Recycling is another ‘religion’, just like man-made climate change.
If/when it becomes profitable, the government will not need to mandate participation.
Wow. Some semblance of a fair and balance article in the N.Y. Times about recycling? They actually are talking about cost and benefits of it? They admit that kids from kindergarten up are indoctrinated that recycling is an unquestioned good goal???
So the Times wants us to think about a cost / benefit analysis of recycling??? There is actually a liberal cause which they think we should do such a review?
Will the Times shock us, by saying we should do a cost/benefit analysis of the various plans liberals have to fight “global warming”????
Once you get the recycling thing down, it’s not that big of a deal to do it. If paper content can be recycled, I think it’s a good idea.
Glass, plastics... perhaps not a big money maker, but if it’s doing better than breaking even and can be reused, why not.
I’m not against things that make sense. If these things don’t, then I have no axe to grind to force them anyway.
The big ideas of the Left have basically turned out to be nothing more than big ideas on the Left.
Desalinate me some water. Do something productive for a change.
Our recycling junk(washed bottles and cans) gets shipped across water far away and sits in a warehouse and then they hope some fool buys it
As a conservative, I believe in conserving resources whenever reasonable and not unnecessarily wasting resources. I turn off the lights when I don’t use them. I cool things before refrigerating or freezing them. I do a dozen things every day like this that save energy and resources, and yet I never deprive myself of anything. I simply don’t believe in waste.
Thoughtful conservatives believe in efficiency and abhor waste. Such desire for efficiency and abhorrence of waste is actually more grounded in the principles of conservatism than the vague do-gooderism of “Progressives” for “saving Mother Earth”, who more often than not choose feel-good solutions that actually are more often than far worse for the environment than rational behaviors of thoughtful conservatives.
Bottom line, I manage my life in such a way as to be as efficient as possible with my time and resource usage, though I never deprive myself in any way by such thoughtful behavior.
Recycling is one such effort. Where I live, recycling is single stream, so you toss garbage in one container and recyclables in the other. Garbage is picked up weekly and recyclables every other week. There are drop-centers for larger items. Throughout the county, contractors save money by hauling large quantities of recyclables to these centers which they would otherwise have to pay to landfill. The county has a county-wide processing center that processes all of these materials, and railroad cars of useful materials, including metals, glass, paper, and kraftboard are put back to good reuse every week.
Prices of such materials go up and down on a daily basis and some are worth more than others. In boom times, almost all basic recyclable materials can be sold for a profit, but in a depression, not so much. But recycling is not like copper mining where you just shut down the mines for a while when demand is low: recycling processing and collection infrastructure is in place through thick or thin times, including the many manufacturing facilities which have been optimized specifically to use these recycled materials.
In good times, recycling is self-sustaining, in slow times, a small subsidy is required, but the savings in terms of energy either way is enormous as it takes WAY less energy to reuse existing glass, steel, and aluminum than to make new, not to mention that high quality iron ore and high quality aluminum ore won’t last forever. So, recycling helps to make sure that our children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren will have some resources left for them to use as well.
And yes, at times recycling requires a subsidy, but everything that preserves the environment requires an economic subsidy. Clean air, clean water, clean oceans, clean everything all have hidden economic costs, and it’s all a matter of degree.
I can’t imagine very many people here would like to see our land, water, and air fouled like early industrial revolution England, or China in the 1980’s, have PCBs dumped into the Hudson River, see Cleveland’s rivers catch on fire, etc., and yet to preserve our health from these kinds of toxic environments does have an economic cost.
On the other hand, we understand the economic point of diminishing returns, for example, making our land, water, and air that extra 1% cleaner makes no sense if that extra cleanliness comes at a cost of the first 99%.
It offends my sensibilities to give away “raw materials” for free.
The NYT ran a piece in the Magazine section years ago categorically confirming that recycling was nowhere near as efficient as making form raw materials. Does anyone know how to find this piece?
Meh. Reusing is generally a better way to go than recycling.
Of course, there’s not really much you can do either way when you live in most condos/apartment complexes. No recycling options, and no yard to toss food compost. Either way I still toss most of it behind the bushes outside my condo, seems like that bush is growing faster than most of the others :p
Back in the early 70’s when this movement started the great thinking Marxist concluded that our trash would be so coveted that tptb would even pay us to haul our trash away.
I don’t recycle at all. The recycling container that my little city gave me is in my garage filled with my stuff. I throw all my cans and bottles away.