Protect the Environment: Stop Recycling
Scott Kirwin
Last night The Family watched Dirty Jobs - a show on the Discovery Channel that sends a guy out to do some of the nation's dirtiest jobs. One of the jobs was sorting recyclable materials from trash at a recycling center. If memory serves, garbage trucks from the Bay Area carted recyclable materials to a center filled with conveyor belts that moved the stuff around as people sorted it into paper, plastic, glass, metal and trash. Mike Rowe, the host of the show, worked alongside one of the sorters, asking him all kinds of questions about the job. Paper was compacted into bales weighing a ton. The center produced 400 of these a day, and sold them for about $130-200 a bale.
"See why I nag you to sort the recycling first?" The Wife nudzhed me.
I remained silent, doing the math in my head. 400 x $200=$80,000/day for paper. Not too shabby on its own, but as I stared at the numerous lengthy conveyor belts that snaked their way through a large well-lit center filled with moving cranes and fork lifts and I began to wonder about the overhead costs - both economic and environmental.
There was the cost of electricity to run the conveyor belts, lights and other machines. The electricity most likely came from a powerplant burning fossil fuels. Then there was the cost of the diesel used by the fork lifts and garbage trucks. Diesels aren't the cleanest engines on the planet (yet - although I've read they are much improved). I imagined them driving around the Bay Area collecting recycling while spewing pollution into the air. That struck me as a bit nonsensical.
They didn't mention glass. The materials for glass making are some of the most abundant on earth, and recycling glass takes a lot of water and energy to do. When you look at the entire lifecycle, does recycling a glass bottle make sense rather than making a new one?
Here's an in-depth rticle that discusses just that. It's conclusion: If you are concerned about the environment, recycling doesn't help. There's only one solution: Use less.
It's important in a marriage to choose your battles carefully. It will take me years to convince the Wife that if she wants to help the environment she should read the Sunday paper online, avoid glass bottles and when she can't - throw them away in the trash. She was indoctrinated at the University of California to believe that recycling is good for the environment ie An environmental group said it. I believe it. That settles it. It is a dogma that she hasn't questioned much over the years, and honestly, I wasn't up to rocking her world on a Tuesday night after a long day in the NICU.
But the fact remains: Recycling is bad for the environment. Using less is good. So the mainstream media (MSM) isn't just biased and elitist: it's bad for the environment too.
Who said Conservatives weren't green?
Your argument was great and I dig the article, but that little cap off to me just reaks of partisan bickering and, in my insignifcant opinion, makes you guilty of the same elitist bias that you accuse the MSM of having.
See how I'm not even talking about the content anymore (let alone at all)?
The glass thing, though, is certainly ridiculous. There's plenty of sand on the earth. The only plus side would be that those glass containers aren't going to sit in landfills for all time like they would otherwise.
(Preview at the link.)
I've actually seen articles about how much more energy intensive it is to make aluminum than it is to make glass. But people didn't want to be bothered with cleaning the glass so that it could be used again.
I'm biased. I'm a human being with strong opinions: some based on facts, others based on experience, and still others based on my upbringing, those of my close associates (ie The Wife), and countless other things.
So what?
Here are some differences between MSM and me:
1. I don't pretend to be unbiased. I think such attempts are doomed from the start and worse, dehumanizing. Biases aren't the evil things some consider them to be.
2. Elitist? Just for not liking the MSM? I'll admit, I have an extremely strong populist bent - which makes me unpopular in some circles but the last time I was called an elitist is when I was on the other side of the ideological divide (Like David Horowitz, I'm a recovering Liberal).
3. I don't make a living from journalism. Envious? Nope. By my figuring I make about 2 1/2 times what the average journalist makes - and I do it writing - in the business world.
4. I was trying to be ironic and slightly humorous. I stopped reading the local paper when I got bored with its Left-wing slant on all matters EXCEPT for banking. This being Delaware, the local rag sings the tunes played by MBNA, JP Morgan-Chase, Citibank, HSBC and the other band of merry outsourcers.
