For decades, we’ve been told: recycle!
“If we’re not using recycled paper, we’re cutting down more trees!” says Lynn Hoffman, co-president of Eureka Recycling.
Recycling paper (or cardboard) does save trees. Recycling aluminum does save energy. But that’s about it.
The ugly truth is that many “recyclables” sent to recycling plants are never recycled. The worst is plastic.
Even Greenpeace now says, “Plastic recycling is a dead-end street.”
Hoffman often trucks it to a landfill.
Years ago, science writer John Tierney wrote a New York Times Magazine story, “Recycling Is Garbage.” It set a Times record for hate mail.
But what he wrote was true.
“It’s even more true today,” says Tierney in my new video. “Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less.”
It would be smarter to just dump our garbage in landfills.
People think landfills are horrible polluters. But they’re not. Regulations (occasionally, government regulations are actually useful) make sure today’s landfills have protective barriers so they don’t leak.
Eventually, landfills are turned into good things: ski hills, parks and golf courses.
But aren’t we running out of landfill space? For years, alarmist media said we were. But that’s not true.
In 1987, media gave lots of publicity to a garbage barge that traveled thousands of miles trying and failing to find a place to dump its load.
But that barge wasn’t rejected because there was a lack of room. States turned the barge away after hysterical media suggested it contained “infectious waste.” The Environmental Protection Agency later found it was normal garbage.
Landfills have plenty of room for that. In fact, America has more space than we will ever need. Sometimes states and businesses even compete to get our garbage.
“If you think of the United States as a football field,” says Tierney, “all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line.”
Putting garbage in landfills is often much cheaper than recycling. My town would save $340 million a year if it just stopped recycling.
But they won’t, “because people demand it,” says Tierney. “It’s a sacrament of the green religion.”
The religion’s commandments are complex. New York City orders me to: “Place recyclables at the curb between 4 PM and midnight … Rinse plastic containers … Separate paper from plastic, metal, and glass.” Paper must be tied “with twine into bundles no taller than 18 inches,” and so on.
“That’s one reason recycling fails,” says Tierney. “It’s so complicated; people never learn the rules.”
Worse, some recycling is pointless, or harmful.
“If you rinse a plastic bottle in hot water,” Tierney points out, “the net result is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than if you threw it in the garbage.”
Since most plastic can’t be recycled, what’s the environmentalists’ solution now?
“Stop producing it,” says Greenpeace’s John Hocevar.
Lots of environmental groups now want to ban plastic.
That’s just silly. Plastic is useful. Using it often creates fewer emissions than its alternatives. Plastic bags create fewer than paper bags. A metal straw has to be used 150 times before it creates less pollution than a plastic straw.
Environmental groups rarely mention that, or how they misled us about recycling year after year.
“It’s appalling that after telling people for three decades to recycle, they don’t even apologize for all the time and money that they wasted,” complains Tierney. “Instead, they have a proposal (banning plastic) that will make life even worse.”
Plastic is not evil. Recycling is no climate savior. When Los Angeles mandated it, they added 400 big noisy garbage trucks.
That creates lots of pollution.
But environmentalists still demand we do things like pick through our trash, switch from plastic to paper bags that rip. California even banned small plastic shampoo bottles
“Some of these rules are just so arbitrary and silly,” complains Tierney. “It’s simply a way for greens and for some politicians to pretend that they’re saving the planet.”
The dirty secret of recycling is that like all of environmentalist radicalism it us green on the outside and red on the inside
Actually, it’s green also in the inside. As dollar bills are.
Recycling can work, and does work in places, there’s lots of stuff claiming to be made from 100% recycled plastic here in the UK, but, I suspect lots of it is recycled industrial waste that is clean and consistent.
Domestic waste can be burned and turned into electricity and the heat generated can be used to heat local buildings.
None of this is hard to do, the metals in the waste can be separated easily and cardboard can be easily recycled along with food and garden waste which can be turned into compost.
Nothing hard about this but the government somehow managed to screw this up.
You couldn’t be more wrong. The time, money and energy wasted is recycling is worse than a landfill. Did you even read the article?
The same physics applies to UK garbage as US garbage.
Scrap yards and bottle recycling work, everything the government touches doesn’t, got it?
Saskatchewan has an excellent beverage recycling system run by a organization that supports people who have difficulty keeping jobs usually because of disabilities with funding from the provincial government.
