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Posted on 04/15/2012 1:45:30 PM PDT by SoFloFreeper
Throw away the green and blue bags and forget those trips to return bottles recycling household waste is a load of, well, rubbish, say leading environmentalists and waste campaigners. In a reversal of decades-old wisdom, they argue that burning cardboard, plastics and food leftovers is better for the environment and the economy than recycling. They dismiss household trash separation a practice encouraged by the green lobby as a waste of time and money.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Several years ago, a retired doctor who had worked in the scientific field during his career, told me that there is a fact in usage of materials called “a tiring of materials”. In other words, there is a wearing down of components in machinery from constant usage over a period of years that results in all sorts of accidents and mishaps.
It would seem to me that using metals, or glass, or any material over and over and over would finally result in a weaker and more inferior product. (I look for those recycled plastic bags to finally get so weak after repeated recycling that they’d just get to where they were more holes than bags, and it’s no comfort to think that the jet engine on the plane you’re riding is made from recycled soda can tabs that have been recycled time and again for years.)
This isn't exactly true, the glass companies do benefit from recycling, but the environment and the tax payer do not.
It's the total cost and energy that's twice as much using recycled vs raw. It's just the government spends the money & energy instead of the glass company.
It's like if the government sent a limo to drive you to work everyday, yeah sure you'd save a lot in gas money but obviously the environment and taxpayer get screwed over.
Actually recycling glass is silly on its face, because what is glass? Glass is essentially cooked sand.
Sand, the 2nd most common stuff on earth. Only a brain dead Liberal would find recycling sand reasonable.
When I found out that every county I have lived in ran its recycling program at a net loss I do not bother. I haul a lot of stuff to the incinerator from my rentals and pay thru the nose to do so. The scrap metal does go to the recycle place in exchange for cash. If they won’t give you money for it it is not worth doing. Now usable furniture I put out to the curb and it seems to vanish quite quickly.
***I just figured glass would be easy to re-melt, and re-use!***
40 years ago, when the recycle movement began, some cities encouraged separating colored and clear glass for recycling. Lots of people did it and felt good.
Then it was found the city was picking up the separated glass and taking it TO THE DUMP! But it made people feel so good!
Twenty years ago one of my liberal college geography teachers did a study on recycling. His conclusion: recycling was a waste of time and money.
With metals, once you melt it down, its the same as new, but in some materials the impurities accumulate. Recycled Aluminium for example is never used in aircraft.
Recycled plastics are never made into anything as useful as the source, usually its blocks of hardened crud that can’t even support its own weight, and is used for decks that requires a wood deck underneath for all its support.
And paper, is also always an inferior product, the fibers get broken and shorter fibers make for weaker paper.
It isn’t mentioned here but cardboard boxes are the one form of paper recycling that is not a total waste, you can tell because bundles of scrap cardboard are worth buying to make new products from. Just a couple bucks per ton.
What a great story....
Please see tagline below.
Old fashioned windmills were used to pump water from wells, or mill grain (hence the name ‘wind mill’).
I have studied the energy budget, extensively, for use in an old-fashioned job - lifting water. Specifically, lifting water at an elevated water storage tank, for rural water districts. The beauty of using the windmill to lift water into a storage tank is precisely that it gets around the limitations of relying on when the wind is blowing. You make the tank big enough, it can last several days without the wind blowing to pump in more water. You are essentially storing the energy used in pumping, until it is needed - a rarity in the sale of electricity.
We discovered we could get it to work under only these conditions:
1. 30% federal subsidy to build it
2. State law requiring the electrical utility to purchase unused power, during high winds, at wholesale rates.
3. A fairly large windmill, to generate alot of excess power for sellback to utility company.
4. Be very near an existing transmission line...no money spent to build new transmission line, beyond a fraction of a mile.
And all of these calculations were made with an assumed 40 year lifespan of the windmill...which I tend to doubt will be true.
Several water districts heard the pitch...non bit on the idea...and now the subsidy is gone, so it is downright impossible to make the numbers work.
Without the subsidy, they just don’t cost out. And the amount of energy they make, and their spread out nature, makes the cost of transmission very high, compared to a discreet 1GW power plant, using coal or gas.
I’ve been part of the ‘budget’ process with these things...and it just doesn’t work....even after we thought we had found a clever energy storage medium.
The authors followed the trucks as they dutifully collected up the three separate bins. The trucks went to - you guessed it - a landfill in Virginia.
In the same story, they discovered that although there were three openings in the trucks for the three separate bins, the stuff all went into a common container.
Glass is cheap.
Except for the boxite, everything else is readily available, or at least much less expensive to make from scratch.
Personally, I like to
a) reduce
b) reuse
Looong before I get to c) recycle.
It is my understanding the big garbage haulers sort and recycle anything of value. Presorting isn't really necessary. Our town came up with a regulation that all apartments complexes have recycling bins. We have the bins at my complex, but none of them are labeled. So if you look in the various bins, it looks like a regular garbage can. I don't bother to sort any more. I just throw it all in the regular garbage can which is still there..
Maybe the yuppies & hollyweirdos should set a good example and stop buying bottled water.
After you, my dear Alfonse.
I can tear down a couch-chair-mattress and it goes in the curby. The springs are saved and trucked to a bone yard at 10c a pound with all other metal. I laugh when they pick up my three recycle bins with every scrap of paper plastic and cans I can get in it. I have 15 rentals and make good use of the system. Saves me a ton of cash. I love those people.
I’ve consistently argued for years now that we need to let market pricing sort out the recycling question. If no one is willing to pay for a used material, then it simply doesn’t have enough value to justify recycling it.
Put another way, if it costs more to recycle it than someone is willing to pay, then mandating recycling anyway will actually waste resources, not conserve them.
This becomes obvious when one sees the additional costs incurred for multiple garbage cans, separate runs for recycled materials, etc. And the cost of people’s time doing all that breaking down and sorting is never calculated.
Once the price mechanism is introduced, those who want to recycle things of value will do so, and those who think their time is worth more to them than the value of the recycled materials will not do so. It takes a government mandate to mess up an otherwise rational system.
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How utterly pathetic.
It takes time to tear stuff apart. I have several dumpsters that I pay for already that most of the small stuff goes in. The bigger items get trucked to the incinerator at $56.70 per ton. We will knock apart particle board stuff just to save room. All the metal stuff goes to the yard but I do not clean the alum/steel mix stuff just turn all in for steel money.
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