Celebrate Earth Day by Ending Mandatory Recycling!
It is one of the great secrets that must never be uttered in polite company (meaning liberal company). Mandatory recycling wastes resources - it does not save resources. The belief that it does is one of our great superstitions.
Anyone who has ever bothered to learn the facts knows this. Recycling has become a sort of messianic PC cult religion, in which practitioners make pilgrimages to the local recycling bin centers, place their recycling containers on their lawns as PC creches to let the world know they are (effortlessly) saving the planet, and recite the silly PC recycling R-trinity ('Re-use, Recycle, Reduce'). The recycling pagan evangelists violate the separation of church and state and attack school children everywhere, with never so much as a symbolic bow to the view of dissidents. Recycling may be the greatest form of self-indulgent ego-stroking in the United States. It is the great cop-out by those too lazy to study and understand real social problems.
In fact, recycling wastes resources and actually contributes to pollution. On June 30, 1996 the New York Times blew the cover of the recycling cult and revealed to lib'ruhs everywhere the truth.
Recycling is energy intensive (driving the trash around) and - even more so - it is labor-intensive. Sorting out all that trash into nice piles costs the economy huge amounts in terms of wasted manpower. And labor resources are part of nature's unrenewable resources (once an hour is wasted, it is gone forever), where as trees and many other "natural resources" are entirely renewable in most cases.
And all for what? Where are the "resources" being "saved" in recycled glass? The glass is made of sand! New bottles can be produced for far less than the cost of collecting, transporting, cleaning, sorting and refilling old bottles. Ditto for paper.
The proof? If the "resources" in glass and paper were worth more than the resources being used up to recyle them, then there would be bottle and paper merchants knocking on your door each week, asking to buy your trash for cash, and no one would need any coercion. When one could save money by recycling printer cartridges, people sold them in the market to recyclers without any coercion. The fact that the same people do NOT sell other sorts of trash proves the point that recycling wastes resources.
Some processing of "recycled" materials involves chemical treatment that releases pollutants into the environment. And in any case, more often than not those nice piles of "recyclables" collected at the nice recycling center are never even reused; they are simply dumped or burned when no one is watching. Most of that "recyclable paper" that supposedly could be recycled ("in theory" - which is what recyclable means) just never is.
7 Comments:
Never let the facts get in the way of a good (bleeding heart) cause.
Dan
A local contractor who frequently uses the local county landfill says both garbage trucks and recycling pick up trucks dump in the same landfill. So much for Recycling.
Churches and other private fund raisers have asked for old newspapers from their members for years. I still see poor people collecting cardboard from dumpsters. There must be some money in used newprint and cardboard.
I can watch my used aluminium cans crushed into 2x2x2 blocks. How much more processing does aluminium need before reconstitution into a usable state for new product?
Try this one on for size...
Around 15 years ago I helped clean up trash after an Earth Day event at Forest Park in St. Louis, MO.
By that I mean garbage strewn everywhere.
How can these people preach about cleaning up the earth when half of them have never seen a wet bar of soap and the other half thinks a public park is a trash can?
Deanr:
Recycling aluminum is probably the most economical of things you could recycle. The energy required to convert enough bauxite into enough aluminum to make a soda can will power a small television for a year. But once converted, aluminum is reusable, and it doesn't take nearly as much energy to melt it down and shape it into something else. It's recycling plastic, paper, and glass that is a waste of time.
As a matter of fact our council (Maroondah, Victoria, Australia) asked us to look for "recycling thiefs". They said sombody was stealing recyclables (paper and metal) on recycling day and probably sell it for profit. They said that the price for the recyclables is around $100..300 per tonne and it goes into reducing our local taxes. So they encourage us to report any trucks unmarked with council logo picking up our recycling.
Guess it worth something but not that much
Great Post!
It's touchy, feel goody, crap-ola!
The jury was in long ago!
The best way is to bury it all! It does not use that much land, and you can build a golf course on it!
What is the most pernicious pollution? Air pollution!
Do you have any idea how many trucks were added to the American roads to pick up recycling material? Nether do I, but just about double. And that is not even addressing the myriad of other problems more trucks on the road causes.
Watch your wife, or anyone for that matter, clean out a jar! Do you have any idea how much water is used to clean jars out? Water is our scarcities resource!
EVERYTHING THESE SOCIALIST TOUCH, THEY MAKE WORSE OR DESTROY IT!
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