Slashdot Mirror
Is Recycling Really Worth It?
sickofbluebins asks: "If one does a google on Why To Recycle there is a staggering amount of information on how recycling saves trees, resources, reduces pollution and generally is A Good Thing (tm). However, I recently read this article which comments that most recycling (besides aluminum) is not really worth it, and most of the recycling push is not based on science, but rather just by more politically based groups. I remember having people in my college classes be shocked when I informed them (being from a small town in the middle of logging country), that old growth forest was NOT being used for paper, as those trees produce the best lumber for things like houses and decks. The shock continued when I also stated in fact most paper comes from trees planted just for that purpose. All this makes me wonder how accurate the typical recycling information is.
So I ask you, Slashdot readers, have any of you seen a true 'scientific' study of the benefits (or lack thereof) of recycling, especially renewable resources such as paper. I would really like to know what recycling really helps our planet out, and what is just a bunch of hype."
(flamewar ensues)
From the Google link:
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: why to.
Here come the Rush limbaugh fans. Hold your noses.
I was reading just the other day about how recycling phone books produces a large amount of toxic waste. I have no corroborative evidence, however.
"According to William Johnston, a researcher at the University of Texas, half a liter of toxic waste is produced while de-inking a single phone book. This is waste that would otherwise not be created if not for recycling."
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
See if you can find any data that indicates just how toxic the recycling process is vs the original manufacturing process. I have a sneaky suspicion that recycling computers by shredding them, melting them down and pouring them into a chemical soup is in fact worse for the environment that if they were just thrown out. (Of course, keeping them running through repair and upgrade is best by far, but even that still spins off bits that can't be used again.)
At my high school there's a trash can and recycling bin in nearly every room. After school lets out, the janitor comes around and dumps both into his trash bin.
Why recycle? For one, it raises awareness of things to come, and things that are. Why not recycle... These extra steps we take in separating refuse give the teamsters something to strike about. :-)
Dear Tuning Point Rehabilitation Center,
One of your patients, a Mr. Rush Limbaugh, has gained access to a computer and is sumbitting stories to Slashdot. Please discipline him as appropriate. Preferably shock therapy.
A quick comment on old growth forests. Preserving old growth forests has nothing to do with recycling or need. Compared to 150 years ago, old growth forests are nearly gone. I want old growth forests preserved because they are rare and valuable from a beauty and moral standpoint. Many who have been in a pacific northwest old growth forest know this. There is plenty (like most forest land) of other managed non-old growth forest land that logging companies manage. By cutting the last of the old growth forests, companies profit and loggers will lose their jobs. To imply that the ones who recycle (misguided, I agree) are ignorant need to look at the loggers who let their bosses profit while they lose their livelihood. These days, old growth forests are exceedingly valuable and rare and truely irreplaceable.
-Sean
I informed them (being from a small town in the middle of logging country), that old growth forest was NOT being used for paper, as those trees produce the best lumber for things like houses and decks.
While the second half of the statement is correct, the first half is speculation, and incorrect speculation at that. Old growth logging for paper does occur in BC (Canada), although most of the paper produced is for situations where high-quality paper is needed, not for writing paper in your three-ring binder. Blanket statements are A Bad Thing
The shock continued when I also stated in fact most paper comes from trees planted just for that purpose.
Correct, but your proposition leaves out a whole slew of other situations - you're stating that paper comes from either old growth or tree farms, ignoring exploitation of second and third growth forests in the public domain. Even though it's been logged, a large amount of it has recovered to the point of being relatively "virgin", yet is being logged again.
My own take on it: using trees (whether "wild" from a forest or "domestic" from a tree farm) to make paper is just plain stupid. We should use less paper or make it from other sources. Hemp or kanaf, for example, make fine, high quality paper, you get a much higher yield per acre and cause less soil depletion. Recycling would still be a good thing though in terms of cutting the waste stream on the other end, because even if the argument about "saving trees" was debunked, you still gotta figure out what to do with it on the other end, which is usually bury it or burn it, neither of which is a great solution.
Epilogue: From the website or your article's "source":
Heartland's mission is to help build social movements in support of ideas that empower people. Such ideas include parental choice in education, choice and personal responsibility in health care, market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas where property rights and markets do a better job than government bureaucracies.
Heartland has been endorsed by some of the country's leading scholars, public policy experts, and elected officials. Dr. Milton Friedman calls a "a highly effective libertarian institute." Cato Institute president Edward Crane says Heartland "has had a tremendous impact, first in the Midwest, and now nationally."
So your premise is to debunk the "politically charged" assertions of environmental groups with "scientific "evidence, but you cite a right-wing libertarian think tank? Do I detect a little "small town logging bias"?
fuck you.
One problem with recycling is an economic one. Recycling only works if recycling affects supply and not price. If supply is constant, recyclers will cause prices to fall, and therefore, sales should rise, particularly if recyclers are in the minority. Saving paper may just allow another company to buy more paper at a lower price, therefore negating the gain of recycling. Does that mean we shouldn't recycle? No! It means that other political efforts may be required to prevent recyclers for just allowing someone else to profit.
-Sean
Around home, We seperate into 3 types: Compost (We live in the country, so that stuff is golden for the garden), Returnables / Recyclables like pop cans and beer bottles, and then other... thats like... well everything else.
Around school, (Acadia University) we have an extensive program of recycling and sorting, but if the janitors see one bit of non mal-sorted trash, like a bottle in with the papers, they won't fish it out, but infact, throw it in the garbage, and won't recycle it all.
I agree that aluminum cans and bottles should be returned, but what can they do with the other stuff than bury it in the ground or burn it in a furnace.
As for the tree issues, and the paper issue under that, the mills that make the pulp and the paper are quite efficient. There is little waist when they make pulp and less when they press it to paper. If a person would want to save a single tree, they would need an approximatly equal amount of paper. The logistics to save 1 acre of "old growth forests" would amount to millions upon millions of pounds of paper, and then you are burning up fossil fuels and poluting the air with exhaust.
