It’s a pointless uneconomic ritual, and civic religion.
3 thoughts on “Your Recyclables”
Prince William County in Virginia stopped accepting glass for recycling in July 2019. It made no sense, given the fact that the raw materials for new glass are so cheap that recycling was uneconomical. But my wife, the lovely and capable Kat, researched it even further. It turns out that the litany of what can and cannot be put in recycling bins is overwhelming. Paper from a paper shredder, for example, cannot be accepted. Nor can plastic bags. Nor can a bunch of things one might ordinarily consider recyclable.
The reason? The sorting machines break down when fed certain items, paper from a paper shredder (!) being a biggy.
I’ve watched our highly unreliable and intermittent trash pickup people do their thing many times recently. On more than one occasion, I’ve watched them dump the “trash only” and “recycling only” bins into the same receptacle on the truck. I don’t care. The Earth has more abundance than we will ever use. I don’t want to submit to innumerate ignorance, personally.
It’s about doing something. That something is pointless, expensive, and counterproductive, but it’s something… and so is marching down main street in a chicken suit.
A city in my area decided to do something with all the recycled glass it was collecting. Because, something. That something, in this case, was to use crushed glass as road grit, to replace the volcanic cinders usually used. What could possibly go wrong? It’s not as if there are vehicles driving on the roads to create tiny glass shards. It’s not as if kids, pets, and wildlife are in the area and would get it in their skin and feet. It’s not as if glass doesn’t decay… er. Well, shockingly, it did not end well. For anyone. The cleanup was expensive and incomplete, and the remaining glass was sent to a landfill. They should have sent the morons who imposed this idiotic plan to the landfill, too. Pretty much sums up the recycling mania, IMHO.
This is why our aluminum cans for recycling get sold to OmniSource. There’s money in our pockets, and OmniSource has skin in the game to actually find a buyer who’ll melt them down and make new aluminum stuff.
But then it actually takes a lot less energy to melt down refined aluminum than it does to refine it from ore (until the Hall-Heroult process, aluminum was literally more precious than gold — Louis Napoleon had his inner circle served on aluminum plates and flatware, while lesser lights had to settle for gold and silver). An ordinary campfire can melt silica sand into glass. Which is why glass dates back to the dawn of civilization, while aluminum is a product of the Industrial Age.
Prince William County in Virginia stopped accepting glass for recycling in July 2019. It made no sense, given the fact that the raw materials for new glass are so cheap that recycling was uneconomical. But my wife, the lovely and capable Kat, researched it even further. It turns out that the litany of what can and cannot be put in recycling bins is overwhelming. Paper from a paper shredder, for example, cannot be accepted. Nor can plastic bags. Nor can a bunch of things one might ordinarily consider recyclable.
The reason? The sorting machines break down when fed certain items, paper from a paper shredder (!) being a biggy.
I’ve watched our highly unreliable and intermittent trash pickup people do their thing many times recently. On more than one occasion, I’ve watched them dump the “trash only” and “recycling only” bins into the same receptacle on the truck. I don’t care. The Earth has more abundance than we will ever use. I don’t want to submit to innumerate ignorance, personally.
It’s about doing something. That something is pointless, expensive, and counterproductive, but it’s something… and so is marching down main street in a chicken suit.
A city in my area decided to do something with all the recycled glass it was collecting. Because, something. That something, in this case, was to use crushed glass as road grit, to replace the volcanic cinders usually used. What could possibly go wrong? It’s not as if there are vehicles driving on the roads to create tiny glass shards. It’s not as if kids, pets, and wildlife are in the area and would get it in their skin and feet. It’s not as if glass doesn’t decay… er. Well, shockingly, it did not end well. For anyone. The cleanup was expensive and incomplete, and the remaining glass was sent to a landfill. They should have sent the morons who imposed this idiotic plan to the landfill, too. Pretty much sums up the recycling mania, IMHO.
This is why our aluminum cans for recycling get sold to OmniSource. There’s money in our pockets, and OmniSource has skin in the game to actually find a buyer who’ll melt them down and make new aluminum stuff.
But then it actually takes a lot less energy to melt down refined aluminum than it does to refine it from ore (until the Hall-Heroult process, aluminum was literally more precious than gold — Louis Napoleon had his inner circle served on aluminum plates and flatware, while lesser lights had to settle for gold and silver). An ordinary campfire can melt silica sand into glass. Which is why glass dates back to the dawn of civilization, while aluminum is a product of the Industrial Age.