Recycling: What a Waste!

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http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Environment/myth_recycling.htm

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Is recycling a waste of time?

Giving used cans and boxes a new life is good housekeeping. Dumping the waste on Asia is not, says Lucy Siegle

Sunday January 15, 2006
The Observer

It's the ultimate eco betrayal: Camden householders painstakingly rinsing out pet-food cans and agonising over the correct receptacle for co-mingled rubbish (eg cardboard boxes with plasticised innards) only to discover that their carefully sorted recycling has a one-way ticket to China.

This unhappy incident is not isolated. The volume of packaging waste in transit every year from the UK - most of it to Asia - will soon pass the 1.5m tonnes mark. Who knows where your rubbish goes to be recycled? (As a last resort, try the Environment Agency.) Some local authorities choose to play dumb, others simply don't know - today's paper trail, controlled by a handful of huge waste companies, is as complex as it is exotic. There are those, admittedly apocryphal, tales of UK holidaymakers finding the envelopes they sent for recycling fluttering around Indonesian landfills.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1684673,00.html

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Recycling, Waste of Time and Money
Just to add to my recent claim that recycling is a waste of time and money:

Franklin Associates, which provides consulting services for solid waste management, estimates that curbside recycling is 55 percent more expensive, pound for pound, than conventional garbage disposal.

OK, that's the US, maybe landfill prices are different or something. But my basic contention that the time spent sorting adds costs:

Seattle Public Utilities researchers (in collaboration with University of California, Davis) conducted a survey in 2005 that indicated 98 percent of Seattle households participate in the curbside recycling program, and that 16 minutes are spent recycling per household.

(That figure is per week when you run through their other calculations.)

OK. We know that domestic waste disposal costs us 1.6 billion pounds a year because the Prime Minister has told us so. 24 million odd households, the time spent by people recycling has to be valued. Take 5 quid an hour, somewhere around the minimum wage maybe? 16 minutes? Call it 15 as I did?

1.56 billion quid spent preparing stuff to be recycled.

Nope, sorry, recycling, waste of time, money and effort.

http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2006/05/recycling_waste.html

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Recycle? No! Pile it all at Chumly's front door. He he.

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There was an article about this in the New York Times Magazine many years ago, advancing essentially the same point. There were many angry letters to the editor the following week, and as I recall most of them took issue with the author by saying that recycling wasn't about the money, it was about the "moral principle," or something like that. The letters were a bit vague on what that might mean.

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I agree with Chumly. I reuse and reduce, and don't recycle. In my town recycling is optional. I opt out. I think that concept sounds very noble in theory, but is wasteful in practice.

Whenever I see the recycling trucks, I always think that some politician's brother-in-law is making a lot of money off the gullibility of some people!

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edgarblythe wrote:

Recycle? No! Pile it all at Chumly's front door. He he.

Hey it would prolly excite my wife as she'd go into mega-save-the-world-re-sort-recycle-overdrive-mode!

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Garbage is a raw material just the same way as a tree or crude oil.

Crude oil is a usless product in its natural state. however after undergoing "sorting" it has a vartiety of uses.

How much does it cost to get crude out of the ground, refined, manufactured into plastic bags or shampoo bottles.

Trees are certainly not rubbish however only 42% (approx) of a tree is turned into timber. The rest is either left in the bush or chipped. Once again this could be seen as "sorting"

Then there is transport, crude and it derivitves are transported via pipeline, supertanker, road rail and every other means millions of miles to get to you.

Garbage is a raw material on your doorstep and requires very little transport by comparison.

Valuable products can be created from garbage.
It is up to us to recognise the value of rubbish/recycled materials as a RAW MATERIAL and manufacture products in economic proportions from this raw material. This requires that the product should have a perceived cost/benefit ratio, that it satisfies a need or performs a service.
The cost of curbside recycling will come down as more people recognise the value of products manufactured from garbage.

http://www.rptgreenpipe.com/pages/images/range.jpg

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Good points but how do you address:

As quoted above the issue then becomes "In a reversal of decades-old wisdom, they argue that burning cardboard, plastics and food leftovers is better for the environment and the economy than recycling." as opposed to your "Valuable products can be created from garbage." argument.

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I think the concepts of "Garbage is a raw material as opposed" to "garbage is a waste product" is key.

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book marking to read after a cup or 2....

I'm a believer of reduce and reuse too...

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Concerning non-combustibles, I advocate recycling even if it doesn't gain in resource conservation, just because it can extend the life of landfills.

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just bookmarking

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Chai wrote:

book marking to read after a cup or 2....

I'm a believer of reduce and reuse too...

Same here.

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I recycle everything. My city makes it so easy.

Lawn debris and (some) food scraps go into one bin, garbage in another bin, recycleable things in another bin and they all get picked up on garbage day.

Metro (the regional government) has stations for toxic recycling where you can take motor oil, paint, batteries, all kinds of stuff. You drive up, they unload it and you're on your way. Free! (Well I'm sure taxes cover it so "no extra cost" might be more appropriate.) The paint is remixed into basic colors and available for purchase for about $5.00 a gallon. Cool!

Now I have to go back and read why my actions are so "wasteful" and silly. Maybe I should just start throwing all my toxic crap in the trash.

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as far as i understand it , BURNING garbage in europe means using the burning processs to generate ENERGY , not simply burning it to get rid of it .
a fair number of power stations in europe BURN GARBAGE to produce energy , i believe .
hbg

better explanation than i can give :
BIOMASS

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Right, it's not so much that waste management should not be addressed or that the reduction of needless waste generating consumption should not be reviewed, it's the question of the true costs and full environmental impact of recycling versus the alternatives such as burning or/or land fills and/or breaking down of the waste for more general distribution etc

In boomer's case the ease with he/she accomplish said recycling and the (I assume) good feelings he/she gets from doing so are not justifiable rationales from the perspective the true costs and environmental impact of recycling versus the alternatives.

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with out reading the opening posts..

recycling plastic is actually begining to be as harmfull as producing NEW plastic.

Simply because, it takes a brand new layer of plastic to coat the old "recycled plastic" to keep the chemicals from leaking into what ever is inside the container.
This practice... ( and I can not , for the life of me, remember WHERE i learned this..) is actually starting to require as much energy and plastic production because more and more people are recycling thier plastic jugs.

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Part of the reason I started this thread is because Mrs. Chum is an avid die-hard recycler and I am not........very.

She weeds through the garbage pulling out any and all items I might throw in regardless of the fact that in the bigger picture she is unable to qualify or quantify that for example putting glass into a separate recycling bin is going to help the environment more that it hurts it. Mrs. Chum will on occasion be quick to gently chastise me for some "hidden treasure" I threw out .

No doubt not generating the stuff in the first place is the most efficient and direct solution and in that spirit I never go to fast food restaurants nor buy any newspapers or magazines or new books, nor do I have any kids.

As to the kids aspect, no doubt some posters might be tempted to flame me, but that facts are that there are more than enough people on the planet, generating more than enough waste as things stand now, and if the population was way smaller, then waste concerns would perhaps be proportionally less too.

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Recycling: What a Waste!

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