Basically, the earth was here for hundreds of millions of years before humans, and it will be here for hundreds of millions of years after us. It is only human ignorance that makes us think that if 10% of our population recycles, we can make a difference. These people should put their brains to better use and find cures for dieseases, super conductors, the never ending beer, and many more things that would accelerate our society into a better and bigger future... not holding us back because mother earth has a few boo-boos.
Hold on, the future is coming if you want it to or not... there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. Just sit down, hold on, and enjoy the rids. See you if things calm down.
while(1) { fork(); };
My favorite is glass recycling. It would be hard to come up with a more pointless waste of time and effort. That isn't to say some people don't try (e.g. cutting the loops in the plastic that holds six-packs together so that dolphins don't get them stuck on their snouts and drown, or buying products from people you disaprove of in order to publicly burn them).
Glass is essentially sand that has been cleaned and melted. The main cost is the energy to melt & form it; the second most significant cost is the energy to transport it. The actual cost (both in dollars and environmental factors) of the sand and the cleaning are negligable compaired to these. If glass containers can be reused in the same process (the way you used to refill milk bottles), great. But to collect all sorts of assorted glass containers and transport them a great distance to someplace where they can be ground up to make sand is plain silly.
IMHO.
-- MarkusQ
I informed them (being from a small town in the middle of logging country)
The shock continued when I also stated in fact most paper comes from trees planted just for that purpose
Do you have facts to back this part up?
Growing up in a small town in logging country doesn't really make you a paper expert.
And who claimed that paper comes from old growth forest? Are you sure you aren't mixing up the messages?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
There needn't be a single, universal answer to this. It depends on the alternatives to recycling and the costs of each. For example, it may not make much sense to recycle steel if you live between an iron mine and a coal mine, but if you're in Japan, and have domestic supplies of neither raw material, recycling may make sense.
Another fact is the cost of the inputs, key among which is labor. If labor is cheap, picking through garbage to find glass, metal, and specific kinds of plastic makes sense. If it costs US$20/hr, it probably doesn't.
And finally, you need to consider the cost/benefit of your alternative, landfill or incineration. In some places, potentially recyclable materials, including some plastics, are burnt to generate electricity; this might make more sense than recycling. And if you're in Japan, recycling can also save valuable land from the dumps. That probably matters less in Montana.
.sig withheld by request
...and we found out last year that the school just throws the stuff in all the in-dorm recycling bins in the trash anyway. I guess I can't blame them so much, tho - everybody seems to throw their trash in the bins anyway. Of course, they could mark the bins a bit better, and could let folks know specifically what sorts of products can be recycled. Believe it or not, most people think that staples count as recyclable paper.
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
Ok, when I first saw this post I was all excited. Finally someone agrees with my crazy logic.
Nope it just some horribly biased marginal source with no statistics other than the fact that we only have to make 44 square miles of our country into landfill. Great, which major metropolitan area should we bury?
So, here's the crazy logic I alluded to. We use oil to make plastic. We dig oil up from the ground. When you recycle plastic it means we have more oil to burn because we don't have to use it to make more plastic. But, if you throw plastic away the oil goes back into the ground (hopefully) and we have less oil to pollute the atmosphere with. So recycling plastic leads to air pollution.
Environmental policy is, by it's very nature (pun!), ineffecient. Pollution is one of those rare problems that cannot be solved by a competitive free market. It's extremely difficult for people to "vote with thier dollars" for whatever company creates the least amount of long term negative environmental impact. Firstly, because that kind of thing is difficult to print on a label. Secondly, because nobody knows what the long term effects of what we do really is. So you have to dictate from the top.
But autocracy breeds corruption. And when you have to base your policy on "what if" and "just in case" and not, for example, 5000 years of careful scientific observation, the possibility for corruption becomes much more than a possibility. Corruption and waste run rampant in any system that is based more on faith and arguments from authority than on science because oversight and public scruitiny become extremely difficult, and environmental policy is no different.
Don't get me wrong. We need these laws...otherwise we go back to the days of rivers being so polluted that they catch on fire. But unless some serious and objective long-term study is done in all areas of environmental science, the solutions will always be very sub-optimal and may not, in fact, do anything to protect the long term health of the planet.
Reuse is becoming cheaper than disposal for lots of things.
Things might be different over there in the land of the freely available, but here in Europe, the push to recycle has as much to do with not generating waste. We're running out of space to put the stuff, and noone wants incinerators built near them, so every attempt to build one gets held up in court for years.
And yes, sand for glass is pretty damn cheap, but in some places, it can be a lot easier to turn old glass into new glass than to find a new quarry, or beach that isn't vanishing due to everyone driving down and taking sand and rocks for their gardens.
The economic arguments aren't all focused on costs of production, or sustainable use of resources anymore (since we're supposed to have learnt the lessons by now).
Next week: "Smoking is good for your health" by the R.J. Reynolds Institute.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Trees need to shed their leaves come winter in order to prevent this very vulnarable part of tree to become damaged and with it damage the tree itself. However these leaves represent a huge amount of resources for the tree. The energe invested in growing them is not a problem. It will have gained enough energe from them in return to regrow them next year.
The minerals however are another matter. Soil contains only a limited amount of the building blocks for leaves and for that matter the tree itself. Were shedded leaves simply to remain indefinete then two problems would occur. Sooner or later the tree would be unable to find any more nutrients in the soil. Hence no more leaves == no more food and the tree would starve. However it would also starve as any leaves it could grow would be covered under a pile of old leaves.
Fortuanlly shedded leaves decompose and the nutrients in them return to the soil. This prevents the soil from becoming starved and stops the earth being covered in huge piles of leaves.
So how does this apply to us? Well take packaging material like glass. It is cheap to make requiring a few cheap chemicals sand and power. Power is cheap sand is cheaper and as said the chemicals involved are also cheap. So why do we recycle glass? Not because the resource is limited. We are not likely to run out of sand anytime soon. Power is more restricted but recycling glass requires a similar amount of energy.
