Posted on 04/24/2019 12:12:43 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
A couple of years ago, after sending my five-year-old daughter off to school, she came home reciting the same cheerful environmental mantra I was taught in elementary school.
“Reduce, reuse, recycle,” she beamed, proud to show off a bit of rote learning.
The moral virtue of recycling is rarely questioned in the United States. It has been ingrained into the American psyche over several decades. On a recent trip to the Caribbean, my friend’s wife exhibited nervous guilt while collecting empty soda, water, and beer bottles destined for the trash since our resort offered no recycling bins.
“I feel terrible throwing these into garbage,” she said, wearing a pained look on her face.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was a good chance the bottles she was recycling back in the States were ending up just like the ones on the Caribbean island we were visiting.
Difficult Implementation
As Discover magazine pointed out a decade ago, recycling is tricky business. A 2010 Columbia University study found that just 16.5 percent of the plastic collected by the New York Department of Sanitation was “recyclable.”
“This results in nearly half of the plastics collected being landfilled,” researchers concluded.
Since that time, things have only gotten worse. Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a story detailing how hundreds of cities across the country are abandoning recycling efforts.
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
When metal prices are high it works great.
For paper and plastic it has always been iffy.
We used to burn most of this stuff. We should go back to that for most of this stuff.
‘A couple of years ago, after sending my five-year-old daughter off to school, she came home reciting the same cheerful environmental mantra I was taught in elementary school.’
Didn’t bother reading beyond this. Any person DEMENTED enough to sent their kids to public schools is not worth my time, as they obviously don’t care about what their kids become.
But what the heck, it is ‘free’, after all.
Penn and teller convinced me about 15 years ago. :D
Its true purpose was to train people to do the bidding of their rulers.
Dr Seuss showed decades ago that there is no removing pollution it is just transferred from one medium after another.
That’s what I do now. I burn everything that will burn, and drop the cans, glass, etc. in public trash recepticles. I live in the sticks but work in a city where I pay a county income tax. That’s the service they offer me with my tax dollars: free trash disposal.
Truth be told, it’s easier than having curbside, since the “curb” is 1/4 mile from my house. And not much of my trash is not burnable. A wal-mart plastic bag every three to five days does it.
We’ve gone to “single stream recycling” - throw out everything in one bin.
Recycling paper is actually more harmful to the environment than new paper. Very few chemicals are involved in the creation of new paper. To recycle paper, all sorts of chemical baths are required to get rid of ink, etc.
Paper is like potatoes. If we need more, we just grow more trees. And we grow these trees just like we grow corn now. On I-5 in Southwestern Washington state you can drive by a bunch of these “farms” and actually see these trees.
There is some one DEMENTED here but it ain’t some parents not doing what you want.
Always been the same. Anything worth recycling they’ll pay you. If you gotta pay them, don’t bother.
It sucks that I have to pay waste management the same fee for my use of their blue receptacle, whether or not it has any utility.
Sounds about right.
“Penn and Teller’s Bull5h1t!” Season 2 episode 5 “Recycling” 2004
...aluminum the only close to viable stream
...State and municipal recycling only works because of federal supports
...one square mile (we have a few of those) could hold all landfill type trash for the next 100? years (been awhile since seeing the show)
Not from the show...multiple versions thermal depolymerization could turn landfills into viable sources of diesel and minerals.
Yup, sounds about right.
KYPD
It is highly inefficient and cost prohibitive to hire people to comb through every grain of sand on a beach.
The People’s Republic of Boulder (CO) is master at playing this silly game. There are actual visual “checklists” at even McDonalds showing where to put the straws, plates, food, (throway drug needles and used marajuana tokes - just joking, but it IS boulder).
Meanwhile in neighboring Republic of Denver, you can camp in city parks, take bodacious Obamas everywhere, and can almost get free drug injection sites - thankfully only recently sidelined by a very smart talk radio host (Peter Boyles).
And so goes the idiocy of progressives.
I heard that some municipalities pay “recycling” contractors to recycle but it’s cheaper for the contractor to just dump the trash into a landfill.
My bil told me recycling was a scam 20 years ago and I didn’t believe him then, but I sure do now.
Plant food, baby! Burn, baby, burn!
how many kids have you home-schooled?
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