Mike Sylvester brought it up mandatory recycling on this post. For those like Charlotte that have the time and inclination to do so, more power to you. For AWB, I think mandatory recycling is a pile of rubbish.
Ted Turner’s Flying D ranch outside Bozeman, Montana, could handle all of America’s trash for the next century—with 50,000 acres left over for his bison.
The EPA itself acknowledges that the risks to humans (and presumably plants and animals) from modern land-fills are virtually nonexistent. The agency has concluded that landfills constructed according to EPA regulations can be expected to cause 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years—one every 50 years (EPA 1990, 1991; Goodstein 1995). To put this in perspective, cancer kills over 560,000 people every year in the United States,and celery, pears, and lettuce are all considerably more dangerous to humans than are modern landfills (Ames, Magaw, and Gold 1987;Gold, Ames, and Slone 2002).
The amount of new growth that occurs each year in forests exceeds by a factor of twenty the amount of wood and paper that is consumed by the world each year (Lomborg 2001,115).
Thanks to numerous innovations, we now produce about twice as much output per unit of energy as we did 50 years ago, and five times as much as we did 200 years ago. Automobiles use only half as much metal as in 1970, and optical fiber carries the same number of calls as 625 copper wires did 20 years ago.
Bridges are built with less steel, because steel is stronger and improved engineering permits the use of even less. Automobile and truck engines consume less fuel per unit of work performed, and produce fewer emissions. Packaging has been made both stronger and lighter, yielding less breakage and consuming fewer resources. The list goes on and on, and any analysis that forgets or ignores innovation will always produce incorrect conclusions.
Recycling is a manufacturing process, and therefore it too has environmental impact. The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment(1989, 191) says that it is “usually not clear whether secondary manufacturing [such as recycling] produces less pollution per ton of material processed than primary manufacturing processes.” In-deed, the Office of Technology Assessment goes on to explain why: Recycling changes the nature of pollution, sometimes increasing it and sometimes decreasing it.
For example, the EPA examined both virgin paper processing and recycled paper processing for toxic substances. Five toxic substances were found only in virgin processes, eight only in recycling processes, and twelve in both processes. Among these twelve, all but one were present in higher levels in the recycling processes.
Today’s pepenedores of Mexico work the nation’s dumps from Mexico City to the U.S. border, hoping to find anything that has been missed by the men who push the garbage carts on the city streets, or those who drive the trucks transporting the trash to the dump. Full-time work can yield $25 to $40 per week (Cearley 2002;Medina 1998a, 1998b). The zabaleen of Cairo specialize in particular products, with all members of the family assigned specific roles.They manage to recycle some 80 percent of what they pick up, including the filaments in light bulbs (Mursi 2000; Voluntary ServiceOverseas 1998). America’s transmigrantes are perhaps higher on the economic scale, buying pickup trucks from junk yards, loading them with appliances and furniture scavenged from the side of the street and transporting the load 2,000 miles to the neighborhoods of Guatemala or Costa Rica, where these treasures—truck and all—find a ready market (Yardley 2002).
So there you have it, let’s put all 12 million illegals to work scavenging the dumps.
Recycling is a long-practiced, productive, indeed essential, element of the market system. Informed, voluntary recycling conserves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. In sharp contrast, however, mandatory recycling programs, in which people are directly or indirectly compelled to do what they know is not sensible, routinely make society worse off. Such programs force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard. On balance, mandatory recycling programs lower our wealth.
The complete article, the “Eight Great Myths of Recycling” can be found here (.PDF file)
My recycling bin.
AWB
Last 5 posts by AWB
- Okay, I stink and you can't reproduce... - November 28th, 2008
- Yes Elizabeth, there is no Santa Claus - November 28th, 2008
- Bill Gates will make you a millionaire - November 28th, 2008
- Think about it.. - November 28th, 2008
- Who's flying where from Fort Wayne? - November 27th, 2008
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I’m one of those zealous recyclers…and with good reason:
I believe that if someone can get a new fender for their redneck pickup because I put out a load of cat food cans…I feel good about that.
If plastic can be melted down and reused, all the better (although deposit bottle were always my “first love”…lol)!
I just wish people wouldn’t feel the need to use other peoples’ lawns as their repositotry for discarded items.
But hey, I live on the south side…where most renters STILL drive those 1980s Olds, Buicks, and Pontiac full-sized cars.
Talk about a useless manner of recycling.
B.G.
I addressed conservation as a whole - which includes recycling. I believe Mike did also.
It really isn’t that time consuming to take part in conservation efforts. Recycling itself is simply a matter of throwing cans, bottles, etc. into a plastic tub instead of a garbage can. I mean, the garbage has to go out one way or another, right? If it were mandatory, what would be so hard about that?
The one thing I really dislike though are those stupid plastic bags that you get when you go shopping. I have found a few good uses for them but they seem to multiply when I am not looking.
I use them in my shredder to catch the shreds of paper, and if you have small garbage cans (bathroom, living room, den, etc.) they make good can liners. But that is about it.