No the reason is to save us from being buried under a mountain of glass. Unless you want to live next to a garbage dump you better recycle glass. It is either used to make new glass or it will just be around forever and ever. (glass does not decompose ever)
Recycling metal is different. Metal ore is a far more finite resource. Yet old metal does decompose. Left long enough it will rust. So why do we recycle? Because it is cheaper in the long run. Every recycled can means less ore needed to be processed to produce replacement metal. Unlike glass recycling metal cost less energy.
So recycling has two goals.
To reduce the amount of waste we have to get rid off and to reduce the strain on the supply of the resource.
So does most recycling help? Wrong question, does recycling hurt? Yes to some it does. I bet you a small fortune that these are the same people that drive a 2 ton car all alone, who think speed limits are a restriction of their civil rights, that taxes are a way to keep them down, that women who don't date them are lesbians, that people with other religions/politics are stupid.
In short assholes. Do you want to be an asshole? No then buy four waste bins and one basket. 1 for paper. 1 for glass. 1 for food remains and finally one for all the rest. The basket is for all the stuff like old tv's fridges batteries and the like. How much time will it cost you to seperate them? Zero. How much time will it cost you to empty them? 1 hour extra per week max. Small price to pay for not being an asshole.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So that's what passes for logic in America? Hint to the uneducated: the 87 trees that got planted, they get logged as well. No paper: 13 trees. Paper: 0 trees. Yet the author thinks Paper = More Trees.
Ahh... a f@#king arts student. That says it all.
what about recycling to reduce the growth of landfills?
isn't that worth it?
Staples are no problem. They are automatically sorted out in the recycling process. The biggest problem with recycling is that to do it efficiently, too many people need to be experts in recycling technology to avoid putting too much time, energy and resources into unnecessary sorting while still performing required presorting.
talk to you principle, it obviously isnt supposed to be happening. don't be such a patetic fatalist whiner.
> it would require a hole that is 44 miles on each side and 120 feet deep. This is a mere one-tenth of 1 percent of the land area of the continental United States. As the report concludes, "there is sufficient land available to continue [our] reliance on landfills."
Way to totally miss the point, Mr. Article! Clearly a 44mi x 44mi hole in the ground is possible (I nominate somewhere in Utah) but the fact is that in our large cities, we have nowhere to put the trash. NYC is a great example of this. We recycle because it's something else to do with the trash besides truck the sh*t to some inland landfill. In other words:
There is no more room, convenient to the cities where most people live (and therefore most trash is generated), for our trash to be dumped. This means either (A) urban/suburban residents paying the garbage company [no, not SCO, the other kind of garbage company] exorbitant amounts of money to haul garbage in a truck to someplace like Utah, or (B) reducing our trash output by whatever means is possible.
I'll take B.
I can recomend a couple of good books on the subjet, writen by scientists. The first is The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg and the other is The World According To Pimm by Stuart L. Pimm. They are fair and well writen. Read them both.
"Aw, recycling is useless, Lis! Once the sun burns out this planet is doomed. You're just making sure we spend our last days using inferior products!"
If nothing else, recycling has created an entirely new industry... and many jobs. In the same way environmental cleanup has also created a new burgeoning industry... cleaning up our own waste has always been a huge industry, we're just thinking up new ways to do it.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I recently read an article in a scientific journal (I think it was 'Water & Environment Manager') about how recycling paper is actually detrimental to the environment; not just in terms of the energy costs involved in, but in long term damage to the unique biosystems of landfill sites.
As paper decomposes it encourages the growth of microorgamisms that effectively 'eat' trash. Without these microrganisms, material such as plastics are taking much longer to degrade. So, rather ironically, putting less paper into the landfills is actually a bad thing.
Unfortunatly, because it has been long been government policy to tell people that recycling is a 'good thing' (not just in the states, but practically everywhere), you aren't exactly going to be told 'put your paper in with the rest of your trash' anytime soon.
So you test all your cans on the little magnet, and throw the sticky ones in the 'steel' box and the non-sticky ones in the 'aluminium' (or aluminum) box. You're doing your bit for the environment - preserving the planet and its atmosphere.
Or are you? The greatest user of recycled aluminium is the motor car industry. So all those gas-guzzling, air-polluting SUVs driving around are made cheaper by being constructed from your recycled Coke cans...
- true or false? I dunno, its something I heard from a Greeny friend of mine.
If there was ever a post tat deserved a +1 insightful, it's the parent post.
Recycling is about anything but saving te environment. It's about economics.
Practically nobody who is in a position to really 'clean things up' is motivated to do so. People who run recycling plants by and large don't give a hoot about the environment - they're trying to make a profit. Recycling only happens when it's easier/faster/cheaper/more profitable than using new materials. And you can make all the federal laws you want about it, you know how well those work...
=Smidge=
...a New York Times Magazine article about this very topic I think in 96 or 97. Basically, they studied the history of recycling, the cost/benefits, and the political and economic motivations behind it.
I wish I could find the article, because it was excellent and thorough. The conclusion was recycling is more wasteful and pollutes more than just throwing away the old stuff (no polution other than transport) and making new. The problem was that sanitation companies (if you don't know who owns these, maybe a search for 'mafia' on google will clue you in) use the environmentalist recycling euphoria to push politicians to pass expensive and environmentally disasterous recycling laws.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Pardon my simplistic take on old growth forests, but...
1: Figure out how old "old" is. For sake of example, I'll use 300 years.
2: Figure out how many square miles of old growth forest you want to manage. For sake of example, I'll use 300 square miles. But remember, this argument can scale.
3: Use Simple Math. At the example scale, you can cut 1 square mile each year. If 1 square mile each year isn't enough, put more square miles under management.
