Teach me how to recycle

Recycling has been drilled into our heads since such a young age, and many of the reasons why we must do it are based on fallacies. I can't do an effective enough cost/benefit analysis with regard to recycling (I just don't know all the facts off the top of my head) to conclude whether it does net good or there is a net cost to it, but it isn't clear cut, and I certainly have my doubts based on what I know. There has certainly been hyperbolic and false hysteria used by interested groups to change the playing field of the debate.

It doesn't get questioned because it has been turned into propaganda and it has been drilled into schoolchildren's heads since the 80s and 90s, as if we are going to be overrun by waste if we don't recycle. That is clearly not true. A lot of what we are told is based on outdated, false and hyperbolic claims.

The main one has to do with landfill capacity. We have enough landfill capacity to accommodate 20 years of our waste today, and that capacity has grown impressively since the 90s, so we are gaining capacity, not losing it. I read one thing, when I looked at the issue at one point, that figured out that it would take one giant landfill the height of Fresh Kills (which grew to 255 feet) that was 10 miles square to accommodate our waste for the next century. That is not that much space for a country this large. The "truths" we are fed about clogged landfills are just not true.

Places that are NOT recycling may be being rational. It's expensive and there is no clear cut benefit for the added expense. That is why people don't necessarily do it on their own and why it takes forced programs to make it happen.

Fifty years ago, people had their milk delivered in a bottle and they paid a deposit. The bottle got reused. It was because it made
economic sense. It saved people money. It was very rational. No one had to mandate the behavior.

Forced recycling today? I don't know. What I do know is that recycling itself is not good or bad. It is morally neutral. And that is a distinction that has all but been lost because so many people have been put into that mindset of "Recycling good," "Not recycling bad," and they don't adequately question WHY that is the case--whether we have been brainwashed by interested parties in the debate who got the upper hand. Now you are just a bad person if you don't recycle and kids get brainwashed in school with scary stories about how they are destroying the earth. But is it based on anything factual? Is it really true? There is a lot out there to challenge the question. I remember Popular Science did a story last year persuasively challenging recycling ideas that people take as fact.

And if you are interested in at least challenging those notions before accepting them, a good name to google is Daniel K. Benjamin. He teaches economics at Clemson University. He used to give very convincing lectures about the issue and discussed (and wrote about) eight myths regarding what people blindly accept without question when it comes to recycling. He challenges things we are told with factual evidence to the contrary. He's also affiliated with PERC, based in Montana, which is an acronym for the Property and Environment Research Center. They apply economic thinking to environmental problems (free market environmentalism), and are an interesting organization in that they are clearly an environmental organization (resident hippies and all), however they will challenge environmental organizations that rely on propaganda and hyperbole when there is clearcut empirical evidence to demonstrate something different, and they don't believe that forced government green programs are necessarily efficient and serve the greater good.

 

93, This is not global warming. There is empirical evidence that the planet is warming and that man made things are causing it.

Don't try to combine the two issues, because there is no scientific evidence that items sitting in landfills are causing any kind of harm to the planet. If there is, I challenge you to show it to me. And in fact, no advocate of recycling the typical items -- plastics, metals, paper -- makes that case. The original basis for recycling, in the 1980s, was that we had a landfill crisis. That is not true. Two things contributed: 1) A garbage barge called the Mobro got a ton of press when it wandered around looking for a place to dump NY or NJ trash. It was widely incorrectly reported that the problem was that there wasn't enough landfill capacity. That was false. The owners of the barge had a deal to dump it in a Louisiana landfill and decided to try one on the way down in North Carolina, thinking they'd get a better deal. They got turned away by the site in NC and then a combination of poor decisions by the mobster who was running the operation (Long Island mob boss Salvatore Avellino) and short-term problems created by EPA rules that were changing, they couldn't go to dozens of landfills that had plenty of capacity. Environmentalists seized on the story, which got blown up, to claim that we didn't have enough landfill space, and that is just no true. For every place that doesn't want a landfill, there are hundreds of towns all too happy to bring one in for the revenue it supplies. ANd as I said in the other post, landfill capacity has been increasing in this country over the last decade and a half. We have enough landfill space out there to handle the next 20 years of garbage. And it would take a miniscule portion of the U.S to create a single landfill that could handle our refuse for the next century. That is just factual. 2) The EPA has put out deliberately misleading info on the issue to try to bolster recycling. They harp on the fact that the number of landfills has decreased. When the amount of landfill space has increased. This has happened because of consolidation and the fact that larger landfills are being created.

Your point about where garbage is sent? Here is the fact: 49 states export municipal solid waste and 45 states import it. It is big business and it is a big source of revenue for the areas that do take it on.

With all of that in mind, I am very open minded. Tell me what the benefit of recycling is? Why is it necessary? It is costly. Why should that cost be mandated if no one has ever made a scientific (as has been made in the case of global warming) point about how it benefits our world and lifestyle? And if you try to, look at it holistically. You will have to be able to accurately calculate not only the cost of recycling, but other negative effects, such as any emissions (and I don't know the answer to this) that are caused in the process of recycling materials that wouldn't be caused, for example, by incinerating them and producing energy from it.