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“Conservatism is all about being good stewards of your environment.”

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 money), and yet I never deprive myself of anything. I simply don’t believe in waste. After all, I’m a conservative, which, believe or not, means one who conserves things!

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 far worse for the environment than the 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 giant 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 sometimes required, but the savings in terms of energy either way is enormous as it takes WAY less energy to re-use 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 in some circumstances 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, because it’s far cheaper to dump toxins and poisons and crap in our air, water and land than to take the extra step of keeping our nest clean.

I can’t imagine very many people here would like to see our land, water, and air fouled like early industrial revolution England, our Eastern seaboard cities in the mid-1800’s-1900’s 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. Anybody want to get rid of all of our sewage treatment plants and dump the shit stream of 350,000,000 people in the U.S into our rivers and oceans like mankind did for thousands of years until only about 65 years ago? After all, we’re all being billed BY THE GOVERNMENT every month to build and use those sewage treatment plants. Think of all of the money we could save.

On the other hand, conservatives 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%.

In the county I live in, the recycling program is run as an enterprise fund of the county and actually turns a profit that is used to fund a number of other related programs.

Much of their revenues come from contracts and services to large commercial organizations who find it much cheaper to pay to have recyclable materials hauled to the recycling center for processing rather than paying to have those materials hauled to a landfill because landfill tipping fees are so expensive around here.

The same is actually true for private individuals here: our overall solid waste fees are actually reduced because it’s cheaper for the haulers to rid themselves of the recyclable materials at the county processing center rather than paying the tipping fees to dispose of those materials at a landfill.