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- meshman, on 02/05/2008, -31/+118"state's monopolist garbage-collection "service" no longer accepts garbage: they will only collect leftovers and other biodegradables."
Ok, I'll give you that your state is retarded. It is unreasonable to force people to either recycle or recycle every last item.
However, where I live in Canada, landfill space is a premium. Last year my region diverted over 350,000 tons of waste from landfills. The plants that recycle this material are now actually turning a profit form the resale of re-processed raw materials and employ a good workforce. We still have garbage collection and they have reduced the nuber of bags you can put out but overall, this is a good thing. Money saving? It's never been promoted here as any kind of huge money saver. It's all about re-using as much as we can so we're not creating huge stenching environmental disasters.
Speaking of disasters, that Penn and Teller thing was the most ridiculous pile of tripe I've ever seen on the subject. They don't address any of the above points. Recycling doesn't save money, therefore it's a total lie and a complete waste of time and energy. That is *****. These program help reduce the massive waste we as humans produce every day. 350,000 tons/yr in one region is a damned good start. - rossmcd, on 02/05/2008, -48/+126I see the author is a student of economics. I'm reminded of a quip that economists "know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
The overall purpose of recycling is not to make our lives more convenient or save us time - it's to slow down our consumption of limited natural resources. These include fossil fuels, ore, and landfill space. It's easy to sit there and complain on your blog about recycling, but would you volunteer to live next door to a landfill?
Yes, human nature is to cheat when you think it will get you ahead without getting caught. That's pretty obvious. Societies enforce rules requiring behavior that contributes to the common good BECAUSE of this, not IN SPITE OF it. The Swedes have collectively decided that waste reduction is one such issue that's important to their society.
This article amounts to a cleverly-rationalized complaint about having to do chores. boo hoo. - liamfly, on 02/05/2008, -45/+122I loved the Penn & Teller's ***** episode about this.
- Itazura, on 02/05/2008, -22/+67This was a complete opinion piece with zero facts, math, sources, or even quotes from people that matter. If you wanna change minds, maybe you should try science.
- Richandler, on 02/05/2008, -38/+80Recycling trucks use a lot of energy, so do sorting machines and so does driving non-recycling products to the dump that were placed in recycling. Simply put recycling doesn't save the world as much as we like.
- digghasnoethics, on 02/05/2008, -1/+41Recycling is an obvious example of a poor management mindset, rather than an approach focused on the benefits you want. All the action, all the attention, goes on cleaning, separating, collecting, sifting, reengineering waste - rather than the other end of the process.
The real aim, the benefit desired, is to use less resources and fill less holes in the ground. In order, the best approaches to this are:
- don't use as much packaging in the first place
- reuse the container again
- use less energy/environmental degrading materials
- recycle
So why do we never see the supermarkets and major manufacturers hauled over the coals for their packaging? Its a fairly good bet that if they were forced/taxed to take packaging seriously we could reduce packaging by 50% through a collection of methods. That's action at a very few number of points, no big new government collection apparatus, and much more in the way of useful results.
Forget worrying about flimsy carrier bags, concentrate on what's filling them out. - SillyRabbits, on 02/05/2008, -8/+44Reminds me of Dilbert strip where the janitor comes along emptying all the sorted recycling bins into the same general trash. I hear that's what happening in a lot of cases on the recycling processing side. For some materials, they have way more than they need so it just gets shipped off to the land fills once it reaches the plant.
- Birdoftruth, on 02/05/2008, -12/+47people don't understand that this isn't completely about saving energy. It is about saving materials that we don't have unlimited resources of.
- nblsavage, on 02/05/2008, -18/+52It's still better than dumping everything in a landfill.
- sonaboy, on 02/05/2008, -11/+45Recycling was never about "saving energy." It was about saving resources. It was a trade off of using more human and industrial energy to extend the usage of resources we had already harvested. This article is not only inaccurate, it's deliberately misleading. Buried.
- bryanedds, on 02/05/2008, -15/+45Someone didn't read the article... or is severely lacking reading comprehension...
- jgehman, on 02/05/2008, -10/+34The reason landfill space is at a premium - anywhere! - is because of legislation making it impossible to create new landfills. Duh!