OR
Decide you don't want old growth forests, any more. Make plans NOW for your current business plan to vaporize. If you cut any faster than some sort of "renewal rate" you're going to cut it all down and go out of business. It's just that simple. Or perhaps you mean to cut it all down and let your children go out of business.
There's obviously room to waffle on figuring out the "renewal rate", but in the end trees don't lie. Cut corners on allowing the forest to renew and you eventually go out of business.
4: Profit!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Nobody wants the 44mi x 44mi x 120ft hole in their back yard. I have a sister who lives in Utah, and I've visited there, and they TREASURE their land. (So do we in Vermont, for that matter.) To get one Utah opinion that is shared by many (though assuredly not all) read the works of Edward Abbey.
Perhaps the best place for the landfill is next door to Roy E. Cordato's house or the Heartland Institute, though I'm sure they'd prefer it be next door to someone of lower income.
So many of these rants sound to me like, "Just let me keep making money, and keep my money, and don't bother me with these silly 'issues' and 'consequences.'"
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
There was a study published in New Scientist some years ago in which they studied the use of disposable plastic coffee cups vs reusable china cups/mugs. They came to teh conclusion that if the mug was washed in a doshwasher after every use, it did more environmental harm (energy in, detergents out) than the plastic cup. Two uses per wash and the china won out.
When, some years ago, I was in the nappy (diaper in the US) purchasing stage, writing on the packat claimed that using disposables was more environmentally friendly than machine washing and tumble drying re-usables. This was from an obviously biased source, so I didn't take it seriously (but went on buying disposable because of the yuck factor) but it does suggests the relative costs must be in the same ballpark for them to get the claim past the advertising standards people.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
The Heartland Institute is a genuinely independent source of research and commentary founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1984. It is not affiliated with any political party, business, or foundation. Its activities are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
They say they're not affiliated with any political party, but who do they cite as authorities who approve of their work?
Heartland has been endorsed by some of the country's leading scholars, public policy experts, and elected officials. Dr. Milton Friedman calls a "a highly effective libertarian institute." Cato Institute president Edward Crane says Heartland "has had a tremendous impact, first in the Midwest, and now nationally."
Milton Friedman and the Cato Institute. In other words, this is just another right-wing pressure group, camouflaging itself under the colors of a left-wing social movement:
Heartland's mission is to help build social movements in support of ideas that empower people.
Fortunately, they aren't doing THAT good a job of camouflaging themselves: here's their real mission statement:
Such ideas include parental choice in education, choice and personal responsibility in health care, market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas where property rights and markets do a better job than government bureaucracies.
Do you see anything there about protecting the environment? No, it's all about giving businesses free reign to do what they want.
Looking to them for accurate information on recycling is like looking to a Marxist group for good ideas about investing on Wall Street.
Obviously if there were no recycling we would eventually have more garbage dumps than usable land. That point would be in the distant future, but one way or another, we'll need to start recycling the dumps themselves, or stop making more of them.
Just taking a chance here, but is this the Smidge from Northern Minnesota?
I vaguely remember that somewhere in Germany, the local council stopped having people seperate out thier trash - it was actually cheaper and easier to do the seperation at the refuse processing plant. Apperently they have to make sure everything gets seperated anyway (because people don't always put stuff in the right bin), so there was no real point in the residents sorting it themeselves (other than a feel good factor).
It could well be that your school is allowing it's student's to feel that they're doing something to help the planet when it really doesn't matter what they do.
Tk
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
It's called single stream recycling.
Our entire town does it. You put everything into one can, and then the garbage company takes it to a facility where minimum wage workers hand sort it.
Supposedly it's more efficient.
I got very disillusioned a few years ago when I decided to follow the recycling truck.
It went to the dump, and deposited its load in exactly the same place as the garbage trucks did.
I asked the site manager about this, and was told that while it's the law to recycle in our area, we didn't actually have a recycling program in effect, so they just mix the trash and recyclables at the dump.
This had been going on for 8 years already in 1999.
I have come to the conclusion that the us is a society of convience, we thow stuff away all the time. It's not really aour fault tho, there is no incentive to recycle. It does not cost the consumer more to buy something that is made from virgin material. If we want recycling to take place you need to tax the piss out of non recycled materials. Spending the money on the recycling programs, education about packaging (not putting 10,000 pieces of paper in a box), and discounts for items made and packaged in highly recycled materials, and incentives. I do not know how much of this is done, but if you hit the consumers in the wallet they will demand change.
-- tim
TKrabec Pahh
There are definitely other things besides aluminum that without any question
at all, environmentalist arguments aside, make very good sense to recycle.
Glass is one of them. It's a LOT cheaper to make new glass out of old glass
than from scratch. Actually recycling glass is even more ecconomic than
recycling aluminum, in some ways. (It's also more of a pain to collect,
which may offset that, but the fact remains it can pay well enough to be
worth doing, no question.)
Then you have your environmental reasons, and I think it's pretty clear that
recycling plastics is a good idea for the environment, if doing so can be made
practical. (We can only use so many expensive picnic tables.) In time, the
technology for this may improve to where it's fairly practical, hopefully.
It ought, in theory, to be possible to make pastic recycling ecconomic, though
for the present I think the technology hasn't got there yet. But I don't know
that there are any underlying reasons why it can't be ecconomic in the future,
given the right technology. And plastic technology is advancing rapidly.
Paper is always going to be the big sticking point, because it's not ecconomic,
and lack of the right technology is not the problem. Pretty much the only
valid argument in _favor_ of recycling paper is saving landfill space. (I'm
not saying this isn't a good argument; I'm only saying that it's the only one.)
Trees are very much a short-term renewable resource, and it's cheaper to make
paper from trees than from old paper -- and the resulting paper is (at least
in theory) better (though for some purposes the difference is unimportant).
