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The Sacrament of Recycling
Office Christmas parties have few redeeming qualities. I maintain that the world would be a better place if the practice were done away with completely. I do, however, have a rule about never turning down free food. While standing amongst co-workers this past Christmas, plotting how I could subtly steal the entire tray of cannolis, some of our colleagues from Britain inquired as to where the recycling was.
One co-worker pointed to the holiest of holies, while beaming with unjustifiable pride. Mildly surprised to find that we Yankees observed the same religious rites, our British colleagues began inquiring as to the depth of our devotion. Anyone can recycle bottles, cans and stacks of printer paper, but did we recycle cardboard? The American congregation was unsure.
Bemused, but only there for the food, I endeavored to stay out of the conversation. I remembered Clark Wiseman’s calculations showing that if the United States were to continue generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and put it all into a single landfill 100 yards deep, it would occupy a space of 30 miles on each side. This hardly seems a great imposition for a nation of 3.8 million square miles.
I bit my tongue as the self-flagellation of my co-workers continued. We learned that the British are far from perfect in their devoutness, and recycle only a fraction of their waste when compared to the Scandinavian countries. And yet the guilt of my co-workers would not be easily assuaged. The United States needed to take recycling more seriously, they all agreed. After all, we’re running out of space.
I laughed audibly, drawing the skeptical gazes of the faithful. I looked up from my plate, which was at this stage suffering from a distinct lack of cannolis, and decided it was best to elaborate.
“Have any of you ever driven laterally across Kansas?” I asked. Several smiles appeared in the room, identifying my fellow recycling heathens. “We’re clearly not running out of space.” The point was granted by all in the room, and the subject quickly changed. An awkward tension hung in the air for several minutes as some tried to continue small talk.
If this were truly a disagreement about efficiency or resource management, there would be no need for hurt feelings in response to a dissenting opinion. My crime was far more sinister. I questioned the instrument of their redemption and the source of their smug moral superiority.
Like most religions, the Green movement attempts to define codes of right behavior. It contains an original sin: Existing. The battle against entropy requires the consumption of resources and the production of waste. These actions wrack the environmentally conscious with tremendous guilt, which can only be assuaged with an act of contrition.
The ritual is simple enough, though lacking the entertainment value of firewalking. Sort your waste into separate bins, rinse the recyclable items clean, and put a can down at the curb weekly. Now that you have “made a difference” you can go about your day knowing that you are better than most people. After all, think of all of the trees you’ve saved. One doesn’t need to guess at the number, as it can be readily determined.
It is commonly believed that increased wastepaper recycling will save trees, and presumably result in a larger growing stock of forests in the long run. The adjustments that can be expected to occur in forest management cast serious doubt on this conclusion. About one-third of the pulpwood for paper comes from residues of other wood products, the production of which will be negligibly affected by recycling. The remainder mostly consists of pulpwood trees, largely plantation-grown softwoods planted in orderly rows and mechanically harvested as a 20-year rotation crop. Their small size—indicated by a fiber yield of less than 200 pounds per tree—contributes to the immense numbers of trees cited by recycling advocates as being “saved” from the woodsman’s axe. The notion that stately old trees are used for paper production is erroneous; their value as lumber or plywood far exceeds their pulpwood value. Increased recycling will result in the conversion to agricultural uses of some plantation forest lands in the same way that a reduction in the demand for bread will reduce wheatlands, the possible result being a net reduction in the nation’s forest inventory.
None. You saved no trees.
Recycling is not inherently foolish. Many companies profitably recycled things like paper before governments began mandating the activity. And there are certainly environments (like a spacecraft) where the benefits of recycling vastly outweigh the costs. But what should be a cost-benefit analysis performed by individuals in a market place has become an article of faith enforced with social norms,rather than reason and evidence.
This has become a bit of a running gag when I’m at friend’s houses. I ask where the trash is so that I can throw away the can of soda I am holding, only to have my friend look down with disapproval, raise one figure into the air, and, with a pained expression on their face say, “Actually, we recycle.” Their concern for my soul is written clearly across their faces. Will this be the moment where I accept the redemptive powers of recycling into my heart?
“That’s neat.” I say while throwing the can in the trash. “Now let me tell you about Scientology.”
I’m a big hit at parties.
Published in General
All trash on Cape Cod is taken by train off the Cape and burned to make electricity at a Covanta SEMASS (Southeast Massachusetts) facility. It’s a pretty cool system. Trash into electricity. You would think this would make liberals happy, wouldn’t you? Noooo.
We recycle a few things, but not to the extent that other communities do. (The rumor is, however, that this is going to change soon. Oh well.)
Whenever I have company, they follow me around the house and the yard, “Don’t you recycle? Don’t you recycle? Don’t you recycle?”
My guests were driving me nuts.
People who need to recycle go a little spastic and they hyperventilate.
So I set up a small garbage can for them with a sign that says “Recycle,” so they can breathe easy again, and after they leave, I put their stuff in my trash.