- 14justice, on 02/05/2008, -21/+45What??? Canada is the second largest country in the world, with a land area of four million square miles, and it's hard to find landfill space?
- homedaddy, on 02/05/2008, -8/+31http://www.videosift.com/video/Penn-Teller-Bullshi ...
- BigManOnCampus, on 02/05/2008, -15/+36You obviously didn't really pay attention to Penn & Teller. The points they were making were.
1) Recycling doesn't save energy.
2) We're not running out of landfill space.
3) Recycling doesn't save money. (except in the cases of metals, it really doesn't)
4) Recycling doesn't save trees.
5) Recycling doesn't create jobs any more than a new government agency creates jobs.
They defended those points very well. Nowhere do Penn & Teller say that all recycling is useless. In fact, in Hawaii, due to a *REAL* lack of landfill space, recycling is not *****. But on the mainland, or any other large country (yes, you Canada), it makes very little economic/environmental sense to recycle everything at this point. The options are slowly getting better. For instance, the re-use of plastics for energy production is coming into it's own.
People believe in recycling because, ultimately, we'd like to just magically recycle everything we produce. The bottom line is, we're not there yet. - inactive, on 02/05/2008, -22/+43Recycling is about natural ressources.
The more paper is recycled the less trees have to be cut. The point is to reduce the environmental impact by reducing our environmental needs. A completely arbitrary example: you need 15 square km of forest to supply the demand without recycling, with recycling you can save, as in not exploit, 5 square km of forest.
So you protect larger areas which are left as natural habitats. If we didn't recycle, we'd have to destroy even more forests, drill for even more oil, and mine for even more metals.
And on the other end, you save on waste. Landfills take a lot of place and are simply terrible for the environment, when you recycle, landfills take more time to fill and they don't need as much space.
Recycling is not supposed to be economical. That's the whole point. It costs more to recycle paper than to to just make it. The point is to SAVE natural ressources, ecosystems, ensure that renewable sources have the time to replenish (tress growing back), etc. Not to save money.
"Per Bylund is a PhD student in economics at the University of Missouri and the founder of Anarchism.net. "
The myth of an article about recycling. This was a slander piece on socialism and environmentalism.
"Please enlighten me, wherein lies the so-often-acclaimed success of this system?"
Swedes have forests, still. Clean rivers, still. Clean lakes, still. They get to breathe clean air, drink clean water and guess what: they can actually swim in their lakes, not poisonous! Can't say that about you state, can you Mr Bylund of Missouri? Oh yeah that's right, your fish are contaminated with mercury and you can't even eat them. - h4ppydotcom, on 02/05/2008, -4/+24Not every green issue is about Carbon or Energy. Recycling can (and often does) save energy. But even when it does not, it undoubtedly saves resources and this should only be encouraged, whilst remembering the following "Three Rs of something-snappy-that-I-can't think-of":
Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
* Reducing usage is the best (buy products with less packaging, drive less, etc)
* Reusing is the next best (e.g. In the UK, Bertolli pasta sauce comes in handy pint sized jars that make great glasses - a real talking point over dinner!)
* Recycling is the third best option
And ALL of the above are better than hiding your head in the sand and living a straightforward consumerist lifestyle. - nuteredardvark, on 02/05/2008, -8/+27My uncle works for the EPA and was one of the people to help create the Diesel-Hydraulic UPS trucks http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/06/epa_and_pa ... He and his team also created a 100mpg diesel system for a garbage truck. What happened to this technology that would give our garbage trucks 100 mpg in the city? Ford bought it and is currently sitting on it, they have no plans to do anything with it. They just want to make sure Toyota doesen't get hold of the technology. Everything is physically there to make it happen, politics are not though.
- BoneheadFarker, on 02/05/2008, -9/+25I use to work in the garbage industry. I can tell you for a fact that Penn and Teller were telling the truth.
Since I use to work in the garbage industry, there are certain things will refuse to recycle. One is an organic material...paper and cardboard. First, we aren't going to run out of trees. No really, we won't That's why we have tree farms. And second, many landfills today syphon off the methane to generate electricity, produced by bacteria eating all the organic material, including paper. Clean and free energy...gotta love that. Plastic I'm iffy on, since they really can't recycling it properly with overspending. Though the break-even point is getting closer. Aluminum I will recycle, because it's highly used metal and actualy turns a profit when recycled.
