The Truth About Recycling

1. Buzz
   November 11th, 2008 at 1:26 am

   "the United States has about 20 years of disposal capacity left in existing landfills"

   ah plenty of time to enjoy the good life now

2. DOJ
   November 11th, 2008 at 1:54 am

   Not all recycling is equal. To be cost effective, some materials need subsidies, others don't (e.g. metals).

   Reduce and Reuse are vastly superior options compared to Recycle.

3. Miss Cellania
   November 11th, 2008 at 2:11 am

   If you reuse something, isn't that recycling?

4. Edward
   November 11th, 2008 at 2:46 am

   Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

   The first choice is to reduce out use of disposable materials. For example, using low-volume flush toilets.

   The second choice is to reuse disposable materials with little or no processing. Such as using untreated waste water for irrigation.

   The last priority is to recycle our waste. This is what water treatment plants do.

5. Miss Cellania
   November 11th, 2008 at 2:58 am

   So what is this:

   http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15241

   Reusing or recycling?

6. ted
   November 11th, 2008 at 7:27 am

   Untreated waste water for irrigation? Wouldn't that spread e coli?

7. Rocky Rook
   November 11th, 2008 at 7:41 am

   The janitors at work dump the contents of the paper recycle into the same container they dump the garbage in. Huh?

   At home we recycle as much as possible.

8. Scott-O
   November 11th, 2008 at 8:19 am

   Read the Omnivore's Dilemma to understand how it can be done on a farm. The author covers a farm in Virginia that is, for all intents and purposes, self sufficient.
   Also, pay attention to how much plastic you go through in a day- sandwich bags, plastic windows on mail, grocery store bags, the friggin' packaging on toys these days, etc. Keep in mind it will take centuries for this plastic to "go away" in a landfill. It is an eye opener.

9. Sid Morrison
   November 11th, 2008 at 9:19 am

   Miss C is clearly doing a lot of REUSE. Nice job. I'm not a rapid environmentalist, but I am an engineer, which makes me cheap by nature. Hence, I've got a LOT of reused coffee cans, spaghetti jars, &c.

   "Recycling" can have a broad or narrow definition. The broad one means not throwing the scrap in a landfill and thus includes reuse. The more narrow one means to reprocess the waste, often at low efficiency and a LOT of energy (gas/oil/electric) expense.

   As for the Omnivore's Dilemma: I've heard the author speak in interviews (NPR maybe for one...) and he's rather unrealistic in many spots. He would have a WHOLE lot more credulity if he were actually a farmer or had some experience in the subject. He doesn't and it shows. Some of the things he pushes makes sense, but a lot of it if adopted on a wide scale would result in hugely dramatic drops in agrcultural efficiency. Establishing self-sufficiency in lots of little farms as he suggests eliminates a lot of huge efficiency benefits that come from having Farmer A plant a lot of corn, Farmer B concentrate on apples, Farmer C on dairy, &c. Distributing the crops enables each farm to operate at MUCH higher levels of efficiency than they would if each grew a little of everything and had to buy less pecialized equipment to handle the gamut. His method has some idealistic benefits, but the current method (while not flawless) enables a LOT more food to be produced for the whole world on less land and with less energy input. For an individual *subsistence* farmer, his ideas have merit to keep the family fed. To feed a nation or the world, no.

   Straight Talk from Sid.

10. MENLOHEAVYWEIGHT
    November 11th, 2008 at 10:40 am

    my dog likes recycling he eats his own poop and the cats poop too! He calls them kitty snickers!!!

11. andrew
    November 11th, 2008 at 10:54 am

    Miss C. All of your examples are reusing. recycling is an industrial process that literally tears these objects apart, and then uses the base materials in them to form new objects.

12. Ali S.
    November 11th, 2008 at 1:52 pm

    Fascinating stuff.

13. kev
    November 11th, 2008 at 3:07 pm

    I was a senior manager in a waste management company in the late '80s through the mid-'90s. In the midwest we would enter into county and municipal recycling contracts, dutifully pick up the recycleables at curbside.....and then dump them in the nearest landfill. At less than $10 per ton to landfill, recycling did not pay (most of the gov'ts we contracted with were aware of this). The opposite was true in the northeast. Hard to believe that disposal cost today in the NE is about half of the $120-150/ton it was 20 years ago. Rule of thumb for today--if you want to benefit the planet,recycle metals, especially aluminum. I compulsively pick soda cans out of the garbage and place them in nearby recycling containers, but I remain lukewarm about plastic recycling. Though things are slowly changing, the eviro benefits remain marginal for plastics.

14. Sid Morrison
    November 11th, 2008 at 4:16 pm

    hah hah... I said "rapid", when I meant "rabid".

    Yeah, recycling Alumin(i)um is a no brainer it saves a ton of energy. The other materials get more questionable. The PM article (I read the print version) is pretty good.

15. DOJ
    November 11th, 2008 at 6:26 pm

    @Edward and Sid - thanks for explaining recycle vs reuse

    @Miss Cellania - that's some great reuse

    @Kev - "lukewarm about plastic recycling" fits me pretty well too.

16. Jimbo
    November 13th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    Landfills work great and we have enough land in the U.S.A to last THOUSANDS of years. The gas produced by a land fill is turned in to power through steam generation.

    I refuse to buy anything that is recycled. They always sell recycled stuff at about the same price as virgin, but their cost is only 10% of total price. I see that as a 90% markup to take advance of people.

    Stop smoking pot and let your brain clear.

17. Derek Wall
    November 17th, 2008 at 3:34 pm

    http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2008/11/mob-recycling-assinati on-in-tel-aviv.html

    which goes to show there is cash in recycling, by the way I stick a lot of my stuff in the worm bin this cuts out a lot of the problems...

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