At work we recycle copper and steel. Aluminum is for homeless people.
It’s one thing to waste one’s time recycling. What I can’t get over is the European fetish with talking about it, too! We have friends from Britain and one American raised by her German mother, mostly in Germany, who are just fixated on the subject.
I try to be polite, but I can feel my eyes crossing out of boredom, and I wonder, “where do I go to get my lost brain cells back?”
It really is a religious rite for some people.
you should read the stories of Harrisburg’s attempt to do the same. Unmitigated financial and environmental disaster. Bankrupted the city. Columbus tried it too, utter embarrassing failure.
Depends on how much you have. We manage to get a few boxes of scrap aluminum every year. Worth a few dollars as it is a higher grade than pop cans.
I will look that up. That’s too bad.
Another real scam is e-recycling. Most of it gets dumped in Ghana…………it is actually really bad. Kids take piles of computer cables burn them to get the rubber off and recycle the copper. This is just one of the many documentaries on it:
I recycle cans and bottles, but most paper waste I compost. I turn all that garbage into delicious fruits and vegetables. At heart I’m just selfish with my garbage.
Penn and Teller did a great show on Recycling. I particularly liked the multiple can test they did just to see how far they could push the faithful. The results were very depressing. Go to the 5:45 mark to see……
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rExEVZlQia4
Hilarious post Frank! That said, I do recycle because it is easy, but I’m not religious about it nor self-righteous. And I am deeply annoyed that the legislature in our fair state has outlawed plastic bags at the grocery store, starting next summer. Yes, I live in CA of course. I think pathogens reside on the bags you have to tote back and forth to the grocery store and don’t want to wash after every dang trip, especially in the heat of summer. Can we sue the legislature and make the taxpayers compensate us when we die from those pathogens?
I remember when I lived in Sacramento they replaced all the trucks and garbage cans with automated trucks that would grab the can and dump it. The Sanitary district crowed on the savings since trucks could now have just a driver no need for loaders.
Then they passed MANDITORY recycling in town. And the garbage truck was then followed by the recycling truck with a driver and two loaders……
Non-ferrous metals, definitely recycle.
Iron and steel, I put it out on the curb with the trash and the scavengers take it.
For the rest of it, makes no difference to me if I put it in the recycling can (blue) or trash (green) can. They’re the same other than color. All ends up the same place probably.
Gee could there be a way to make it a profitable business to transport bottles from out of state? Maybe if you had access to a mail truck ?
I once lived in a neighborhood when, on trash day, there was a woman who would go through all the garbage containers by the road. If she could identify who tossed any recyclables found, they would get a loud, hectoring phone call.
Trumbull, CT where I once lived was one of several towns that sent their trash to a cogeneration facility (power generator.) The operator of the facility took all the participating town’s trash for free, saving them landfill costs. Each town signed a contract which required that they supply a minimum volume of BTU-rich trash. Then the State mandated recycling. This removed rich sources of BTUs (plastics and paper) from the waste stream, The towns were forced to pay contractual penalties to the cogeneration facility operator. You could say this caused a big stink. I just thought it was funny.
I recycle, ignorant of its worth and accepting of the premise that it is “good.” More likely we’ve now mandated that a marginal industry be created where no economic justification exists. Like most green initiatives (wind farms, solar) without government mandates and subsidies, it wouldn’t exist. It’s a boondoggle.
I read a pretty good book several years ago called “Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage”. The guy took core samples from landfills and analyzed them, with pretty surprising results. Fifty-year-old hamburger still identifiable, newsprint still readable, etc.
Evidently in a lot of that airtight environment down there, biodegrading does not take place. It was pretty interesting.
One thing I took away from it was that if you take out all of the most inert materials from a random pile of garbage, the paper, glass, plastic, Styrofoam – essentially all the stuff we recycle – what you’re left with in the landfill is the truly gross and toxic stuff, now highly concentrated. Seems like a landfill would be much less objectionable if we kept it all together.
(Speaking of Styrofoam, the big bugaboo of the Left when I was young: if something “lasts unchanged in the ground for 500 years”, isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t little Styrofoam balls one of the main ingredients of potting soil?)
Bathroom tissue is made from recycled paper, so They’re not completely full of $?&!.
In the 1990s when I lived in Pleasanton CA recycling was achieved by just taking all the garbage to a transfer station, where it was sorted by the carting company. It achieved very high percentage recycling, no work or infrastructure, e.g. special cans needed by consumers, and cost roughly 40% less than having everyone sort their own.
So of course, since it worked well, it didn’t meet the central planner’s definition of how to do recycling, so it had to be discontinued, everyone provided new garbage cans, buying a new fleet of trucks to handle the pre-recycled trash, maintaining the existing sorting service because not everyone ever complies, and the final result was recycling about 10% less effective with costs up about 40% paid for by increase to everyone’s garbage bill. I love government – not!
