago is one of those imponderables.
The 2009 article from libertarian Von Misis institute? I was looking for something a little more recent.
Thank you
NY Times no less
actually recycling is working well in the video. The items are gathered and sold to someone who values them enought to resell them and get them reused.
More about price collapse would be interesting, any links about what happened in your town?
Recycling, as designed to work, does NOT work well in the video.
The taxpayers shelled out big money for the bins, and more money to collect the recycling product—glass.
Any profit is supposed to go to offset the cost of recycling.
When the addicts steal the glass, they are stealing resources belonging to the city, i.e. the taxpayer.
So, the addict gets the money, the taxpayer pays for the whole collection set-up and gets nothing.
The addict compromises the recycling loop, causing additional costs.
Plus if they can’t steal enough glass, thyey’ll come to your house and rob you and kill you, if they want to.
John Stossel did a show on that subject a while back. May find it at his site or u-tube.
“The items are gathered and sold...”
By whom? For free? Of course not. Sold to whom? Why don’t the people who buy it from the people who gather it up just gather it up themselves, and cut out the middleman? See where I’m going with that?
The recycling workd. The recycling stream was there and the glass got recycled. The particpants did not protect their part of the stream but the glass was evidently valuable enough to steal.
I guess the question is, was the glass valuable because it could be resold for monies or was the glass valuable because there was an artificial value made by bottle/glass deposits?
By whom? For free? Of course not. Sold to whom? Why don’t the people who buy it from the people who gather it up just gather it up themselves, and cut out the middleman? See where I’m going with that?
z———————————
because they are obviously making enough of a profit.
CS, surely you jest.
The recycling worked for the thief, not for the people paying for the recycling stream to exist, and who were supposed to derive the economic benefit of the recycling.
No one can say that taxpayer subsidy of theft is recycling that works.
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