I enjoyed this:
As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. “If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to confront,” says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. “Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?”
I particularly enjoyed the observation that if you rinse your plastic bottle with hot water before you put it in the proper bin, you may have just negated the value of reusing the plastic!
And this is fun:
To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.
Really, people, we aren't running out of landfills. And we never will. This belief comes up every so often, and despite the idiocy of the notion many people will believe it.
My recycling is limited to cans and bottles--because Michigan has a deposit on them. This makes sense as the people who collect discarded bottles and cans during a home football game demonstrate. Nobody needs to make "green jobs" to clean up the empties. People do it voluntarily and take them to stores for deposits.
I'd probably even dump paper and cardboard into the proper bin if the recyclers weren't so darned annoying in their religious fervor for mindlessly recycling everything they have in the belief that it makes up for their ski trip via jet to Colorado and in fact shows they are a virtuous person--in contrast to people like me, of course.
Although I'd compare carbon footprints--which seems to be important to them--with any one of the annoying set and see just who is more planet friendly. And no purchased "offsets" allowed--that's cheating.
Anyway, I participate in the local municipal single-stream waste disposal project. I hear it is very popular in Japan. (With a hat tip on the latter to Penn and Teller. Language warning.)