As far as toxic poisons, the ink is much more a concern than the paper itself,
and when you recycle paper the ink is left over, and you still have to do
something with it. So it comes down to saving landfill space. Consequently,
paper recycling, if it's going to be done, is going to have to be heavily
subsidized by someone -- preferably by an environmental charity of some kind.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Sounds a lot more efficient to me. I loved just throwing everything in one can. Plus, it helps the economy by creating jobs!
OK, I haven't read the article. However, just from your first 2 sentences, I would say that it's more likely that recycling does good. Note what you said:
If one does a google on Why To Recycle there is a staggering amount of information on how recycling saves trees, resources, reduces pollution and generally is A Good Thing (tm). However, I recently read this article which comments...
(emphasis mine)
So...there's a "staggering amount" of information on why recycling's good, but suddenly now, because one article has been published bashing recycling, it's bad? I realize this is an exaggeration, and other such articles have been published; however, it seems to me that when you see a vast body of scientific work showing one thing, with no large money-wielding entity behind it (and no, the environmental lobby has never had all that much money, particularly compared to its opponents), it seems to me that whatever that one thing is is probably pretty likely to be true.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Agreed. I concur from a scientific standpoint. Sand is Silicon Dioxide crystal, and glass is a silicon dioxide molten superfluid (it's below 'freezing' temperature but not crystalized). Turning glass into more molten glass should require MUCH less energy than turning crystalized silicon dioxide into glass.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Not to be greedy, but there used to be places that would pay you for your recycleables. I seem to remember 15 years ago going with my folks to the recycling center where our stuff got weighed and we got paid. Does that happen anymore? I'm living in Champaign-Urbana, IL so there may be other places that have more services than here on the prarie. What's available out there?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Well, thing about it this way, is it cheaper to recycle or to create new from scratch? If it's not cheaper, then recycling is probably actually bad for the planet. Generally money is eventually tied to recources, i.e. natural resouces. At some point, that extra money you spend to recycle translates to extra electricity (read, burn more oil), extra man-power (and all the cost of keeping a human housed, fed and entertained), or some other extra resource being used up down the line.
Much in the way that electric cars don't reduce pollution (just redistribute it out of the cities to the power stations), recycling doesn't always reduce the impact on the environment... it just redistributes that impact to somewhere else.
This is exactly why we should be using hemp for paper. It is far easier to grow, takes less chemicals to process, and is superior in just about every way. As an added bonus, schoolchildren can get their homework back from their teacher and roll one up!
the argument was never that old growth shouldnt
be used for paper, its that it shouldnt be used at all.
the argument was never that recycling was the
savior of our planet, just that it helped to reduce how
much plastic we were creating, and how many trees
were being clear cut, even if recycling costs MORE than
cutting those trees. Because there are benefits other
than cost factor.
Im not goin to do the research for you.
This same logic applies to the relationship between paper and trees. If we stopped making paper from trees, there would be fewer trees. Eighty-seven percent of the trees that are used for manufacturing paper are planted for that purpose. That implies that for every 13 trees "saved" by paper recycling, there will be 87 that never get planted. This is why, contrary to popular belief, both the amount of forest land and the number of trees in this country have been increasing for the last 50 years. Increased demand for paper has led to more, not fewer, trees.
Let's just examine their not-so-veiled assumption here: that Trees Are Good, Regardless. To some extent, trees are indeed good, but so is variety. Increasingly, when looking at plantation timber, you are looking at a plant monoculture. For example, here in Australia a huge percentage of our plantation timber is Pinus Radiata. I shudder to think of how many native varieties, or other valuable timbers (or indeed other kinds of plants and animals) have been displaced in order that we should have thousands of hectares of one non-native species of tree, because it grows easily, fairly quickly and is easy to harvest.
The quoted paragraph above made me immediately suspicious of the credentials of the organisation in question. Trees are good, but not when they are all the same Tree, a point carefully glossed over in the article.
SofaMan -- Occasionally Battling Evil With His Mighty Powers Of Indolence.
Other than the aluminum can, and pop bottles, the average consumer doesn't generate enough prime scrap to recycle.
Compared to say, a large retail store, who has for years, crushed and bundled cardboard boxes, for recycling. But they have the space to store a partial truckload, making it worth the effort to pick up. Now, plastic amd steel strap can be recycled in the same way.
The problem now is that residential garbage needs to be sorted by a human for recycling. Until a machine is invented that can sort out plastics by type, this is going to remain a bottleneck.
New York. At least it was the same continent :)
=Smidge=
At one company, they had a box with discarded soda cans in it, and one day I saw the trashman dump them into the regular trash. Also, there was a newspaper story about Durham, NC just dumping the recycled items that they were picking up in special trucks into the landfill with everything else. I'd be willing to bet less recycling happens that what we'd like to think. Until it becomes profitable, I don't think it will happen on a widespread basis. Remember the cost-benefit analysis.
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
glass is a silicon dioxide molten superfluid (it's below 'freezing' temperature but not crystalized)
This is an urban legend. Glass is not a molten superfluid, supercooled liquid, etc. It is an amorphous solid. Old windows do not flow. Soda is used to reduce the melting point of sand in making new glass; it works the same way as putting salt on ice does. Adding old glass reduces the melting point the same way puting frozen saltwater on ice would, but that doesn't buy you anything--you can just as well uses some of the glass you just made, and you won't have to haul it for miles.
-- MarkusQ
Recycling is ethically right. The problem with making recycling work is raw materials like virgin plastic cheap. Lets assume some kinds of raw plastic made from petroleum probably cost about the same per pound as gasoline sold at retail. A $1.99 gallon of gasoline weighs about 6.96 lb. So the plastic feed stock used to make a 2.5 ounce milk carton costs $.04. Just use your calculator. If it costs only 4 cents to make a pure sterile milk carton from virgin non-recycled plastic there is no narrow economic basis to sustain a recycling program.
If they DONT cut down the trees, the Companies won't profit and the Loggers won't have a job to loose.
A couple of points here: If you stop logging old-growth, there is still second growth available for logging. Unfortunately, second-growth trees are much smaller than first growth and thus much better suited to heavily mechanized harvesting.