When you buy a beverage container you pay a deposit and get it back when you return the container to the organization’s depot. It gas taken about 90 % of containers out of the garbage
It pains me to ho to other places and see all the beverage containers thrown out on the streets rtc
I do not recycle. Every monday and thursday I haul out the garbage cans and dump the plastic bags into a container to be picked by the garbage truck. The recycle stuff is mixed in with the regular garbage.
Every other wed. the mindless dutifully haul out their recycled crap in their plastic containers and leave them for pick up. Who knows where that garbage ends up.
Mindless? You sound like a miserable person.
recycling plastic does not work YET.
In a few decades the old landfills
will become our greatest un-natural resource.
Give the tech a bit more time.
The tech was just on the horizon, they said, right from the beginning of this schrade. We’re still waiting for the tech to be ready. In the mean time, we are forced to pay for recycling programs that actually pollute more than simply dumping trash in the landfills! Idiotic.
Here is yet another option: Use glass for foods, juice, ,shampoos, etc; as we did back in the 60’s and prior. Stop using plastic where glass works. (glass breaks down, plastics do not)
The increased weight from shipping will greatly impact the environment. Plastic weighs less and can be kept sterile. There is a reason we use it.
I heard that we would be mining dumps to get iron ore. My father was a chemist and said that was nonsense, there would not be enough iron in a landfill dump. It could be that heavy metals and rare minerals like platinum and iridium and so on could be salvaged from old computers. They are so rare it might be profitable to salvage them. Other things like iron and plastics are probably not valuable enough to salvage them from landfill. And technological development makes some materials no longer as important to recycle. It used to be that photography used a lot of silver, but now we use digital photography, which is less dependent on silver. Correct me if it is still needed in photography. Anyway, Kodak and Polaroid went out of business when digital photography caught on.
The problem with digital photos is that it has a very short life. Look at 30-40 year old football-matches or interviews which in some cases are very hard to see now. Loss of bits – loss of dots. Compare that to 500 yeas old books. We are the first generation to leave nothing written or recorded.. One of the reasons for the rising amount of trash is that everything is packed as if it should travel around the globe, which in many cases it will, as we have given away our production and workplaces to China. Anther reason is that many things are (deliberatly) unrepearable. A latch closing the batterycompartment in my camera broke. It needed a complete camerahousing to replace it. Repair is the finest form of recycling.
We need to find alternatives to disposable plastics. They leach chemicals into water tables and micro plastics get ingested. No current desirable solutions exist for these plastics. We need an alternative such as hemp for these items and save plastics for durable items, which should be recycled to keep the micro plastics out of circulation.
A few years ago the Sierra Club put out their calendars that wasn’t printed on recycled paper and Greenpeace was once forced to serve drinks in Styrofoam cup because someone had forgot to bring their ceramic ones
Paper is made from 8-10 year old softwood pine. These days it’s usually grown on a tree farm for the easiest harvesting. Recycling paper, which creates toxic waste from the process of removing all the ink and bonding agents, simply means fewer trees are growing at farms.
A lot of green hypocrisy!
How do they save the planet with inefficient wind farms while they don’t mind killing millions of useful birds and bats every year? And what environmentally harmful material is used make those windmills in the first place? And how unsightly they are on the face of the earth!
I just go to the dump when I need to and put cardboard in the designated container.
At one time a container had designated windows but no partition inside. How did that help?
It’s all futility of the mind, imo.
Compared to solar panels, windmills are harmless. Both should be banned.
All this ban on “single-use” plastic bags in stores and supermarkets is STUPID. Whoever said they were “single use”? I use my plastic grocery bags to line my wastebaskets all around my home (except the kitchen which requires bigger bags).
Not a single one of those bags ever got used only once. Now, because of these harebrained policies, I will have to BUY plastic garbage bags to line my wastebaskets. And THOSE will be single-use… I’m not going to empty the garbage out of them and reuse them! Policy makers are not known for their common sense….
So how is eliminating plastic bags going to “save the environment”?
Enviromental Hypocracy like Hollywood Star Donna Mills saying Americas have to stop their high way of living or Robert Redford opposing Fossil Fuels while doing ads for United Airlines(Its Time to Fly)and John Travolta with a 707
Maybe the entire recycling issue needs to be look at again.