Posted on 04/24/2019 12:12:43 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
A couple of years ago, after sending my five-year-old daughter off to school, she came home reciting the same cheerful environmental mantra I was taught in elementary school.
“Reduce, reuse, recycle,” she beamed, proud to show off a bit of rote learning.
The moral virtue of recycling is rarely questioned in the United States. It has been ingrained into the American psyche over several decades. On a recent trip to the Caribbean, my friend’s wife exhibited nervous guilt while collecting empty soda, water, and beer bottles destined for the trash since our resort offered no recycling bins.
“I feel terrible throwing these into garbage,” she said, wearing a pained look on her face.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was a good chance the bottles she was recycling back in the States were ending up just like the ones on the Caribbean island we were visiting.
Difficult Implementation
As Discover magazine pointed out a decade ago, recycling is tricky business. A 2010 Columbia University study found that just 16.5 percent of the plastic collected by the New York Department of Sanitation was “recyclable.”
“This results in nearly half of the plastics collected being landfilled,” researchers concluded.
Since that time, things have only gotten worse. Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a story detailing how hundreds of cities across the country are abandoning recycling efforts.
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
The People’s Republic of Boulder (CO) is master at playing this silly game. There are actual visual “checklists” at even McDonalds showing where to put the straws, plates, food, (throway drug needles and used marajuana tokes - just joking, but it IS boulder).
Meanwhile in neighboring Republic of Denver, you can camp in city parks, take bodacious Obamas everywhere, (and almost got free drug injection sites - thankfully only recently sidelined by a very smart talk radio host - Peter Boyles. But boy, you’d better carry a bag to pick your dog poop.
And so goes the idiocy of progressives.
You know, I don’t mind separating things for recycling purposes. I don’t like tossing everything into a landfill.
Sad fact is though, a lot of cities just combine the stuff and dump it in a landfill.
It’s not monetarily feasible to do what we would like to think could be done.
If you burn the stuff for energy production, you have to consider the chemicals being lofted into the air too.
I think this is one of those things we can say, “We tried, but it simply didn’t pan out.”
No harm in that. It is what it is.
Recycling never works.
It didn’t work during WW2 and it still doesn’t work.
It’s a propaganda mantra that lets people think good of themselves while accomplishing nothing.
We should get rid of recycling.
Since everything now is plastic, just burn it and if you can, recover the heat. Burying it only adds to the problem.
As for plastic single use bags, almost all of them contain starch so that will break down from UV radiation or bacteria.
Single use bag bans is colossally stupid. Reusable bags are even stupider. Reusable bags are a health bio-hazard.
I thought I was the only one! ;)
Here in the Pittsburgh area most suburban communities quit recycling glass and many plastics on Jan. 1. There is simply no market for it.
The City of Pittsburgh however continues to Virtue Signal at taxpayer expense and insists on recycling EVERYTHING.
Even though they are currently losing money on everything except aluminum cans.
I agree...We had one in our area. Plastics became a problem...but the system was generally efficient.
Are you aware that most of the stuff you read here on Free Republic, from the articles themselves to the comments about the articles, is written by public school graduates?
Apparently not.
Hopefully you didn’t waste your time by reading even this far.
I cannot find a place that takes bottles.
And I’m not talking about old mayonnaise bottles or whatever, I’m talking Strongbow cider bottles...
no place, nowhere...
Most people do not have the wherewithal to provide alternative "education" due to the crushing tax burden imposed by the state.
I'm sure TSR appreciates your concern as much as I.
Fairfax County, VA burns its trash in a 80MW electric power plant. Metals are extracted before and after the burn, the ash is landfilled.
Everything but beer cans goes in the dumpster. The aluminum cans are beer money... A small payback, but better than throwing it away!
Is Canada willing to go to War over recycling ,LOL
In fact, I have three very expensive recycling machines in my house. I use one of them to recycle my glasses, dishes, and silverware; the other to recycle my clothing.
Other than that, not so much.
‘Most people do not have the wherewithal to provide alternative “education” due to the crushing tax burden imposed by the state.’
I guess that I would agree if they want to maintain their ‘lifestyle’...
‘Are you aware that most of the stuff you read here on Free Republic, from the articles themselves to the comments about the articles, is written by public school graduates?’
They sure as hell didn’t graduate from the same type of public schools that parents are now dumping our kids into. Night and Day, compared to back then.
‘how many kids have you home-schooled?’
4, and you?
It's one of our first experiments in Socialism.
It also points out the fact that failed lawyer who go into politics are extremely poor "Central Planners,
Charles McKay must be beaming down on us as we write another chapter in his classic book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". It should be required reading to graduate from any publicly funded high school.
Recycling was the death Knell for the “Return for Deposit” bottle.
“Any person DEMENTED enough to sent their kids to public schools is not worth my time,-—”
—
If home schooling produces kids as judgmental as you are that tells me all that I want to know about it.
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