Second point is that, in an area where old-growth logging is stopped, there are other jobs available.... Another way to put it is that if you cut the trees, you destroy OTHER jobs that depend on the forest.
As an example, I'll take the Clayoquot Sound area of BC... A highly contentious area in the past.
In that region there are two towns with very different pasts. Tofino and Ulclulet. The two towns are on either end of a ~30 mile stretch of beach, and each has it's own sound in which logging has occured. Back in the '70s, Both towns were heavily dependant on the logging industry, but they diverged when Tofino and the logging industry butted heads over the logging of Meares Island. Meares island was considered sacred by the local natives and also served as the town's water supply. When they learned that it was going to be logged, there was strong opposition to the plan.
After many attempts a compromise, etc. ((and I don't remember the long story here)) the logging industry decided to pick up their toys and go home. They stoped ALL logging on the tofino end and shut down the sawmmill throwing much of the town out of work. I'm guessing that they actually intended to make an example of the town but, if so, it didn't turn out quite the way it was intended.
Over the next decade, not having many logging jobs available, Tofino residents turned to eco-touristry and associated methods of making a living. Ulclulet, on the other hand stayed the 'tried and true' resource/logging path. By 1993, when I showed up, the two towns had gone firmly down their two different paths. The area around Ulclulet had been pretty thoroughly logged but Tofino's Clayoquot Sound was still relatively pristine. That's where the big fight started... The Ulclulet loggers wanted to log out Tofino's forests, but the tofino residents wanted none of that.
I was in both towns in 1993... You can find a lot of my notes from that time at on my old website. The towns were a study in contrasts.
The hills around Ulclulet were heavily logged.... Bald. Ugly. The town itself consisted of a couple of very utilitarian stores the local school (shared by Tofino and Ulclulet students) and a couple of provincial government offices. The town itself was minimalistic and bland.
Tofino, on the other hand, was a good bit more vibrant. Tourism had taken hold and was providing quite a bit of employment including whale-watching and eco-tours. The Tofino fishery was also a good bit more vibrant (salmon and other fish depend heavily on healthy forests). Most of the stores in the area were in tofino as were the bars.
Ulclulet had pretty much nothing but logging jobs, and those were dying. Tofino, on the other hand, also depended on the forests -- but in a non-destructive manner. If only by virtue of the fact that they're now so rare, old growth forests can provide some very healthy employment opportunities in the area of tourism.
In 1993, the logging industry tried to paint Tofino residents as greedy -- not wanting to 'share' their forest with the forestry industry. Tofino, having seen what happened to the Ulclulet logging community (decimated and the few loggers left were now hungry for the trees of Clayoquot) were even more firmly against the idea.
The Ulclulet loggers are mostly gone now. Logging still continues in Cla
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
The last time I tried to calculate the amount of energy saved vs. the energy expended by recycling Aluminum or Paper, I couldn't make it even close. The real problem environmentalists miss is the energy issue - we are going to run out of energy long before we ever come close of running out of Alumininum. Aluminum recycling is particularly stupid because it's so cheap to refine in mass quantities.
Bottles work to recycle, if like in most of Canada, they are washed and reused instead of broken down and remelted. I remember the numbers being a little closer for glass, depending on the type.
The problem people forget is nothing is free. You need to collect the material. That's energy. Then you need to transport the materials to a center, where they are trucked yet again. All the while burning gasoline and diesel - don't forget those emissions in your calculations. Then you need to expend more energy to reduce the material to a simple state, then more energy still to reform it. The end product often needs to be recombined with unrecycled material to get an acceptable grade of finished product.
Do the environmentalists have any idea how paper is recycled? It's not friendly - you need very powerful chemicals to break up the bonds to reform into pulp. Where do you think those chemicals go when they're used up?
The sad thing is often it makes more sense to throw it away. Recycling is DEFINATELY not based on a solid background. It is a feel good, useless exercise to make children and ignorant adults feel better about their MASSIVE impact on the environment.
If you REALLY care about the environment, live close to where you work or telecommute so you don't have to drive and waste gas. Drive a small car. No, you don't need a SUV. Yes, they're nice. Use LESS material. Buy material in BULK so you don't have packaging. Limit your consumption of electricity. If you really want to help, don't have more than one or two children. If you're not selfish at all - don't have ANY children. Those things will make a real impact.
Recycling a bottle just makes you feel good, because the government must be right.
Show me the science. Recycling, until then, remains a bad joke. There is no shortage of land for landfills. There is no shortage of trees. Trees are the least of our problems. There is certainly no shortage of either iron or aluminum in the earth's crust. There is no shortage of silica. What there IS a shortage of is ENERGY. Wars are being fought over oil - thousands of people die over oil. Many more will in the future. People do not die over glass bottles.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Do you know where this expression came from? Do you know why recycling is last on that expression? Because it doesn't work.
Rant off.
..don't panic
I think that it should be our responsibility, as the dominate species, to do our best to take care of our environment. Part of this is managing our waste, sure it is easy to toss everything in to one big pile and forget about it, but that could be dangerous. It could lead to pollution of our water table, witch will effect wild and domestic plants alike. It will find our way into our food, and then into the population, as well as the populations of every other species.
Now humans will probably survive this, the human body can handle a lot of toxic substances. But smaller species will not be able to handle it so well. Insects , birds, and small mammals could die. If the insects go, then our crops will not get pollinated and they will not produce food.
This may not happen in your life time, but it could happen in further generations. But if we continue to just throw everything in one big pile there will be measurable affects some where down the road.
Also it just make sense, to me anyways, to reuse our resources. We may not run out of them anytime soon, but we can slow the rate of consumption and have a system in place for when we do run out, when ever that may be.
Sure, there may be negative effects to some recycling processes. But many of these processes are new, and are still evolving; they have the potential to lead to new methods that don't produce waste toxic to the environment. Most, if not all of the recycling methods have the same or less equivocal environmental impact as creating the product the first time.
