Posted on 12/29/2003 10:07:20 AM PST by stylin_geek
My neighbors are unhappy to learn that the trash they’ve carefully sorted for years into brown bottles, green bottles, cans, and paper is being dumped back into one pile at the local landfill. Except for aluminum cans, no one wants the sorted trash items. Is this bad for the environment?
Probably not. I checked with Dr. Daniel Benjamin of Clemson University (and the PERC Center for Free Market Environmentalism) and he says: First, don’t worry that the trash going into our landfills will take over too much of the land area. People today are actually throwing away less trash (in both volume and tonnage) than in previous, less-affluent generations. Dr. Benjamin says the average U.S. household today generates one-third less trash than the average family in Mexico!
How can this be?
In significant part, it’s because we throw away less food, thanks to commercial processing and packaging.
When chickens, for example, are commercially processed, the beaks, claws, and innards are turned into pet food instead of going into the kitchen garbage can. Commercial processing and packaging of 1,000 chickens adds about 17 pounds of paper and plastic wrap—but turns (recycles) about 2,000 pounds of chicken by-products into useful purposes. Ditto for such things as the peelings from frozen French fries and the rinds from making orange juice. (The “factory” potato and citrus peels go to feed livestock.)
Millions of additional tons of organic waste go down the garbage disposals and so on to waste treatment plants, instead of drawing flies at the landfill.
Companies have also turned to lighter-weight packages (mainly to cut transport costs) and the total weight of the packages entering landfills, says Dr. Benjamin, has fallen by 40 percent. Plastic two-liter soft drink bottles weigh 30 percent less than the old glass bottles. Plastic bags weight 70 percent less than paper. Even aluminum beverage cans now weigh 40 percent less.
Thirty years ago we were told that we were running out of landfill space. New York City wasn’t able to dump its garbage at sea any more, and it got piled up on Staten Island. What happened?
A new rule on ocean dumping and a temporary shortage of landfills with permits basically caused a bottleneck. New York initially started exporting its trash by rail. (Some if it came to Virginia, where we had lots of rural gullies to fill, and were very cheerful about the dumping fees.)
Today, the United States has 25 percent more landfill space permitted than we had 25 years ago. And all the trash we’re expected to dump in the next 100 years would fit into a landfill about 10 miles square.
There are no plans for one centralized national dump, of course, because it’s more advantageous for most communities to save the transportation costs, and turn their completed landfills into parks and tennis courts within their own borders.
What about pollution leaking from the landfills? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), never likely to minimize a pollution risk, says leakage from modern America’s landfills can be expected to cause one cancer-related death over the next 50 years. In other words, the danger is too low to be measured. Today’s landfills are sited away from groundwater sources; built on a foundation of several feet of dense clay; the foundation is covered with thick plastic liners, and the liners are then covered with several feet of sand or gravel. Any leachate is drained out via collection pipes and sent to the municipal wastewater treatment plants.
Won’t we be losing irreplaceable resources if we landfill instead of recycling? Too often, recycling proponents focused on the aluminum or newspaper being recycled, and forgot about the fuel, manpower and other resources it took to turn the trash into something useful. And with new technology, resources such as copper and wood have declined in value.
Franklin Associates, which consults for EPA, says extensive recycling is 35 percent more expensive than conventional disposal, and curbside recycling is 55 percent more expensive. In other words, recycling takes more resources than landfilling.
Why did people promote recycling so heavily in the first place? Lots of people probably misunderstood the costs and benefits. It’s also true that eco-activists urgently wanted everybody to feel a direct stake in saving the planet. Telling us all to recycle was their way to make us feel eco-involved.
Today, however, when environmental concern is near-universal and conservation techniques are far better, we don’t need “phony” recycling campaigns.
I don't ever recall 2-liter Cokes being sold in glass bottles, either.
But glass was sterilized and reused umpteen times. Then somebody got the bright idea to dump the costs on the public and use "disposeable" plastic bottles, which takes years, if ever, to deteriorate.
The only reason glass was recycled was because we didn't have the technology to make enough plastic bottles. Now we do, and it's cheaper than hauling all those heavy bottles everywhere. The plastic bottles actually decompose faster than the crude oil they were extracted from.
Even if we run out of fossil petroleum we will still be able to synthesize whatever plastics we need from trees, crops or coal. All it takes is energy -- and we have at least a 4,000 year supply of uranium and thorium.
The most rational way to recycle is to burn trash to reclaim the energy and release the CO2 so that plants can use it.
This is a clueless answer. The foundations that financially sponsor eco groups are heavily invested in selling you energy and water. Guess what recycling wastes in abundance?
So now one of the Doctors, a watermelon, has become the Complex's Garbage Nazi. His office has a corner view of the garbage storage area with all of the marked and defined bins. He watches all day and then makes periodical visits to physically inspect the individual dumpers which are different colors and marked for specific garbage. All of the garbage goes into one or two trucks, it is compacted together
Insanity. Like Alice in Wonderland. Like a Monty Python skit.
Well, I was certainly amused! Every time I lifted the lid I half expected to be regaled by the sight of a toothless redneck, chugging a Miller Lite and chomping on a big wad of Red Man.
It may describe the useful idiots, but it doesn't do justice to those who fund them.
I don't live in Calcutta, so I always attempt to minimize the amount of time spent playing with my garbage
Maybe this is just a big joke and even the greens don't believe in it -- just their way of having fun. Kind of like the way they stopped up everyone's plumbing with the low-flush toilets.
Stupid or evil? Evil
"one-time second largest aluminum recycling site in North America (my previous employer)"By recycling, did you mean that they actually melted the cans down to ingots? If so, what kind and size of crucibles did they do the melt in? And how long did those crucibles last, before needing replacement?
I ask because a dirty little secret of aluminum recycling is that the ratio of aluminum oxide to aluminum is at its highest in the thin sheets used to make aluminum cans. The aluminum oxide is a very good insulator and this causes hotspots in the crucible which results in overheating it to destructive levels. Crucibles are very expensive and the need for frequent replacement can destroy the cost savings of recycling.
Any comment?
--Boot Hill
"the stupidest recycling story I've heard, was a few years ago when a street near me was repaved using recycled glass"Actually, that's not as stupid as you make it sound. Recycled glass is crushed to the size of small grains of sand and added to road repaving materials, recycled rubber (e.g., for railroad crossings) and to plastics to make them extremely strong and durable. Pretty standard and intelligent use of recyclables.
--Boot Hill
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