…some national recycling experts have begun calling for government restraint in trash recycling, which can be more costly and environmentally damaging than dumping.
“We just assume recycling is always better,” said J. Winston Porter, president of the Waste Policy Center, an environmental consulting and policy organization. “But there’s a point at which you shouldn’t just recycle for recycling’s sake.”
I think we’re well past it. It’s become the new secular state religion.
My cynicism over it peaked a few years ago when (as I related in a blog post, but don’t want to look for it right now) I watched the recycling truck come by, and unceremoniously dump the contents of my yellow paper bin and my blue plastic and cans bin into the same repository on the truck, completely negating all of my entropy reduction efforts in sorting them. I do notice now, on my return to CA after five years, they’ve at least ended that fraud, and just have one big blue recycling bin.
Either way, give it up for Earth Day.
The reason they do that is because it is easier to pay some poor bastard to sort the recycle, then it is to pay the union driver to dump it into different bins.
My personal hope is to turn packaging into a direct home fuel source. Basically develop a generator system that directly converts household waste, including sewage, garden waste, packaging, etc., into electricity, heat, ash fertilizer and perhaps purified water. Idea being to eliminate electricity, gas, water, trash and sewage utilities all with one small cheap little consumer appliance – it looks possible.
I am just waiting for when nanobots will break down all the trash into easily reused components. Then our only problem will be making sure the nanobots don’t escape out of the landfills and break down the rest of the planet as well.
I am just waiting for when nanobots will break down all the trash into easily reused components.
For paper and such, we already have them. They’re called “bacteria”, and the break the materials down into methane and CO2. Since landfills now have to have impermeable liners, it’s not a great step to further engineer them into bioreactors to more rapidly decompose garbage into useful fuel gas (and to greatly extend the life of the landfill by reducing the volume).
The best part is the quote that Rand included: “We just assume recycling is always better,” said J. Winston Porter, president of the Waste Policy Center, an environmental consulting and policy organization..
That sums it up best – they just assume their choice is better and never really take a good, hard look at the outcome to make a determination.
“That sums it up best – they just assume their choice is better and never really take a good, hard look at the outcome to make a determination.”
The people who did actually look at it way back when concluded that it was wasteful, but were sneered at by those who could just “assume” without evidence or thought. I recall George Reisman writing a monograph (or maybe a chapter in a book) called “The Waste of Recycling” way back in the mid-1970s.
But why bother with evidence or thought when things are so obvious?