Most other things go straight to the landfill. This does really worry me, sending things to a landfill. Mostly because the one ski hill in town is a former landfill site. And in about 20-30 years, the other land fill in town will become another ski hill. The only problem is the NIMBY crowd. But they forget over time that the piece of land they bought next to the ski hill use to be next to a landfill.
Believe me...recycling, for the most part, is *****... - ChzPlz, on 02/05/2008, -3/+18Even if a landfill is properly maintained, they simply aren't designed to enable materials to breakdown. They are garbage warehouses, not compost bins.
- Gardimus, on 02/05/2008, -2/+16Recycling was big during the Second World War. I'm sure all sides were doing it because they wanted to lose.
- Arcesius, on 02/05/2008, -8/+21Therefore let's all go back to our consumeristic ways and ignore the concept of sustainability. That'll play out well.
- o0joshua0o, on 02/05/2008, -0/+13Recycling is not such a clear-cut, black-and-white issue in reality. This is because all energy has associated costs, and almost all resources are limited. Does the energy saved by recycling that metal can outweigh the amount of energy wasted by using water to clean it and using gasoline to drive it to the recycling bin? I’m not arguing for or against recycling, I’m just saying that these are important considerations.
- mattes5, on 02/05/2008, -1/+14Well if you go by the MIses Institute and Austrian economist (where this article comes from) you privatize the garbage service... From the landfills to the movers. The more it cost to move/store garbage and certain types of garbage the more you will see the market demand less products that produce waist and demand more recycle friendly/ cheaply disposed products.
- underthesun, on 02/05/2008, -18/+31This article is rubbish - buried as inaccurate. This is a straw-man argument. Recycling has never been about "energy saving", it's about waste reduction and the reuse of natural resources.
- Otto, on 02/05/2008, -2/+15No, how about let's do recycling in a *sane* way instead? All this manual sorting is complete crap. Not only does it *not work*, but it's counterproductive to begin with.
The few communities that have put in machines to do automatic sorting (and yes, this stuff works, the technology has leapt forward over the years) have shown a consistent profit. Recycled goods, when they are cheaper, are in demand. And the only way to make them cheaper is through mass production in an efficient fashion.
Manually sorting and hauling garbage to 6 different locations is not efficient or cost effective. The goods that are produced are of inferior quality and sold at a loss. Less goods are produced.
95% of recyclable materials can now be automatically sifted out of your standard everyday garbage. Why are we still putting stuff into separate bins?
Here's what we need to do:
1. Automatically sort all trash for recycling and resale of the products.
2. Encourage companies to make packaging that is easily recycled.
3. Stop with the laws forcing people to do work that doesn't help things. - Otto, on 02/05/2008, -5/+17If it's not saving energy, if it takes more energy, then it's actually environmentally unfriendly. Where do you think energy comes from anyway? Most of the energy on this planet comes from coal and oil.
- strad2, on 02/05/2008, -3/+15Many of the arguments that Penn and Teller put forth in that episode (the crux of their argument is based on an article called "Recycling is Garbage") are one-sided and have been debunked by a variety of sources. I don't have time to spend detailing some of the finer points on this issue (it is a complicated issue, and a busy day here at work), but here are a couple links from a quick google search:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id ...
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/611_ ... - EtherGnat, on 02/05/2008, -1/+13Also a properly maintained landfill takes energy and effort, the very thing people are criticizing recycling for.
- Frayed_Knot, on 02/05/2008, -7/+19Yeah, and they have a 300mpg carburetor and a car that runs on water too!
- KraftDinner101, on 02/05/2008, -13/+25We're not going to just cut down trees to create more space for a landfill and for the most part, if its not farmland or houses, its forests.
- WaterDragon, on 02/05/2008, -3/+15In Soviet Union, government recycles you.
(Sorry, couldn't resist.) - Bodhinature, on 02/05/2008, -1/+13An article in Scientific American intimated that some scientists at least believe that the solution isn't recycling because the problem isn't waste. The problem is consumption. Consumption must be curbed which creates less waste and green house gases. Less consumption means less wasteful production.