I think over all we should be more broad sited to recognize that recycling is going to have to be a major part of humans future on Earth.
Don't hang me if I'm wrong but in my University (Indiana University) staples are said to be paper recycling bin safe.
Susprised me too, but that's what it said.
On the other hand reading all those posts here, I'm also not 100% sure what exactly happens with the so called recycling. That's a shame though... (I'm European and pro-recycling:).
You mean it wastes labor resources that could be better used for other things?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
Perhaps there is a legitimate use for RFID after all..
Can we outsource that part to India?
I don't have the data to hand, but (as far as I remember), various councils in the UK had to pass bylaws prohibiting the removal of sand and rocks from public beaches. At the time, natural effects were discounted. There was/is a major fashion for rockeries, and almost industrial levels of removal for sale to landscape gardeners/members of the public. A side effect was that this hastened erosion.
:)
All beaches are pretty closely monitored for water/sand quality & changing currents as part of the EU ratings system, so it's usually quickly apparent when and why something happens to one.
This is given the geography of the British Isles, where an average beach would be lucky to rate as a cove on the scale of continental coastlines.
And it's just occured to me that here, the main source of sand is a cherished public amenity, whereas the US has large inland sand deposits
Remember, kids -- if your opponent doesn't use unfair ad hominems against, that's no reason to pretend they did and accuse them anyway!
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
"Or are you? The greatest user of recycled aluminium is the motor car industry. So all those gas-guzzling, air-polluting SUVs driving around are made cheaper by being constructed from your recycled Coke cans..."
Well without recycling, those SUVs so many love to hate would be made from heavier steel, and would use much more gas. But since we don't want to help out those automakers in making cheap autos for us to drive, we shouldn't recycle steel either. They should only use brand new steel straight out of PA. That would put many more steel workers into good paying jobs. Well that is until the automakers figured out no one could afford the all steel cars, and the industry collapsed. With the auto industry done, and all of us working to pay for our cars because they are as expensive as our homes, the economy would tail spin. Next thing you know the Taliban, tired of being hunted in Afganistan, will move to DC and set up shop in the White House.
I certainly wouldn't want to help the auto industry. They are so eeeeevuhl.
If you really want to help, don't have more than one or two children. If you're not selfish at all - don't have ANY children. Those things will make a real impact.
This used to be one of my pet peeves. Although I have since realized how ill advised that argument is. It would result in those people who are responsible citizens purging themselves from the gene pool. That's a surefire way to help improve the environment and society in the future!..
Second, we already have a problem (and it's getting worse) due to the shrinking and aging productive population in the western world. The quality of the population is also being lowered due to several factors. Productive and successful people on average already have fewer children than their unproductive counterparts. Ironically, it's thanks to the well-meaning philantropy of the hard-working producers that the irrisponsible reproductive behavior of non-producers can be sustained. At least for now.
If you believe yourself to be a model citizen, go ahead and have as many kids as you can, and pass your desirable traits on to the next generation.
It will increase our chances of breaking out of the downward spiral we're in!
The article is idiotic in places and long on speculation in others.
But what do you expect the Heartland institute is a propaganda arm of the politically active corporate sector. And this is not even a liberal/conservative argument, there are plenty of conservatives who embrace environmentalist arguments. This is a political conflict between economic interests who have heretofore not had to pay for the costs associated w/ pollution generated by their product and services(known in economics as externalities) and the rest of the world that is increasingly tired of giving the aforementioned interests a free ride.
It is by coff... er, will, alone I set my mind in motion...
The waste involved in processing, collecting, and transporting the cans vastly exceeds the savings from doing so. You didn't read my arguement at all.
Watch all the soccer moms dropping off the cans in their SUV's. Then watch trucks haul the cans around. Then watch them get processed. Then watch them get shipped again.
We won't even get into recycling paper.
..don't panic
Sorry that I put a grain of salt to your wonderful world of free market environmentalism. Face it, that article (6 years old BTW) is based on nothing but the authors agenda. There is no scientific basis, no data to back it up. The fact that the source is constantly spreading stuff like this and coincidently gets money from the worst poluters speaks values.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Oh, you seem to confuse conservativism with capitalism. I don't.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Flipping burgers?
But seriously, my comment was intended as a joke.
[rant]Maybe if we had a command economy I could see the point in your pointed retort. But capitalism "wastes" some labor resources on some pretty silly things just because someone is willing to pay for them. Not that I saying that's a bad thing. It's just a fact of life. Car detailing? That guy in the fancy restroom that hands you a towel? Lobbyists? Siegfried and Roy are fricking millionaires for god's sakes. Your telling me that a guy seperating recycleables so that I don't have to do it, and so people who don't do it still get their garbage recycled is a bigger problem then the fact that Carrot Top is probably a millionaire? And the fucking Juice Man? [rant off]
I used to work for a courier company and one of my duties when serving an office building was to collect their empty toner cartridges for "recycling". My instructions were to toss the cartridges in the nearest dumpster out-of-sight from the office building. The sad thing is these offices actually paid for this "recycling service".
That sounds like a reasonable argument. It's too bad that, with 30 minutes of Googling for 'old growth' and about eight different activist websites, that argument wasn't made *once* on any of them. You should send it to them.
But don't the plantations just re-lime the soil and plant another crop of trees? Does it really matter whether the calcium comes from a mine down the road or from the decay of rotting trees? Don't you think that (eventually) they will find a way to extract the calcium from the processed pulp and return it to the soil if that method becomes cheaper?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Recycling aluminum makes sense, as it's one of the few items that actually gets stronger as you recycle it. Many people don't realize, however, that in many jurisdictions beverage cans aren't made of aluminum -- their bodies are often extruded steel, with only the top being aluminum. However, steel recycles well too, so this isn't really a major problem. Indeed, steel is typically the most often recycled material.
