‘GET EXCITED about Single Stream!’’ trills the flyer that comes from Brookline Town Hall. A letter from the commissioner of public works hails the “exciting change’’ beginning next month, when town residents will no longer be required to sort their recyclable trash into separate blue bins — one for paper, the other for cans, bottles, and plastic containers. Instead recyclables will all go into 64-gallon “toters,’’ which will be emptied at curbside on trash day.
But like much else about this religion, the claims aren't actually true. You just get the excitement of a different kind of sorting.
But it isn't about the impact on our environment at all:
“There is not a community curbside recycling program in the United States that covers its cost,’’ says Jay Lehr, science director at the Heartland Institute and author of a handbook on environmental science. They exist primarily to make people “feel warm and fuzzy about what they are doing for the environment.’’
But if recycling household trash makes everyone feel warm and fuzzy, why does it have to be compulsory? Mandatory recycling programs “force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard,’’ writes Clemson University economist Daniel K. Benjamin. “On balance, recycling programs lower our wealth.’’ Now whose idea of exciting is that?
I won't be singing with the choir on this one. These nuts believe that recycling is an indulgence that lets them jet off to ski in Colorado guilt-free. I feel no need to go along with their religious nonsense. I swear to God, I'm getting really close to intepretive dance in protest.
Now go and emit no more.
