Posted on 09/30/2004 3:52:59 PM PDT by LibWhacker
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I once rinsed out a few tuna cans years ago. I think it took at least ten gallons of water to rinse out as many cans, so I knew that couldn't be good. We save newspapers to take to an auction house for people to wrap their purchases in when they buy them. After that, they can recycle them if they want to.
It began looking familiar once it got to the kids' comments.
I used to recycle. But then they made it difficult - seperate this, do that, rinse this, can't do that. Eventually I decided I wasted more effort and energy attempting to recycle than could every be saved by recycling. Now everything goes in the same trash bag, I'm a lot happier, and by golly, the world hasn't stopped spinning yet.
If any touchy-feely envirowhackos feel like I'm killing the planet,feel free to volunteer your time to sort through my trash and separate the recylables from other trash. Oh, and be sure to bring a bucket of water to clean the bottles and cans out - since I don't want you wasting water from the hose on my dime.
Thanks for posting this! I've never recycled willingly. It seems like such a waste, no pun intended. This article confirms my instincts.
bttttttttttttttt
I go out of my way to not recycle. It's my small way of fighting the machine.
I'm going to stop recycling after reading this. My husband has been telling me for years that he thinks it's a waste of time.
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We have single-stream (dump all the enviro-crap in one big container) recycling, so it's pretty easy.
okay. My eyes were glazing over, and I tried to read it the best I could, but are the trees really in danger or not? I'm not a treehugger, but when that talk first came out as I was in junior high school I never heard from the contrary.
There was an article from a SCANDINAVIAN country recently, like last summer, saying that recycling was a big waste.
I used to recycle. Our rich, liberal county has one of the most modern and efficient recycling facilities in America, and people come from all over the world to study it. We also have had a state-of-the-art landfill which, we were assured, would someday be covered with dirt and seeded over to make a lovely green recreation area. All this made the local population of ignorant, earnest, well-intentioned pro-green liberals feel satisfied and virtuous as they rinsed out their tuna cans.
Alas, things did not work out quite as well as the environmentalists predicted. Recycling newspapers is costing the county a minor fortune. We did not anticipate that the local population would so enthusiastically thrown themselves into recycling every scrap of notebook paper, and the recycling center is overwhelmed with paper it cannot sell. The roads are clogged with recycling trucks, which let garbage paper escape onto the increasingly messy roadsides. Trucks going endlessly back and forth to the landfill are destroying the roads; a road near my house is on its third major repair (costly) job in just the past few years, due to the pressure of dump trucks. The landfill is full now, and has indeed been seeded over as promised, but its purportedly leak-proof lining has failed and the local water table has been ruined by poisonous leachate, so the county's taxpayers have to supply bottled water to all the houses within miles. Yes, the bottles that water comes in have to be manufactured and disposed of, while the millions of gallons in the local aquafer are now useless. Very efficient use of resources there.
At length we all realized that it would be easier to burn the trash, and we built an incinerator. Now all we have to worry about is where to bury the poisonous ash. And I, for one, have stopped recycling anything.
Ok, once again everybody:
You will know recycling makes economic sense when someone offers to BUY your trash.
Unitl then, recycling adds cost to the economy (subtracts total value).
Here are the pertinent quotes concerning trees--hope this helps:
1. "Every week," Dittersdorf said, "75,000 trees are cut to make the Sunday New York Times."
2. We're squandering irreplaceable natural resources. Yes, a lot of trees have been cut down to make today's newspaper. But even more trees will probably be planted in their place. America's supply of timber has been increasing for decades, and the nation's forests have three times more wood today than in 1920. "We're not running out of wood, so why do we worry so much about recycling paper?" asks Jerry Taylor, the director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute. "Paper is an agricultural product, made from trees grown specifically for paper production. Acting to conserve trees by recycling paper is like acting to conserve cornstalks by cutting back on corn consumption."
3. Should you recycle today's newspaper? Saving a tree is a mixed blessing. When there's less demand for virgin wood pulp, timber companies are likely to sell some of their tree farms -- maybe to condominium developers. Less virgin pulp means less pollution at paper mills in timber country, but recycling operations create pollution in areas where more people are affected: fumes and noise from collection trucks, solid waste and sludge from the mills that remove ink and turn the paper into pulp. Recycling newsprint actually creates more water pollution than making new paper: for each ton of recycled newsprint that's produced, an extra 5,000 gallons of waste water are discharged.
When you get the time, read the article. It's fascinating.
Jen, is that you? LOL, just kidding! :-)
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I think he came close, lol. The environazis went postal when this was published.
I found a couple of websites out there that seem to be dedicated to rebutting the Tierney's points one by one, all these years later. But from what I've seen, none of them is very effective in doing that. You can tell Tierney really hit a nerve.
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