Out With The Trash
Tim McNabb from Five Hundred Words has an essay which pretty much covers my views on recycling. Read the entire piece by clicking the header.
He`s dead right; the enviromentalists want recycling as a type of Sacrament. They want everyone to ``get involved`` in what is, primarily, a symbolic ritual. (Most recycling trucks drive straight to the city dump and mix this carefully seperated garbage with the rest of the waste.)
I`m all for recycling, provided it has any real merit. Aluminum recyclers pay real money for people to pick up cans (or at least they used to.) Why? Because there was a profit to be made! Why doesn`t the trash company pay you for your plastic and paper? Because it is worthless, and they are picking it up seperately for political reasons only. P.C. is the operative phrase here; there is no real merit to seperating your trash.
He`s dead right; the enviromentalists want recycling as a type of Sacrament. They want everyone to ``get involved`` in what is, primarily, a symbolic ritual. (Most recycling trucks drive straight to the city dump and mix this carefully seperated garbage with the rest of the waste.)
I`m all for recycling, provided it has any real merit. Aluminum recyclers pay real money for people to pick up cans (or at least they used to.) Why? Because there was a profit to be made! Why doesn`t the trash company pay you for your plastic and paper? Because it is worthless, and they are picking it up seperately for political reasons only. P.C. is the operative phrase here; there is no real merit to seperating your trash.
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 10:16 AM
3 Comments:
Tim -- I would have commented earlier, but I was too busy separating my recyclables :-)
Actually, I don't mind doing it, even if it isn't necessary. Without the recyclable bins the trash bins would be too full to manage. As it is we just got a brand new "wheelie-bin" as the Brits call them -- for paper products. I'm amazed how fast that fills up -- even though I don't subscribe to a daily newspaper (who needs one?) -- circulars, catalogs, junk mail, old phone books, paperbacks, etc. And the cans and plastic and glass bottles take up so much room too. So -- I'm ac/dc on this issue. In the long run if things could be reprocessed I'm not opposed to it. We are "conservatives" and I was raised not to waste things, because of my family's background.
But anyway -- I need to do a bit more sorting -- so I'll check back with you later -- heehee.
Most of the recycling programs I am familiar with have been "forced" upon those who participate. That is the key to this movement, the environmentalist’s use of force to make everybody bend to their will. It has precious little to do with reclaiming potentially valuable resources. The sole benefit to the participants is that they “Feel good” about saving the planet regardless of the lack of results produced by these programs. The last truly successful recycling effort occurred during WWII and even then, the tangible results were arguable.
Sorry to disagree, even if only slightly, but recycling does have several benefits:
1) It does help to slow reaching capacity of landfills;
2) it creates a new industry, and that means new jobs, for entrepreneurs as well as often for the kinds of people who might not have jobs in a technological economy;
3) plastic ought to be recycled for the same reasons and others that aluminum is, and besides it is a petroleum byproduct -- and !@#$! gasoline is soaring or has soared 'way past $2.00 a gallon and closer to $3.00 in godforsaken places such as California and Oregon.
Ideally we will begin switching to alcohol as the internal combustion engine fuel, but whenever we start, it will take years before alcohol is widely and/or universally used and available.
I mean, even if we can keep Ted Kennedy from drinking it all, it will be hard to overcome the inertia of our now-petroleum based transportation system.
When we do make alcohol our major fuel, we can produce it from some of the very products we are now recycling, and many more that are disposed of, including much food waste and even such things as grass clippings.
Recycling can help create, also, methane gas, although it is also created in landfills, but it is not often enough tapped to use for energy.
Granted, recycling is too P.C. to suit us, and all the wrong people are wildly in favor of it, but this time their position can be sustained. At least partly.
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