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Posted to rec.food.cooking
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Recycling?
Ophelia wrote:
> "GM" wrote in message
> ...
>
> https://fee.org/articles/america-fin...-doesn-t-work/
>
> America Finally Admits Recycling Doesnt Work
>
> Its time to admit the recycling mania is a giant placebo.
>
> Thursday, March 21, 2019
>
> by Jon Miltimore
>
> "A couple of years ago, after sending my five-year-old daughter off to
> school, she came home reciting the same cheerful environmental mantra I was
> taught in elementary school.
>
> €śReduce, reuse, recycle,€ť she beamed, proud to show off a bit of rote
> learning.
>
> The moral virtue of recycling is rarely questioned in the United States. It
> has been ingrained into the American psyche over several decades. On a
> recent trip to the Caribbean, my friends wife exhibited nervous guilt while
> collecting empty soda, water, and beer bottles destined for the trash since
> our resort offered no recycling bins.
>
> €śI feel terrible throwing these into garbage,€ť she said, wearing a pained
> look on her face.
>
> I didnt have the heart to tell her that there was a good chance the bottles
> she was recycling back in the States were ending up just like the ones on
> the Caribbean island we were visiting.
>
>
> Difficult Implementation
>
> As Discover magazine pointed out a decade ago, recycling is tricky business.
> A 2010 Columbia University study found that just 16.5 percent of the plastic
> collected by the New York Department of Sanitation was €śrecyclable.€ť
>
> €śThis results in nearly half of the plastics collected being landfilled,€ť
> researchers concluded.
>
> Since that time, things have only gotten worse. Over the weekend, The New
> York Times ran a story detailing how hundreds of cities across the country
> are abandoning recycling efforts.
>
> 'Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents
> recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In
> Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the
> terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a
> landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona
> faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their
> curbside program was not working and suspended it. Those are just three of
> the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled
> recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to
> huge price increases.'
>
> One reason for this is that China, perhaps the largest buyer of US
> recyclables, stopped accepting them in 2018. Other countries, such as
> Thailand and India, have increased imports, but not in sufficient tonnage to
> alleviate the mounting costs cities are facing.
>
> €śWe are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,€ť Fiona Ma,
> the treasurer of California, told the Times.
>
> Cost is the key word. Like any activity or service, recycling is an economic
> activity. The dirty little secret is that the benefits of recycling have
> always been dubious for some time.
>
> €śRecycling has been dysfunctional for a long time,€ť Mitch Hedlund, executive
> director of Recycle Across America, told The Times.
>
>
> Has Recycling Always Been An Illusion?
>
> How long? Perhaps from the very beginning. Nearly a quarter century ago,
> Lawrence Reed wrote about the growing fad of recycling, which state and
> local governments were pursuing€”mostly through mandates, naturally€”with a
> religious-like fervor. There were numerous problems with the approach, he
> observed.
>
> The fact is that sometimes recycling makes sense and sometimes it doesnt.
> In the legislative rush to pass recycling mandates, state and local
> governments should pause to consider the science and the economics of every
> proposition. Often, bad ideas are worse than none at all and can produce
> lasting damage if they are enshrined in law. Simply demanding that something
> be recycled can be disruptive of markets and it does not guarantee that
> recycling that makes either economic or environmental sense will even occur.
>
> If only lawmakers had heeded Mr. Reeds advice, or that of John Tierney, who
> offered similar guidance in The Times the following year.
>
> Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that
> recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their
> conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes make sense--for some
> materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option
> is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since
> there's no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false
> alarm), there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative.
>
> Thats economics, you say. What about the environment? Well, the
> environmental benefits of recycling are far from clear. For starters, as
> Popular Mechanics noted a few years ago, the idea that we dont have
> sufficient space to safely store trash is untrue.
>
> 'According to one calculation, all the garbage produced in the U.S. for the
> next 1000 years could fit into a landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across
> on each side--not that big (unless you happen to live in the neighborhood).
> Or put another way, it would take another 20 years to run through the
> landfills that the U.S. has already built. So the notion that we're running
> out of landfill space--the original impetus for the recycling boom--turns
> out to have been a red herring.'
>
>
> Recycling Efforts Backfire and Create Waste Themselves
>
> And then there are the energy and resources that go into recycling. How much
> water do Americans spend annually recycling items that end up in a landfill?
> How much fuel is spent deploying fleets of barges and trucks across highways
> and oceans, carrying tons of garbage to be processed at facilities that
> belch their own emissions?
>
> The data on this front is thin, and results on the environmental
> effectiveness of recycling vary based on the material being recycled. Yet
> all of this presumes the recyclables are not being cleaned and shipped only
> to be buried in a landfill, like so much of it is today. This, Mises would,
> say is planned chaos, the inevitable result of central planners making
> decisions instead of consumers through free markets.
>
> Most market economists, Reed points out, €śby nature, philosophy, and
> experience€ť a bunch skeptical of centrally planned schemes that supplant
> choice, were wise to the dynamics of recycling from the beginning.
>
> As engineer and author Richard Fulmer wrote in 2016,
>
> 'Recycling resources costs resources. For instance, old newsprint must be
> collected, transported, and processed. This requires trucks, which must be
> manufactured and fueled, and recycling plants, which must be constructed and
> powered.
>
> All this also produces pollution €“ from the factories that build the trucks
> and from the fuel burned to power them, and from the factories that produce
> the components to build and construct the recycling plant and from the fuel
> burned to power the plant. If companies can make a profit recycling paper,
> then we can be confident that more resources are saved than are used.
> However, if recycling is mandated by law, we have no such assurance.
>
> Again, economics is the key.'
>
> Its time to admit the recycling mania is a giant placebo. It makes people
> feel good, but the idea that it improves the condition of humans or the
> planet is highly dubious.
>
> Its taken three decades, but the actions of hundreds of US cities suggest
> Americans are finally willing to entertain the idea that recycling is not a
> moral or legal imperative...."
>
> </>
>
> Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting
> has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox
> News, and the Washington Times.
>
> Reach him at .
>
> </>
>
> ==
>
> Well I understand that, but I still like to be able to take my garbage to
> the garbage centre every week to let them sort it all out  )
Luv, If I were you I'd send my rubbish to Janet UK...!!!
;-D
Best
Greg
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