- rossmcd, on 02/05/2008, -8/+20How do you figure six different trucks are needed? Just because you're separating the waste into more different categories, doesn't mean that you are creating more waste in terms of volume. A truck with 6 compartments would (most of the time) be able to go to the same number of houses as a truck with 1 compartment, before needing to drop off stuff at the dump.
This isn't just speculation; my city does it this way. We have to separate recycling into two different bins: glass and mixed paper/metal/plastic. It all gets loaded into the same truck but in different parts. - VenDrake, on 02/05/2008, -0/+11That Dilbert strip is based on reality. Our cleaning crew usually comes in well after normal business hours. When I work late and watch them, they dump every trash / recycling can into the same collecting tote. (No I'm not joking.)
- Jyahya, on 02/05/2008, -8/+19Does anyone know of some alternative ways to reduce the amount of trash going to landfill?
The only thing I can think of is forcing companies to use less packaging in their products. - pieinthesky, on 02/05/2008, -1/+12Medical science? You mean we have to increase the human life span just so your argument makes sense?
- donutwant, on 02/05/2008, -5/+14You think the Mises Institute is a Republican think tank. Buried for stupidity.
- 15charmaxwtf, on 02/05/2008, -13/+23Great, whatever works for you. You do that, and leave everyone else alone.
- nblsavage, on 02/05/2008, -3/+13BuddyDoQ, how many landfills can you name that are properly maintained? The stuff that is in most current ones will be there for decades if not centuries.
- tpodr, on 02/05/2008, -6/+16NEWS FLASH: Anarchist complains about Government program.
- Otto, on 02/05/2008, -2/+11Of course it's acceptable. Unless you know nothing about modern landfill practices, of course.
Landfilling is about one of the most environmentally friendly things we can do. Sure, it takes 20 years to fill one, but afterwards, when you cover the thing over with dirt, the forest reclaims that land and thrives on the materials left there. - freexe, on 02/05/2008, -2/+11But that's mostly because you can't build a massive recycling plant until up can get enough material to keep the plant operating. Getting people to recycle first means that when the plant is started, people's recycling habits are already in place and there is material ready to start recycling.
It's a catch 22, they need a lot more people recycling before many of these ventures are profitable, and people using bad excuses like this doesn't help. - stanleyford, on 02/05/2008, -4/+13ElAssoWipo, you're talking about the _intent_ of Sweden's recycling program. Bylund is talking about the _consequences_ of Sweden's recycling program.
Of course the program is well-intentioned, but Bylund isn't arguing against the intentions of the program: nowhere does he say that recycling or environmentalism is bad, or that the goals of the recycling program or environmentalism are bad goals. What he is saying is that the system put in place to accomplish those goals is flawed, and it is flawed because of a heavy-handed government. - mmdanziger, on 02/05/2008, -3/+12Interesting. Part of a universal problem in life in which people seek actions which make them feel as if they have taken care of an issue rather than actually figuring out what would make a difference.
- sonaboy, on 02/05/2008, -10/+18"This article amounts to a cleverly-rationalized complaint about having to do chores. boo hoo."
Exactly so - excellent point. I love how you put that. - daveisfera, on 02/05/2008, -5/+13I thought that the point of recycling was to reuse resources. Whoever said anything about it being more cost effective?
- EtherGnat, on 02/05/2008, -2/+10@Epyn
I hate to break it to you, but vaporizing trash for energy and other reusable materials is still recycling (at least in my book). If the process is indeed cleaner and more efficient than traditional recycling I'm all for it, but I suspect the two processes can coexist. - Epyn, on 02/05/2008, -4/+12Maybe he's heard of plasma gasification technology and how landfill trash can be converted to fuel and plastics and raw materials at a much lower intrinsic cost? New technology could give recycling a black eye in the coming years, provided people actually go out of their way to know and support what's out there. Look up the GeoPlasma arc facility being built.
- matador3, on 02/05/2008, -6/+13LOL, I can't believe this made the front page. Way to get all the nanny staters in a tizzy.
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