Recycling isn't just about making new material out of old material, or minimizing the impact on the original material source -- a very important part of recycling is minimizing landfill input. Far too many jurisdictions are facing problems finding new, suitable landfill space. The situation here in Toronto is a good example -- every day, over 150 extra-large garbage transport trucks make a round-trip from Toronto to a landfill in Michigan.
Paper recycling is often more successful that people think -- however, you have to remember that there are different tiers of paper recycling. Paper recycling has been occuring for decades inside papermills -- trimmings and leftovers from the manufacture of high-grade paper are re-used in the manufacture of low-grade paper products.
On the consumer front, paper recycling is often useful when you're recycling it into other fibre products (as opposed to using it to make more paper).
And like metals, in a landfill situation, paper doesn't readily decompose. It is, however, still a very large portion of overall landfill input. Keeping it down through reducing use and recycling the material you do use helps to keep the landfill demons at bay.
Yaz.
There are now some cities in the Netherlands where disposable diaper should go into the "organic" waste bin, instead of the "rest" waste bin. Most cities in the Netherlands have collect "organic" and "rest" waste seperately. Appearantly there are now some waste processing plants that can process disposable diapers as organic material and recycle them in some manner.
I look forward to visiting and seeing your fine Cottonwood furniture. I'll be it makes great guitars and other musical instruments, too.
Maybe hemp has woody stems, if you look hard enough.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I once read an expose article from Casco Bay Weekly sometime back, I want to say about 8 years or more, about the recycling effort in Portland, Maine. Essentially the reporter discovered if there was more than 10% of 'unclean' recycleables in a batch collected from the public bins, they were put on a barge and trucked 50 miles out to sea and dumped. i.e. if people weren't properly sorting their recylcleables, or putting unacceptable materials for recycling the batch was just disposed of in the most convenient fashion.
The city stopped utilizing public recycling bins about 5 years ago, and are now doing curbside collection so I am not sure if thats still the procedure for 'dirty' batch collections, but I wouldn't put it past them.
I do know that (usually) if there is unacceptable recycleables in our bin, they are left in the bin for us to dispose of. If they are unsorted or excessively dirty, they dont collect at all and sometimes leave a note why.
What I wanna know is where the heck am I supposed to bring my depleted batteries? I called all over the city a year ago trying to find a public recycling bin for batteries since it is technically against the law to dispose of them in the general trash. Absolutely none of the waste disposal or city management departments knew of a place where residents could properly dispose of batteries and consistently deferred me to another city department or waste management facility.
So I still toss them in the trash, like everyone else.
Yay, America! We're gonna be living in a Stinking Pile in 50 years. Congratulations, Capitalism.
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
It seems there are alot of good ideas, animal(human) rights, recycling, and legalized drugs that just get mixed up in a bunch of made up facts or the people pushing for the ideas have no clue what they are talking about.
+-+-+-The folowing statement is true. The previous statement is false.-+-+-+
I think you need to think about what you just said for a minuite. Wood is a replenishable natural resource, meaning that it grows back. Old growth forests are just forests that have been around for a long time. Given enough time, old growth forests will replinish, meaning that they are not irreplaceable. However, these days people are too impatient to wait for forests to become old, since profit not beauty drives the economy, so you are right about them being valuable from an economic standpoint.
Have you any idea how long it takes plastic to break down in the soil?
"Depending on the formulation, the actual breakdown into different compounds may take several thousand years." virtualrecycling.com
Let alone the fact that plastic doesn't break down into oil, please at least have 'some' idea what you're talking about before posting. Use google! Its that damn good.
> At my high school there's a trash can and recycling bin in nearly every room. After school lets out, the janitor comes around and dumps both into his trash bin.
That's why they call it recycle. You see, at the cereal factory they fork the output and put half in ordinary boxes and half in boxes marked "organic". Your janitors are just merging the streams back to the common source. Round and round it all goes...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It is remarkable how many population bomb wonks end up talking this way. Ehrlich himself was mostly concerned with third world countries - and if you read his book, it seems that his whole fear sprung from aesthetic revulsion at being surrounded by kind of a lot of brown people in India. Anyway, this is typical pompous leftism: "Stop having kids, unless you're OUR kind of person!"
It's worth noting that Mr. Earth in the Balance Al Gore has four children - he must be carrying out your plan!
eikimartinson.com
The waste involved in processing, collecting, and transporting the cans vastly exceeds the savings from doing so.
You're comparing a small part of the life cycle of a can made from raw materials to the entire life cycle of a can made from recycled materials.
Waste that isn't recycled doesn't just magically disappear in the trash can, and packaging made from virgin materials doesn't magically materialize on the doorstep. You have to do the collection, transportation, and distribution whether the packaging is recycled or not.
Watch all the soccer moms dropping off the cans in their SUV's.
Certainly, it's not very efficient if "soccer moms" individually drive each piece of trash to the landfill or recycling center in their SUVs, but that's an argument against people hauling their own trash, not against recycling itself. It's also why many communities support curbside pickup of recyclables on trash day, and the recyclables and other waste are driven off in the same truck.
Then watch trucks haul the cans around.
If the cans weren't separated, the trucks would still have to haul them around.
Then watch them get processed.
Others have shown that this reprocessing costs a lot less energy than refining new aluminum from ore.
Then watch them get shipped again.
Cans are going to get shipped whether they are new or recycled. Do you really think people would stop buying canned food if recycling were to stop? We've had a problem with excess packaging since well before recycling was introduced en masse, and there's no reason why we can't pursue a reduction in packaging material at the same time as pursuing recycling.
So, sure, it does cost energy to haul disposable packaging around, but your argument is obviously flawed if you discount the fact that it has to be hauled around whether it is recycled or not.
This is all a good argument for a reducing the use of disposable packaging, and for the use of more efficient transportation methods, but not really a good argument against recycling.
There's a reason why people say "reduce, reuse, recycle" in that order.
how original. correct my spelling... gosh, how creative and intelligent of you!