Teach me how to recycle

[Del_B_Vista]

NEMJ just busted the Tupelo "recycling" program that was dumping portions of material brought for recycling in the dump.

 

[User 1019]

Really? Ouch. I'll have to look that up.

That's part of the recycling problem in the South (although this may be someone padding their pocket) ... it's just too expensive for these small towns.

The town in which I grew up and got my newspaper start had a recycling program that went tits up within a couple of years because it was too expensive.

 

[micropolitan guy]

We can now put banana peels, orange skins, vegtable peels, etc., in our yard waste recycle container. It's awesome. Yard waste, trash and regular recycling picked up curbside every Monday, rain or shine, every week of the year. It's one of the rare instances where privatization has worked outstandingly.

Our little family of 3 is down to about two grocery sacks of garbage every week and about half that once allergy season ends.

 

[zebracoy]

I think Best Buy will take all of them.

Best Buy, China...

 

[Boom_70]

Good for you three bags. Suggest a trip to recycling center to see how things are sorted. I find it much easier to keep bins at my house that are sorted the way recycling center wants. It makes the trip to center much faster.

Color me stunned that recycling is not nationwide at this point. I thought federal money was provided so all areas could build recycling centers.

 

[JR]

What you can recycle and can't recycle really varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Up here in Toronto you can pretty much recycle everything. Previously you had to sort all the stuff--paper had to be separate from plastics--now we just throw everything into a large container and wheel it out to the curb every two weeks. And the city can fine you if you put recyclable stuff in the garbage.

We also have a separate green box programme where you throw your food scraps, coffee grids, ice cream boxes, kitty litter etc.

I'd say HC & I don't have more than one small bag of garbage every two weeks.

And throwing away beer bottles is a foreign concept in Ontario. There's one large retailer, The Beer Store, that sells beer up here...you can't buy beer at your corner store.

They charge a 10 cent deposit per bottle and have achieved a return rate of something like 95% on the two billion bottles of beer they sell annually. And now they also take back wine and liquor bottles.

The biggest problem--which will just get worse---is what to do with all the electronic junk--you know the stuff that's obsolete after three years.

 

[The Big Ragu]

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.

 

[User 1019]

Good for you three bags. Suggest a trip to recycling center to see how things are sorted. I find it much easier to keep bins at my house that are sorted the way recycling center wants. It makes the trip to center much faster.

Color me stunned that recycling is not nationwide at this point. I thought federal money was provided so all areas could build recycling centers.

Thanks. I went and actually put eyes on target (the drop-off) today. The take 1 and 2 coded plastic bottles, clean glass (which you have to put on a table, for some reason), basically all types of paper, and cardboard. I think that's a pretty good start for us. We can get away with three containers -- paper, plastic and glass -- and just lay cardboard on the garage floor, as long as it's clean.

Another question ... what type containers do you guys use?

I've found some online that are stackable and have flip-top lids that seam pretty nice, for $50. Or, I could use some of our rubber totes and rig up some sort of flip-open lid. I don't know. That's the next step, though.

 

[93Devil]

Ragu, I see your point.

I am not convinced the planet is getting unnaturally hotter.
I am not convinced that there is a hole in the zone layer.
I am not convinced that we are losing trees at an alarming rate.

What I know is that pollution in the ground is a bad, bad thing. The more landfills, the more potential pollution problems. Oils seeping into groundwater is a nightmare. Too much **** (literally) in a bay will destroy the fishable waters.

Pollution is why I recycle.

Oh, Ragu, I think you are a New Yorker. Do you know where your garbage is sent? Moddy should.

 

[The Big Ragu]

Ragu, I see your point.

I am not convinced the planet is getting unnaturally hotter.
I am not convinced that there is a hole in the zone layer.
I am not convinced that we are losing trees at an alarming rate.

What I know is that pollution in the ground is a bad, bad thing. The more landfills, the more potential pollution problems. Oils seeping into groundwater is a nightmare. Too much **** (literally) in a bay will destroy the fishable waters.

Pollution is why I recycle.

Oh, Ragu, I think you are a New Yorker. Do you know where your garbage is sent? Moddy should.

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.

 

[Rhody31]

A couple of towns and cities in Rhode Island have will not pick up your trash unless you bring your recycling bin out as well.
You put your trash can out there with no bin, it stays on the corner; people were pissed at first, but it seems to be working.

 

[bagelchick]

I got a blue container for $10-20 at Home Depot or Lowe's.

 

[Rhody31]

I got a blue container for $10-20 at Home Depot or Lowe's.

You can usually call your town and get one for free.

 

[User 1019]

Doesn't work for me. No municipal program.

 

[bagelchick]

I got a blue container for $10-20 at Home Depot or Lowe's.

You can usually call your town and get one for free.

Mine doesn't provide them.

 

[trifectarich]

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.

I could not disagree with you more. To me, it is clear that by digging a hole in the ground and dumping all our trash there, all we're doing is contaminating the one and only planet we have.

Sooner rather than later, garbage will turn out to be one of our most serious problems. It's another disaster we're passing along to our kids. Thankfully, wonderful progress has been made in turning trash into clean energy that does not further damage the environment. All we really need to do is find a way to impart this technology into every town and city.

 

[JR]

It doesn't take a lot of digging around to find that PERC has received over $150,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.

And cigarettes aren't harmful to your health....a scientific study told me so.

And people didn't buy milk fifty years ago from their milkman in reusabl glass containers because it was "rational". There was no other choice.

 

[Cadet]

Not to threadjack the recycling thread, but this is sort of related:

We do have curbside recycling in my town, but we also have people who dig through garbage that has been placed out for pickup. Several mornings I've gone out before the trash collectors come and the recyclables are gone, the garbage bags ripped open and stuff tossed about along the street.

It really freaks me out that people go through my garbage, so I've thought about not placing it curbside and going through the hassle of taking it straight to the center myself (which I already do with mixed paper recycling, since I'm paranoid about identity theft).

But then, those people taking my empty bottles and cardboard boxes need those nickles and dimes far more than I do. Is it the kind thing to do to keep putting them out for them?

 

[User 1019]

The kind thing to do is call the police, I think.

 

[User 1019]

*** fade in as car drives by *** "GAME ON." **players walk back into the street as cars pass**

Got three recycling bins ... well, 12-gallon totes that will substitute until we get the extra cash to buy proper bins ... set up in the garage.

Plastic bottles on the bottom. Glass bottles in the middle (Lots of beer bottles. Hmm, do I have to take the label off?). Paper on top.