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Hey everybody! Let’s save the planet!
I’m a compulsive recycler.
When I was a Boy Scout, I always collected the most newspapers in the annual fundraising drive. My mom helped establish the first recycling center in my hometown. I spent many of my weekends in high school sorting used paper, glass and metal. When driving, she would pull over and have one of us pick up any aluminum cans or returnable bottles she saw lying beside the road. I always carried a sack with me to carry any recyclable material I found.
I still recycle to this day. Every bit of aluminum I use goes into a trash bag in the garage to be turned in for cash every month or so. I still carry sacks with me when I walk the dogs or take a stroll with my wife. I have a box in my car that holds aluminum I find in parking lots, and I even pull cans out of the trash.
“That’s Gross!,” I hear you say. In my teens, I hauled truckloads of manure for my parents’ garden. I’ve been a lifeguard, bartender, and have served in the military, so I’ve cleaned out steamy swimming pool bathrooms, nauseating bar toilets, and disgusting Army latrines. As a cop, I’ve been spit on, vomited on, bled on, and had bags of urine thrown at me. I’ve cleaned blood, poop, vomit and urine out of the back of my squad. I’ve spent several hours in the presence of decaying bodies and had to sort through the contents of a reeking dumpster in July looking for evidence. As a nurse, I’ve had my hands, face and uniform splattered with every imaginable body fluid (and some you probably can’t imagine) from every known body orifice (and some you don’t want to know). I’ve also worked in a bookstore. So, no, pulling a valuable piece of metal out of a trash can is not gross.
I abhor waste.
At work, I turn off the lights and TV’s in empty rooms. I got tired of people throwing garbage in the recycling bin, so I put a funny sign on the recycling bin telling them to stop it.
I also married into the right family. My in-laws’ rule about Christmas is that all the gifts exchanged must be handmade or used, nothing bought new.
I was an enthusiastic recycler. I thought that the government taking over the recycling business was a good thing. Yes, it drove our little volunteer, non-profit recycling center out of business, but so much more was being recycled. And that can’t be bad, can it? You are taking stuff that would be just filling up landfills and turning it back into useful items.
In hindsight, I should have realized that it was not quite that simple. Collecting newspapers for the Scouts required me to spend several hours going house to house with my Radio Flyer picking them up, then storing them in the garage, transporting them to the weekly meeting, and sorting, stacking and bundling them. At the recycling center, the material was all brought to us, but we still had to sort, stack and bundle it. In both cases, there was always some material that was spoiled by water, oil or garbage. There was stuff mixed in that was not recyclable. The dumpsters outside the church where my troop met and the recycling center were full the day after a sorting.
I assume the Boy Scouts made money for this because the recycler was receiving a uniform product at a central location without having to bear the labor, transportation and storage costs prior to that. The recycling center was processing more valuable metals in addition to paper (and much less profitable glass), but still needed monetary donations to stay afloat.
An epiphany of sorts came when I read the book Rubbish! by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy. Rathje was the premier archeologist of trash, and the book is not environmental science. Even so, I learned that I had a lot of misconceptions about recycling.
The big one is that it does not matter that plastics don’t biodegrade. Nothing biodegrades in landfills. There is no light or air underground, so the stuff pretty much stays unchanged. Rubbish! has stories of two-thousand-year-old Roman dumps that began decaying only when they were excavated and recognizable fruits and vegetables pulled out of medieval middens.
I found out that household waste is actually less than half of the waste going into dumps. Most of it is industrial and construction waste. Plastics make up only about 10% of the waste stream, much less than food waste and paper.
I’ve also noticed something from simple observation. The environmentalists like to say that plastics remain in the environment for centuries. If so, where are they?
In an arroyo near my mom’s house, there is the frame of a wrecked car. The engine, wheels, body, upholstery, and every other part of the car is gone. I first noticed it in the 70’s and it was still there the last time I looked a couple of years ago. I tend to look down a lot when I’m walking (there may be cans to pick up) and I’ll still occasionally see a pull tab on the ground. Beverage cans have not had pull tabs since the mid 70’s. I also have come across trash heaps while hiking with recognizable cans and bottles from the 50’s and 60’s.
But I never see plastic waste that is more than a couple of years old. Why is that? I think that it breaks down to smaller and smaller pieces until it is indistinguishable from dirt.
