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I'm pretty sure you could find a long and detailed article on why recycleing is great. Maybe it would be utter piffle, or maybe not, I can't say that I know. I'm just baffled by why so many conservatives are so willing to leap all over this stuff.

If it works it works. If it doesn't it doesn't. If recycling is useless today then perhaps technology will make it mavelous tommorow. There seems to do some sort of objection to sorting some stuff out of one's trash or useing gas effeciently that's based on some sort of metaphysical principal rather than whether or not it does any good.

I don't mean to pick on you in particular Grundle. I've simply noticed that the discussion of this issue is not always as objective as it could be.

Your post was very polite and civil. You are not picking on me.

Regarding this particular recycling program, according to the article, it will cost $500,000 for 500 homes for six months. That's $2,000 per home per year.

If recycling diapers costs more money than putting diapers into a landfill, then that suggests that recycling diapers uses up more resources than does putting them into a landfill.

Let's take a look at gold. Gold is a truly scarce resource. But people recycle gold voluntarily. There's no need for environmentalists to go around and tell people to recylce gold. Why? Because gold is truly scrarce. And this scarcity is relefected in the high price of gold. And the high price of gold is why people don't throw their gold into the garbage.

If dirty diapers were truly valuable, then there would be private companies that would offer to buy them from willing sellers, and no government involvement would be necessary.

People will always voluntarily recycle, if they believe that it passes a cost/benefit analysis. If government involvement in recycling is the only way to get it to happen, that is because it fails a cost/benefit analysis.

In a free market economy, prices communicate information about supply and demand. I think that the people who favor government recycling programs do not understand the function of prices.