It’s worse than a boondoggle. People are wasting time and (literal) energy on an activity they believe offers (spiritual) salvation. Like most everything offered up by the Left, it’s a false promise.
With the exception being metals (aluminum, copper). Pretty much anything someone is willing to pay for is worth recycling. It’s the typical way we know an activity is worthwhile, which the Left utterly misunderstands and misinterprets as evil, greedy capitalism.
We donate our aluminum cans to the Boy Scouts at our church. It’s a twofer. They get some funding from it and we support a conservative cause.
So true. And it is such a stupid law. What company doesn’t package the things it sells, for heaven’s sake.
Are the stores allowed to give customers paper bags?
Speaking of germs, my pet peeve with the recycling movement is that it is a big germ breeder all around.
One of my kids went to school in Burlington, Vermont, and it is a college town. The kids recycle. The garbage in the recycling bins–food not rinsed out and so on–left in their warm kitchens, then put out on the sidewalk. Ugh. It is disgusting.
I am convinced it is spreading disease.
Today’s kids grew up taking antibiotics for granted, and they don’t worry about germs.
Meanwhile the doctors don’t want to prescribe antibiotics anymore. And there aren’t too many new ones in development, to my knowledge.
Young people today are very casual about germs. But the green cleaners they use are nowhere near as effective as old-fashioned Lysol and bleach. And viruses, fungi, and bacteria are breeding everywhere.
I see a perfect storm coming.
Recycling is too much hassle. I don’t do it, so go ahead and hate me. However, I do use stuff until it is really used up. My car was built in 1997, and we actually use a clothes line to dry our clothes (In green-speak, that is a wind powered, solar assisted clothes dryer, which for some reason doesn’t qualify for a tax credit). In case you were wondering, I can afford a new car and to run my clothes dryer. The cost doesn’t justify the benefit (which is also why I don’t recycle).
Some of you seem defensive about your recyling. Don’t be. I’m not judging you, just as I expect none of you to judge me for my sacrafices to Baal.
In conversations I have w/ green relatives, two basic unshakeable themes emerge:
1. There is no room for buying trash. Also, it is wrong to bury trash because MY GOD something something FUTURE GENERATIONS something AMERICA something. The Eastern seaboard is choked with barges laden with trash that have nowhere to go.
2. Immense, voracious machinery are at work 24/7 converting virgin forests into paper, and we will run out of trees. When you point out that it is actually in the industry’s self-interest to plant trees and thus assure a future supply, you get a response like a computer presented with illogic by Captain Kirk; there is a clacking sound, a pause, and then a rejection of the new information as errant nonsense. The paper industry exists to destroy.
I recycle, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to heaven.
They can sell paper bags for 5 cents each, but cannot give them away for free.
It has totally fouled up the self-checkout aisle. There used to be a supply of plastic bags at each station with a frame to hold one open, so as you scanned each item you dropped it into the bag until it was full, then set it aside and opened a new bag. Simple.
Now the store employee who supervises the self-checkout guards the sole stack of precious paper bags. You scan all your items first, then select the # of bags you want (so the system can charge you 5 cents each), he brings them over to you, and now you have to waste time packing the bags while under the old system you were already done and out the door.
That is just plain depressing.
Heaven forbid we leave anything buried for future archeologists to sift through, the bastards. What have our descendants ever done for us?
Don’t even get me started on self-checkout, on top of the plastic bag ban our busybody legislature in Sacramento recently decided to outlaw selling alcohol at the self-checkout for no discernible reason whatsoever.
Until recently when I scanned a 6-pack the system would flag it, the attendant would walk over, check my ID, enter an override code and my birthday into the system, and I could proceed with my transaction. They were in fact more rigorous about actually checking IDs than in the regular checkout line.
Now this is illegal. If you want to buy alcohol, you must wait in line for a checker. The same applies to OTC medicines that, until this law went into effect, I didn’t even realize you had to be 18 to buy. Last time I had a cold and tried to pick up some cough medicine the system flagged it and the attendant came over and told me — after I’d already waited in the self-check line and scanned half my items — that he’d have to cancel my transaction and I’d have to go wait in line again for a checker.
A lot of the greens make a big deal about how garbage doesn’t rot in landfills. I’ve never understood this. “Plastic lasts 15,000 years!!!) What is wrong with that, exactly?
I pick fights with people who want to recycle. I detail how recycling is, in fact, the very essence of pagan idol worship, and that I refuse to engage in un-Jewish activities.
So I make a point of throwing recyclable things away, with pithy remarks like:
“I throw paper out because I support trees.” (After all, only things that we are forbidden to kill are endangered…)
“We took it out of the earth. We made it better. Then we give it back, all improved!”
“Every time a bottle ends up in the ocean, it helps feed fish that I enjoy eating.” (true, by the way – the plastic breaks up, bacteria eat it, etc.)
“You might like to stay up late to sort your garbage, but I don’t do work fit only for liberals.”
And then I hope and pray that they take the bait.