[lmr]

My line of business... I work for (and partially own) a local independent residential sanitation company. You look like the bad guy when you tell people recycling is a myth, but the truth does hurt and when you are telling it, it can hurt yourself. It happens to be politically incorrect if you do not support recycling. The trend nationally is to scale back recycling, but many don't understand why. The why is $$$. Recycling does not make any money for my company. We give the materials away, with the exception of the aluminum cans, and our recycling processor that takes all of this (Weyerhauser) is going to quit accepting glass at the start of 2003. We would not be suprised if Weyerhauser started charging us to dump this material charging us rates comparable to our trash transfer station! That is how bad the situation has gotten. Basically, recyclables are garbage. Local governments have instituted a means of "waste stream recovery" by forcing people to recycle. The fact is, it is cheaper, more sanitary and hell of lot more efficient to dump it in a landfill. But most people just don't get it. If there was any way to make money off recycling it would not have to be mandated and forced onto people. The free market would take care of the demand, if there was any money to be made. The fact that recycling does not make money and that government must mandate it go hand in hand. The wicked environazi's have had their way for too long. Now the bell tolls, recycling is dying. May it rest in peace. Cities and Counties must get back to sound fiscal policies and not fund knee-jerk feel-good socialist myths like recycling.

[mewzilla]

Talk to the people who have to site, buy, manage the actual landfills. Recycling isn't perfect, but it keeps the landfills filling up faster than they otherwise would. And bringing new landfills into this world is a labor worthy of Hercules.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Interesting take. In the PR of Massachusetts it is unlaw to dispose of bottles, cans or newsprint in a landfill, due to a law championed by the wife of former RINO Governor Bill Weld (herself a Roosevelt cousin of some sort). When I good-naturedly chided my poor town clerk collecting for increased price dump stickers that we should get a discount because of all the money we were saving on recycling, she told me that BFI charges $5,000/ month to transport all this stuff to a landfill in Michigan. ("If you seek a beautiful penisula, look around you.")

The reason it is so hard to site a landfill is NIMBYism and a quasi-religious fever on the part of maladjusted people on a messianic ego trip trying to save the World from the evils of flush toilets and modern sanitation.