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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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
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
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.
That's an important point.
: ;-)
A few years ago , our town's landfill, well, filled up.
But... due to a rather amazing bit of short-sightedness there's a two year delay in getting the new landfill online! What to do?
Well, in our case, they've gotten the Recycling Nazi's to take over operation of the landfill (which is rapidly turning into a large hill, there's a good view from the top).
Now everyone going in gets their load of junk inspected for anything recyclable by the Recycling Nazi's. Boxes / glass / paper / car parts / old fridges / oil / any domestic appliance gets taken and so on. The only thing that makes it to the landfill now is domestic refuse. Of course, when I use the phrase "Recycling Nazi" I'm being facetious - they're quite friendly and will happily sift through your junk without any effort on your part.
The upshot of this is of course
- Our landfill grows at a slower rate than it did previously. Which is lucky , because for a while there we all thought it would start blocking out the sun soon
- That one man's junk is another man's treasure and they make a bit of cash selling used parts cheap.(Eg I bought an A/C compressor for my car for $5, as opposed to $400 new)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
> 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.
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.
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=
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.
I don't have a source, but Minnesota grows a lot of paper trees, and the logging companyes prefer popal, which grows very quickly, lots are generally logged every 10 years or less. An Oak tree can live for 300 years, but it grows slowly. Popal grows much faster.
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.
Transportation costs are a major factor in recycling glass. This results in a finite radius around glass plants in which it is economical to ship recycled glass back to the manufacturer. Transportation costs are also why you will typically find glass plants located close to sources of glass grade sand such as the Saint Louis area. Given that commodity prices for industrial grade sand is roughly $18/ton, see USGS mineral commodity summary, it doesn't take many miles before transportation costs become prohibitive.
Transportation costs are also environmentally important. It doesn't make sense to recycle something, if the environmental cost of increased fossil fuel usage to transport the material outweighs the recycling benefits
The primary benefit of plastic bottles over glass is consumer safety. Plastic bottles don't fracture into razor sharp shards.
Mixed glass (clear, brown green) is a major problem in glass recycling. Clear glass is produced in the largest tonnage, but it doesn't take much brown or green glass contamination in the cullet before it is unusable for producing clear glass. Higher percentages of mixed glass can be tolerated in colored glass production, but they aren't produced in the tonnages of clear glass and could not consume the volume of mixed glass cullet. This is why segragating recycled glass by color is so important.Of course, there are alternative uses of recycled mixed glass cullet. One of which is glasphalt. The advantage being that recycled glass can be used locally without incurring prohibitive transportation costs.
Logic is not Divine.
sorting metal is easily done by the factory using an electromagnet...
The automotive industry is also the largest consummer of recycled steel...
It doesn't matter whether it's an SUV or a zero emissions electric car -- they're both made of metals ...
It requires less energy to re-smelt the metal than to extract it from the ore and process it from scratch (although they're often mixed new with recycled to control the final mixture)...
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
You mean it wastes labor resources that could be better used for other things?
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
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...