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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."
However, the original poster has got it wrong when he claims no old-growth forest is used in the paper industry.
Here in Australia there are thousands of hectares of old-growth forest being used for just that. And the plantations set up are mostly of faster-growing, low-value timber. The largest timber companies have a long record of setting up a few "showcase" plantations while continuing to blithely plunder old-growth state forests.
Umm, wow, that's some interesting spin. Ink is removed from phone books by churning the shredded paper through what amounts to detergent and water. The nasty metallic inks went away for those applications quite a few years ago.
The de-inking water can then be filtered or evaporated, and what you end up with is the ink that was already on the paper, and some soap.
If that paper is NOT recycled, where would the phone book go? Into a landfill or an incinerator (possibly as paret of an energy plant).
If the paper IS recycled, where does that same ink go? Why, into the very same landfills and incinerators. But the paper goes back into use.
There's definitely going to be energy and water consumption involved in this process, but the same goes for virgin paper.
melting them down and pouring them into a chemical soup is in fact worse for the environment that if they were just thrown out
You're missing a critical piece of the puzzle there.
Recyling deals with the disposal of materials and the reuse of those materials. Throwing away just deals with the disposal part.
Recycling is pointless if the materials don't get used again.
Recycling can be part of the manufacturing process. If you melt down a bunch of aluminum cans, you don't need to mine aluminum from the earth.
Recycling of some materials (especially plastic) does create a chemical soup (who said otherwise?). But the same thing happens when you manufacture new things. Ever wonder how much chemical soup is produced converting some crude oil into your coke bottle?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Crunched glass is an essential component when producing glass: it dramatically reduces the energy needed to melt sand and form new glass (it melts at a lower temperatures and provides for better transfer of heat). So, not only recycling glass is good to reduce waste, but it is essential in the modern industrial glass-making processes.
I worked at a glass factory, but you could have at least used google to learn how the process works.
This one will probably return more relevant results.
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.
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.
most of the paper produced is for situations where high-quality paper is needed
Most high quality paper is made from cotton, not trees.
I didn't mean to imply that it was a Bad Thing (although I would agree that it is), I was merely noting that it is there. Before considering the validity of any source, the first step is to note its bias.
And yes, I know that they are two different things. But they are not mutually exclusive things, and reading through their site, I felt that they met both definitions.
Now, how about YOUR ad-hominem attack?
fuck you.
Your drivel redlined my bogometer hard :
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.
According to the Aluminium Association of Canada (who should know better than you do), recycling aluminium require 95% less energy. Linkage.
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?
They are recycled. FYI, I have been working around paper mill recovery boiler (which both produce energy and is part of the caustic liquor recycling chain). My father-in-law still work in the caustic plant of a paper mill, where they finish the recycling process of the chemical that will be reused in the digester (where wood chip is being broken down into pulp). In most (all ?) paper recycling plant, the break-down process is partly mechanical, using less chemical than it used to in the first place.
There is no shortage of land for landfills.
Around city, where most garbage are produce, there is.
There is no shortage of trees. Trees are the least of our problems.
Where I come from, an area totally economically-dependant on lumber, people start to fear it. Between forest fire and savage clear-cut, a tree take 60 years to grow to a profitable economic value. While trees are a renewable ressource, the renewing cycle is very long, thus it should be treated as non-renewable if we don't want to face a temporary shortage.
There is certainly no shortage of either iron or aluminum in the earth's crust.
Certainly, but at which price ? There is plenty of iron in Earth's crust, but most of it can't be extracted profitably.
I know many people who justify their non-recycling lazyness by some pseudo common sense, but rarely see them go as far as you do. Fortunately, this kind of bullshit is easy to debunk. Maybe you are just a troll, after all.
:wq
>> If we think about it, if all trash did
>> decompose, imagine the gases that would be
>> coming out of the landfill.
One of the points of the article was that as the micro-organisms which are encouraged to develop by the decomposing paper cause a decomposition of less degradable materials that is not only faster, but also reduces the release of harmful gasses.