About 6 years ago, I had a definitive article on why recycling was a scam. The short version is that it involves shipping materials to China or third world countries to be “recycled” there. We have no idea if the recycling actually even happens and the whole thing causes far more waste than a landfill. Once China cut off most recycling, the recycling bins became a meaningless scam that went right to landfills anyway.
California’s trash is going right back to landfills. 62% of exported materials used to go to China. But no more. California’s Department of Resources Recycling sent a letter cautioning that the “economics of recycling” had become “unfavorable” thus “challenging what recycling means to Californians.”
Now, NBC has a report on Palo Alto figuring out that recycling is a scam. That’s only news to the media.
Four years ago, city officials in Palo Alto, California, posed what they thought was a straightforward question: Where did their recycling go?
The fact that this had to be a question is already revealing. Most people don’t ask, because they don’t want to know.
The main obstacle that Palo Alto encountered was that the half-dozen companies that trade the city’s recyclables on world markets declined to name their trading partners, citing business reasons.
Unable to force disclosure, Palo Alto city staff concluded they are stuck.
“It is not possible to definitively determine whether the materials are being recycled properly or whether they may be causing environmental or social problems,” they wrote in a report published this year.
Also, it’s not possible to know if the Nigerian prince I sent all that money to really exists.
Recycling is a scam. Lefties force us to pay money to companies that virtue signal and then partner with international companies that just take the trash and dump it because it’s cheaper.
Concerned residents asked the city to require their trash hauler, GreenWaste, to annually report how and where their recycling was handled.
The city agreed, and GreenWaste complied. But as GreenWaste’s reports show, it could not establish full traceability.
A key reason, Palo Alto officials said, is that GreenWaste conducts some recycling through middlemen called brokers.
Brokers do not recycle goods, but instead buy and sell them like commodities. Industry participants say they play an important role in linking waste collectors, like GreenWaste, with recycling factories around the world.
But when GreenWaste asked its brokers to specify where and with whom they did business, they balked.
GreenWaste. That sounded good, right?
Except all these virtue signaling operations just route the trash to where it gets treated like… trash. And they can’t tell you where it goes, because they don’t want to know.
Winchester, of Berg Mill, said he attended a recent meeting but came away disappointed.
He said it felt like a missed opportunity to finally grapple with the “big societal questions” — the trade-offs — that come with recycling.
The answer is easy. Recycling is a scam. It’s unneeded and it doesn’t work. It consists of taxing Americans to hide their trash in the third world and then pay ad agencies to make cartoons of singing pizza boxes and soda cans happily describing how they’re being transformed into new products. (They’re not: it’s a scam.)
“Recycling is a scam. It’s unneeded and it doesn’t work.”
No doubt. I remember I already figured out several decades ago that it made no economic sense when they first started making us do it in California. I guess it was an early example of virtue signalling (the people recycling their stuff thought they were doing something good) and a leftist effort to complicate our lives, waste our time and effort, and get more social control over us.
The only remedy that has occurred to me is for manufactured stuff to be biodegradable. Getting humans to solve the problem after non-biodegradable stuff is discarded is a hopeless project.
Back when the Enviromental Defense Fund(EDF)was putting on those annoying TV ads IF YOUR NOT RECYCLING YOUR THROWING IT ALL AWAY
A few years ago, the usually far-Left and angrily anti-American Democrat puppet show Frontline (PBS) did a surprisingly excellent expose of the long-standing recycling scam, that stared with open-mouthed shock at the vast corruption of the giant recycling industry. Naturally, like all such irruptions of real journalism, it had no impact whatsoever, since like most society-wide hypnotic trances (Eg, transgender “rights”, CRT, Global Warming, BLM, etc.), it cannot be broken by mere truth-telling. But I recommend it as the best two-hour video doc I’ve seen exposing the reality of this 50-year hoax. No doubt it’s viewable in the Frontline archives.
The documentary ‘Planet of the Humans’ is also a pretty good expose of the “green” movement. The environmental destruction from mining critical minerals, often in third world countries using child labor, the fossil fuels backstopping “green” power, the short lifespan of solar and wind fields whose components can’t be recycled, the “biomass” industry fueled by felling healthy forests, and more.
“Hypnotic Trance”
That’s a good one, it is a hypnotic trance.
I’m old enough to remember when retail came in a quart glass bottle stopped with a disc of paper.. In school. we had white or chocolate, in little bottles. Same paper stpper.
In East Orange, New Jersey in the late forties the milkman had a horse drawn wagon. The company offered services of a truck. But a truck had to be driven. The horse would follow the milkman as he walked down the sidewalk.
Fwiw, unhomogenized. Cream at the top.
Retail milk, that is. Nothing larger than quarts.
I remember that. We still had milkmen back in the 1950s, delivering milk to one’s door. The father of one of my best friends in elementary school was a milkman.
City collects fees from me, which I presume part goes to the vendor, then the vendor sells it to a broker, who ships it off to somewhere and it gets dumped back into the earth. In the process, lots of $$$ changes hands.