So, I have come to the conclusion that most “recycling” is wasteful and counterproductive. Recycling of metals and most paper works and makes a profit. Recycling of glass and plastic actually hurts the environment, since you are generating greenhouse gasses to transport and process the stuff.
Published in Environment
Glass is best put into roadbed construction, and might be economically viable for that use.
https://www.txdot.gov/inside-txdot/division/support/recycling/glass-cullet.html
I saw another article about a similar product in Pennsylvania. It looks like a good idea.
I looked it up on remembering reading the idea a couple decades back.
Here’s another idea: Lets just crush all the glass and dump it in the ocean. It will eventually become sand, which I hear we’re running out of. Glass is stable and doesn’t pollute. And we don’t have to worry about sorting by type and color, the main expense (other than transporting) in recycling glass.
We’ve been recyclers and composters and light-switch-turner-offers for years here at Toad Hall.
Most of it because then our garbage is cheaper to get rid of. Since we pay for garbage but recycling is free, we’ll pull as much recycling as possible out of the garbage and into the recycling bin!
At my parents’ summer house, I also put up humorous signs for the same reason telling people who don’t want to recycle to take their own garbage to the
dumptransfer station.Thanks for the book recommendation, sounds like fun.
The thing about the aerobic breakdown is why I turn my compost bin.
Also I like the exercise.
St. Vincent de Paul society recycles lots of things, including mattresses and boxsprings.
We got our first washing machine from St. Vinnie’s, a rebuilt machine that was sturdy and cheap.
They provide many people with jobs and job training, and also use some of the product to shelter the homeless.
They also have a recycled glass factory.
It really is one of my favorite books, along with The Peace War, Night Watch and The Golden Turkey Awards. I reread it every other year or so.
#MeToo.
And, of course, Goodwill and Salvation Army. All of those are outside of government. My point is that recycling by the government is mostly a boondoggle and make-work jobs program.
I agree.
I was mentioning them as the kind of recycling that works — their products are outstanding.
That washing machine is probably still working in the house where we left it, and quite possibly so are the former bums who learned how to repair and install it…
I work in IT. For years one of my biggest customers was a paper / pulp recycling company. Learned a bunch about the business. Recycling is not the be all, end all it is promoted as being. But it does have its place in the world. It is a marginal industry that thrives or dies based on government regulation. It is a very energy intensive industry requiring very cheap energy to make it profitable. It also uses some very caustic chemicals during the recycling process. Stuff that can kill you in parts per million. Stuff that would make most environmentalists freak if they knew it was part of the process.
I live on an acreage here in NW Iowa, and my trash gets separated into ‘that which will burn’ and ‘that which goes to the landfill.’ Since I’m a grumpy old bachelor, the latter might fill up a garbage can over the course of, say, a year.
My town does sponsor an electronics recycling pickup twice a year, which is useful for disposing of old computers and TVs and the like. There’s also paper and glass recycling, though I don’t know how seriously anyone takes it.
As I see it, there are two things that put a hard limit on recycling. First, it’s expensive and takes a lot of resources. Since we live in an incredibly affluent society, we can absorb some of it, but waste management costs will always reach an equilibrium with what we’re actually willing to spend on them.
Second, the only way to really effectively recycle would be to capture all trash at a single point and then separate and recycle there, rather than using regulations and coercion of citizens to do that.
I’ve come to think that an unstated (or sometimes even explicit) goal of environmentalists is to force people to recycle as a means of indoctrination – they want to enforce a mode of thought and behavior that induce compliance to the regulatory state, and to the experts that know better than themselves.
But then again, I’m just a grumpy bachelor who hides from human contact out here on the farm.
I pay the City, per can, for garbage. I pay nothing, per bin for recycling. So, I love my recycle bins. I wish they still took glass.
A very interesting topic, and one that is rapidly becoming a crisis issue. Some of the recycling that you mention, independent paper drives and aluminum can recycling are very good, because of the purity of the stream. The state and city mandated household recycling programs are, like most liberal agenda programs, designed with good intentions and create more issues than they solve.
In the past, most recycling streams were containerized and sold to China for processing. China has since ceased to accept almost all recycling streams from the US. The issue is the percentage of contamination in the recycled trash. In effect, we were shipping 30%+ trash along with >70% recyclables to China. China is now demanding product streams with less than 1% contaminants. https://fox2now.com/2018/04/20/china-refuses-to-recycle-more-of-the-worlds-trash/
My wife’s first cousin is manager of Lowell Mass’s recycling programs. Lowell is the second largest city in Massachusetts. NPR recently did an in-depth report on this issue, and if you are interested, Gunther Wellenstein, the cousin, is part of the interview. http://www.wbur.org/news/2018/08/20/cities-cleaner-recycling
This year, the company that processes their recycling is demanding a 300% increase in fees, as they need to add significant personnel and capital equipment to sort the product. Even with that increase in cost, they are still not able to meet the purity standards, and the recycling is being either stored in warehouses, or simply added to the landfills, as regular refuse. One of the alternate uses of the glass recycling, is they crush it, and use it as the daily cover in the landfill.
Lowell has also recently added inspectors who look at people’s curbside recycling bins’ contents prior to pickup and give the homeowners reports and grades on how well they are doing to have a zero contamination recycling stream. If a family continues to put contaminants in the recycling bins, they will be fined. Lowell has also added RFID chips to every bin, and a camera on the truck that takes photos of the contents as they are being dumped into the truck. These pics are then used for enforcement of contaminated recycling.
In the end, a clear look at the true costs of recycling vs simply landfilling all refuse, might reveal that we can not afford the expense and waste of our current mandated single stream recycling. Regardless of how good it makes us feel to pretend we are saving the planet.
Last Saturday our county had electronics and small appliance recycling day. These events tend to result in long lines of cars and pickups lined up waiting for their turn, burning fossil fuels and emitting CO2 and whatever else. This one was no exception. The people who organize these are getting smarter about how they manage the traffic flow, but it was a new location this time and it all worked well except for the main chokepoint where volunteers helped us unload our stuff. Oh, well, they will probably do better next time. They also offered a paper shredding service and a lot of people took advantage of it, including us, but there were no long lines for that part.
Somewhere buried out back on my place, is a barrel of waste glass, all broken up to be compact. It was our accumulated glass waste from the household for a period of several years, back in the days before we had trash service or any recycling services were available. When the barrel filled up, I dug a hole and buried it in the sandy soil, figuring it wasn’t going to hurt anything. And it won’t. From silicon dioxide in the earth you were formed, and to the earth you shall return, in slightly larger and reorganized pieces.
But I think about back about 15 years ago when I was digging the footings for our new garage/office/sunroom. I did it by hand. (Did I mention that I like that kind of spade work? There is no way I was going to let a backhoe deprive me of my fun.) Much of it was in soil that except near the surface hadn’t been disturbed since the last glacier came through. At one point I came across old junk, including a metal barrel ring from an old wooden barrel. I figured I had dug through an old outhouse location, from before the days of septic systems. People tended to throw their junk in those holes before they closed them up.
I liked the post, thanks. I have written several recent posts on how plastic is broken down, especially in the ocean. We have no collections of floating plastic off-shore – between seawater, bacteria and sunlight.. it breaks down. Worst case is that we end up with plastic sitting on the seabed, bothering nobody but providing the physical structures for increased aquatic life.
Dumping hardware is a very real thing. Fishermen sink boats and tires etc to create habitats for fish; it works very well.
Sometimes – often – throwing things away is much more responsible than recycling.
The great thing is that we have a market – and left to its own devices, the market will sort out what is best recycled, and what is best tossed in a landfill, incinerator, or in the deep blue sea.
There is nothing inherently moral about recycling. If it pays, do it. But don’t distort the market by offering subsidies or compelling private citizens.
From the last time I looked at this topic, aluminum cans were the only thing that makes economic sense to recycle — everything else requires more energy to recycle than to make new.
This is one thing I think we could do differently, from my admittedly lay perspective on the matter. Run everything that comes in through grinders so that the surface area and oxygen exposure increases dramatically before it’s buried to sit until the archaeologists come through.
There is an irrational compulsion to recycle in America today. The motivation is not to make the best possible tradeoffs, but the desire to feel virtuous, coupled with an intense, K through 12 – to the grave system of social false moral indoctrination.
The result is that we “do” recycling regardless of the net harm done–even if the harm is environmental.
We see it most clearly where the citizens of a town are incurring time, labor, and other costs to separate their refuse into recyclables and trash, and then paying extra to the haulers to dump both waste streams into the same landfill. More diesel burned, more airborne emissions, just to name two of the absurdities.
But it is far more pervasive than that.
I understand the compulsion. I have it myself, even though as an engineer and amateur economist I am better educated about the lack of a rational basis for the behavior than most of the public.
Nohaaj
In the past, most recycling streams were containerized and sold to China for processing. China has since ceased to accept almost all recycling streams from the US. The issue is the percentage of contamination in the recycled trash. In effect, we were shipping 30%+ trash along with >70% recyclables to China. China is now demanding product streams with less than 1% contaminants.
Not just the US. Europe has the same problem.
This interesting documentary on garbage in China just popped up in my youtube feed:
I would favor a research program to determine whether or not the desire to feel virtuous is a significant motivation, and if so, whether this desire differs between the pro-recycling and anti-recycling sides.
As to the system of moral indoctrination in K-12, I don’t think there is any need for such research. There is such a system. Conservatives as well as leftists desire such a system, but they differ in the moral values in which they want children indoctrinated.
Aluminum cans are best recycled by flattening, bagging, and selling to a scrap dealer (price varies, but 50 cents/lb is more than 1 cent/can). That the scrap dealers can do this profitably demonstrates that ‘recycling’ this way is worthwhile. Recycling through government (or government-contracted) facilities is less certain.
I know someone who remembered the story about the East Coast garbage barge that couldn’t find a place to unload, and still think we’ve run out of landfill space. Even if we haven’t, the idea of burying things is just . . . morally wrong! Wrong! Everything should be recycled, for the sake of the planet.
As for “Rubbish” the book, and landfill decomposition, I seem to recall that the book discussed a town powered by methane generated by landfill emissions. This also infuriated my friend, who insisted that such things Did. Not. Happen.
I recycle everything, but when I set out the cans I remember this entry from wikipedia: “By mass, aluminium makes up about 8% of the Earth’s crust; it is the third most abundant element after oxygen and silicon and the most abundant metal in the crust.”
So it might be okay if you toss away a can or two.
Blech! Gag! Hurk! I think I would just opt out of giving or receiving, which I suppose would be even better for the environment.
More on topic, way back in the pre-internet dark ages every year for a few weeks in late winter there was smelt dipping at the river near our house. People would dip early in the day and after everyone had gone home in the afternoon my mother would gather all her spawn and we would walk along the river collecting all the bear cans to recycle. I don’t quite remember but I suspect we also cleaned up some random bits of garbage as well. When we took the cans in, we also took in newspapers we had collected. I don’t recall how much money we got for it but after several years of doing this the recycling place started demanding we do all the sorting ourselves and lowered price they were willing to pay to nearly nothing. So we stopped bothering. It wasn’t like we made money before but at least we weren’t paying to do all that work. That was one of my first clues that recycling was not what they claimed.
I’ll bet you are actually pretty happy with that setup.
Nailed it.
Sometimes, if we have extra company or a failed pick-up, the bin is too full for the week’s regular garbage. I didn’t care about recycling until I had it pointed out to me that whatever I put in recycling left more room in the garbage bin. Well, duh. Now I have a good reason to separate and recycle.
Another score for science and reason. Thanks! I wish more people could see this truth.
Great post, James!
(Since I always have to find something contrary, I will say that anything you can recycle at acceptable cost to you (one hopes without being overly influenced by proggie sanctimony) that someone will PAY you for on the open market is worth recycling. Unfortunately, aluminum (as it comes from that crust) is a only minor component of Aluminum, to exaggerate a little.
If you’ve ever seen the front yard of a very large New Zealand aluminum factory, you can’t miss the main ingredient in the aluminum recipe. It’s invisible, but you can see two huge fat cables that run into the building.
In fact, NZ owes its income from aluminum smelting to having plenty of mines for that ingredient (they are called hydropower plants, and they are up in the Alps of the South Island). Not to mention the minor ingredient: they also have Brisbane a quick boat ride away, where alumina is produced. Brisbane is in turn blessed by sharing a continent with lots of big holes full of bauxite.