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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
Rational understanding of what is cost and environmentally effective makes perfect sense. I certainly feel a moral desire to not be a filthy pig to our planet. But some things use more energy to recycle than any good can come from it. Glass is mainly silica, which is sand. Sand is one of the most common entities that form Earth. Recycling it is costly. Finding alternative secondary uses for old glass makes perfect sense…sometimes. I was once invited to join a capital venture using recycled glass to make countertops. It sounded very promising until I went to the plant to observe the process and view the end product. I was shocked to walk through the plant and see silica dust thick in the air from the grinding process. The plant workers weren’t even wearing protective breathing apparatus, nor was I offered one as I roamed through the plant. The final product wasn’t even very pretty. Maybe they have made improvements, but I had to pass on any personal involvement. Just the liability for the health of the plant workers scared the heck out of me. At home we recycle. The amount of acceptable recycled products has increased dramatically, it seems to me. I have often wondered how the tubs of foam containers, aluminum foil, paper of a billion different types, and now even steel cans, get sorted out. Is this all just a con? In the meantime, landfills have emerged as beautiful recreation areas and golf courses. I think there is still much to figure out about our waste.
Fusion Reactors will solve all these problems. Plasma Torch is the ultimate! Break it all down into elements!
The thing about aluminum is that it is very hard (and energy intensive) to convert bauxite to useable metal. Once it has been “freed,” it requires much less effort to melt down and reuse. I read somewhere that you are save the equivalent energy of 1/2 a can of gasoline for every can you recycle.
Iron is about half as common as aluminum but about 1/30th of the value a scrap. Why is that? Iron ore is much less energy intensive to convert to useable metal. Iron is a lot easier to recover from the trash stream-all you need is a magnet.
It just requires you to be more creative. I make my own aromatic bitters and vodka infusions and my wife knits. We also go to Goodwill and the Salvation Army to find stuff. We usually get books in return-believe it or not, they are just as easy to read used.
Again, I think we should just dump waste glass into the ocean. If nothing else, it will make the beaches pretty.
Thanks for the links. The article about Lowell is a perfect illustration of what recycling has become–virtue signaling and make-work. Petty bureaucrats scrutinizing your every action and penalizing you for not following picayune regulations. All of in service of a program that is useless at best and may actually harm the environment at worst. A great microcosm of government as a whole.
This is a great example of why I feel so virtuous when I recycle.
Pounds and pounds of glass that would have been
is now
Creating jobs for Americans, jobs which can’t be stolen from us by the Chinese. Just one more example of why we need government to create jobs.
Users of aluminum want your cans because melting down refined aluminum is much less expensive, less energy intensive, than breaking it out of ore. This is also why aluminum ore smelters are located where the cheapest electricity is available.
From the Texas study I linked above:
Can someone make sense of this?
Try this article.
As you can tell, in high school, I was a real social butterfly.
I’ve researched it. My sample size was 100% of the cohort for whom reliable data is available on motives. Here are my results.
“Do I recycle stuff when I know it’s probably stupid because I am self-righteous?”
I would say “no” if I had to guess. Or maybe “yes”. No, I think it is just a simple compulsive need to “not waste”. Not a self-righteous thing, though not rational, either. (For what it’s worth, the progUI’s overwhelmingly give “saving the planet” as their motive: effectively, they’ve already told us that self-righteousness is their motive.)
“Does this desire differ between your pro-recycling and anti-recycling sides?”
Absolutely. My anti-recycling side is completely objective and completely non-ideological: Market-driven recycling’s good. Coercive recycling is good when and only when the social benefits exceed the costs of massive stupidity, cold indifference to humanity, resistance to reform, and corruption that comes built-in with government action.
“Do Conservatives as well as leftists desire such a system, but differ in the moral values in which they want children indoctrinated?”
Yep.
Heh…me too! I learned it at my mother’s knee. But here is how we “recycled” on the farm.
Farming: the ultimate recycling experience. As a result of this “Use It Up, Wear It Out, Make It Do, Or Do Without” attitude was that I learned how to live with very little cash, and waste. It was a valuable lesson to learn, and I passed it on to my children, who have been passing it on to their children.
that life style sounds sooo… sustainable. You were uber cool, before uber was cool.
In Gunther’s defense, he is tasked with the mandated, by law required, recycling stream process. He does not have the clout to change law, therefore, he must rationally provide the best method of implementing it. He does his best at minimizing the cost impact to the overall community. The task is monumental. You are required by law to pick up and process recycling, from a community where some are willing, most comply, and few are diligent enough (can you say “CDO” – which, BTW, is the alphabetically correct form of “OCD”, but I digress) to provide an uncontaminated recycling stream. So the education and enforcement procedures (fines) are enacted to “tax” the citizens who are responsible for excess contamination – and increased processing costs. The goal of the fines is to enlighten the citizens to learn and obey a law. An additional interesting aside: straws are not recyclable, which might be part of the recent panic and outrage directed at the simple and innocuous straw.
I’m not criticizing him. He’s obviously working hard and I’m sure he’s doing the best job he can. When I was a cop I had to enforce all the laws, not just the ones I agreed with. The trouble is with the elitists who institute these asinine policies, then delegate the actual work to poor schmucks like him. Then when the market changes, China stops accepting stuff, transportation costs get too high and all the useless garbage starts piling up in storage, it’s because of the incompetent underlings and stupid citizens who don’t know how to
do socialismrecycle correctly.Ah:
Thanks for the article @josepluma and your input @cliffordbrown. I am surprised but not encouraged. The article says they are still studying the effects of ground glass dust. I would expect they will find something worthy of litigation before long.
Thanks for the info on aluminum – didn’t know that.
You are welcome.
You must have grown up in Oregon.
Washington. But not far from the border.
Picking up beer cans is a lot more renumerative in Oregon.
It was 25-30 years ago. I don’t know how much has changed since then.