Does recycling even do anything?

Post Reply New Topic

Does recycling even do anything?

It creates jobs.

I've gotten so used to recycling that I dont even think about why I do it. I just do bottles and cans and not all that other junk.

Yes. Go read up on strip mining, greenhouse gas emissions over tar sands, oil spills, deforestation, child labor in electronics dumps, water contamination from electronics dumps...there's a lot of environmental degradation that doesn't happen when you don't have to keep yanking raw materials out of the earth and when you dispose of what you've already got responsibly.

Recycling of aluminum and other metals is cost-effective, which is why private companies were doing it for profit before governments got involved. Recycling of plastic, cardboard etc. is generally not cost-effective, meaning that it consumes more resources than it saves.

Every other week, nice people show up in a half-million-dollar truck in order to collect fifty cents' worth of plastic and cardboard. (We rarely have any metal for them.) I try to have something for them to take away; it makes them feel important and it reduces the amount of trash I need to fit into our single city-provided bin.

"Not cost-effective" and "consumes more resources than it saves" are two different things, if by "resources" you mean "natural resources". Resource-extracting industries are heavily subsidized. Recycling plastic means not pulling more petroleum out of the ground and refining it, with all the attendant direct & environmental costs. Including oil spills, GHG emissions, etc.

Unfortunately, it also consumes quite a lot of energy. Around here, that means pulling more coal out of the ground and burning it, with all the attendant direct and environmental costs. And all those trucks and treatment plants and people have to be paid for, which means sucking money out of the productive part of the economy and sending it somewhere that produces very little.

You could build a simple still, in your basement, which would allow you to convert your urine back into drinkable, usable water. It wouldn't even cost that much money to build and operate, and it would reduce both the amount of clean water you consume and the amount of waste water you produce. Why don't you? Because it would be icky, of course, but also, unless you're trying to live on the Moon, it just wouldn't be an effective use of your time and energy.

You make it sound so Keynesian.

Even if you don't believe in any of the environmental scare tactics being promoted, it makes perfect sense to use recyclable materials whenever possible.

This is what happens when you don't shove your local govt along to more environmentally responsible practices. There are non-fossil fuels.

Paying people to do the recycling means you recognize the costs of using these items. Keeping the place where you live in good shape costs money. Despoilation costs much less, in the short term. A great deal more in the long term.

an article looking at cost/benefit

http://environment.about.com/od/recycli ... s_cost.htm


When recycling costs less than disposal, it is cost-effective.

However (according to the article) New York City discovered that recycling was actually costing them more than disposal for plastic and glass so they stopped doing it. But then the last NYC landfill closed (became full?) and the cost of hauling to more distant landfills made recycling the less expensive option so they resumed it.

You have to look at all the costs and benefits of both disposing and recycling. On the surface, it seems that recycling would require double the personnel/equipment because there is now a whole new fleet of trucks that need to run in addition to the conventional trash trucks. But the conventional trash trucks have to go out to wherever the dump is and pay whatever the dump charges, and dumps fill up. So that becomes an added cost as it did for NYC.

But then there's the cost of extraction. When something is recycled, it takes energy to convert it back into useable materials. When something isn't recycled, there is the cost both of disposing of the old thing (paid by the city) and the cost of extracting fresh materials from the earth to make a new thing (paid by the company making the thing and ultimately by the consumer). It may seem or even be the same financially, just paid by different people, but ultimately it is more expensive collectively to extract fresh materials from the earth because those materials are finite and require more and more energy to extract the more we have already used. Space within the earth is a resource too, as NYC found when they ran out and had to pay more for distant space to dispose of trash.

There is hope.



Some of the waste and cost of recycling is due to doing it inefficiently. The more we do it, the more effectively we learn how to do it. This would apply to converting recyclable waste back into materials. With practice and technological refinement, we'll get better and better at recovering materials. This in contrast to extracting new materials from the earth which will get harder and harder as those materials run out. I think recycling is best in the long run since it lets us use the same materials over and over, but that true payoff may not come for decades. We are in the starting phase right now and are very inefficient. I think it is best to do recycling now and get good and efficient at it because it takes so long to develop efficiency. If we wait until we actually have run out of new materials, we will be screwed. It takes decades to get good at this (which we are in the middle of doing) so we need to already be good at it by the time the new materials run out. And they will.

Disposal space within the earth is also a dwindeling resource that we have not yet figured out how to recycle. But there is hope there too.


http://science.howstuffworks.com/enviro ... ndfill.htm


The article goes on to describe various bacterial species that eat specific types of trash. In some cases, the digestion products they convert the trash into are new materials in their own right. The bacteria could be the next wave of recycling. The hoped for end game is that they turn our landfills back into space by turning the trash within back into materials we can use. That would be great!



Exciting stuff.