Oh, but they claim to be unbiased.
Sheesh...
There are really only 2 consumer products that make much sense to recycle today: aluminum and cardboard. And cardboard just barely makes the list.
The “recycling paper saves trees” concept is true on its surface, but not in any meaningful way. Almost all trees used in paper manufacture are farm raised specifically for that purpose (pulp wood). The tiny percentage that aren’t farm raised are basically “scrap” trees that are cut for some other purpose, but have no other economic use. The supply of pulp wood trees is still growing, and there is no chance of us running out. It only takes 10-15 years to start getting a useable crop.
On top of that, the actual process of converting paper back into a useable form is not only energy intensive, but is a very nasty chemical process too, with potential environmental headaches.
Cardboard is a bit different, because aesthetics aren’t as important in the final product, so it doesn’t require as much re-processing as paper. Plus most of it is used in industrial settings, which increases shipping economies.
Aluminum cans are a no brainer, mostly because of the huge energy savings involved in re-melting it versus extracting it from raw ore. In addition, the ore mining and conversion process can cause environmental problems not encountered with recycling.
Unfortunately, a lot of this nonsense is politically motivated. Along with the reasons listed in the referenced paper, I would add that some of it is “make work” in nature, and some of it is protectionist/isolationist. And you don’t want me to get started talking about some of the “feel good” based restrictions coming down the pike. Google “ROHS” sometime for a clue.
And for all the environmentalists who try to claim that the forests are disappearing, that is a flat out lie in the US.
Turns out, unless you clean the diapers yourself (a task that is very, very difficult because you have to boil water) diaper services are actually about as harmful to the environment as are disposables. They use a lot of water, enrgy and a lot of industrial chemicals in the cleaning process. And they of course transport the diapers in diesel trucks which polutes the air. Really, from an environmental standpoint, there's no advantage to cloth diapers.
I would definitely consider myself a conservationist, but it is amazing how certain things we think are helping, aren't doing much at all.
Doh!
I blame low blood sugar on that one...
Of course, only the latter is popular, partially because it's the easiest, and partially because it's the only one that a local government can effectively push on you.
Me, I just don't really care much. As Jay said, we get our paper from farmed trees; I recycle my aluminum cans at home, and I just don't care about a little glass and plastic. Gotta give future archaeologists something to look at, after all.
In most cases, it's actually harmful to the environment. But tell them that and they get mad.
Nowadays, most smart environmentalists will tell you that design is far, far more important than recycling.
Recycling paper might make sense if you consider the water pollution caused by making paper to be far more significant than the air pollution (and cost) caused by driving around collecting paper. I'm pretty sure that using recycled paper somewhat reduces the water pollution caused by the paper mill itself.
That may be two different articles, but they were around the same timeframe making the same points...science and religion are still battling it out and science is currently losing.
Steel makes sense because it's so easily separated.
I'd love to hear what they do with all the glass bottles. I know that glass often starts with a high percentage of cullet (broken glass), but I have no idea if this is what our bottles go towards or not.
At least one company is trying to take recycling to the next level. They want to run the dead-dinosaurs-and-other-organic-stuff, plus pressure, plus heat, plus milennia process that produces oil and reduce it to a few hours. Wouldn't THAT be cool! Of course, it has to make economic sense first......
There are some people who don't want to hear about inefficiencies in recycling because it makes them feel good to recycle, kind of like paying high city taxes for homeless programs that don't work or something.
By the way. The man who won the Battle of Britain certainly wasn't Winston Churchill. It was a composite of two other men, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Caswell Tremenheere ("Stuffy") Dowding, and the man who made sure Dowding's young men in Fighter Command had daily resupply of Spitfires and Hurricanes when and where they needed them, on a daily basis. Lord Beaverbrook was his name. A newspaper publisher before Churchill wisely turned aircraft production over to him. And he did it with scrap aluminum he scrounged from all across the realm.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI