
Recycling is Garbage (1996) - mhb
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/063096-tierney-magazine.html
======
a2tech
When I tell people that digging through our trash at work to recover some
semi-recyclable plastic they're not really saving anything except for
recycling companies bottom line I get looked at like I'm some horrid monster.

Recycling non-rare/poisonous materials is a scam designed to make the general
population think they're helping the Earth while the industries that do the
real polluting can continue on uninterrupted. An improvement of 1-2 mpg in
over the road trucks (semis) will make a vast difference in the amount of road
pollution generated.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
From a money point of view, sure.

But consider the Earth like some large spaceship. Folks are supposed to take
turns cleaning the oxygen recyclers. Somebody says "Hey, I can earn more
imaginary merit points by organizing a birthday party, or 100 other things"

So nobody cleans the oxygen recycler, and they all die.

Recycling is an inevitable outcome of living in a closed-system life-support
system. Like our planet. Its gotta be done, regardless of the micro-
optimizations folks make up to excuse themselves from doing it.

~~~
vectorjohn
I don't know if you read any of the article - it doesn't sound like it - but
I'd be interested to hear your response to some of its claims.

Mainly, sure, Earth is like a space ship, but waste disposal is not like
cleaning the oxygen system. You take all your garbage, bury it in a landfill,
and problem solved. We have nearly limitless space to bury garbage, and when
it comes time, we can bury garbage in old landfill sites.

That is, for anything that isn't rare or hazardous. So what do you have to say
about that? I'm curious because I do recycle all I reasonably can, but it
sounds like that isn't really helpful.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Under the narrow definition of garbage provided (household waste), and using
the system of imaginary points (what is cheaper instead of what costs our
environment more), then sure that's the conclusion the OP came up with. After
endless fables and allegories and precious little actual numbers.

The idea that we cut thousands of acres of wood a year to make paper, yet
somehow the garbage will fit in a smaller space is on the surface
preposterous.

That landfills are any kind of solution is also very debatable. They poison
the area around for generations. My local town, very PC and very educated, has
a massive landfill groundwater plume that destroys wells and makes soil toxic
for 20 miles 'downwind'. Did we do it wrong? Who does it right?

You've heard about the 'plastic continent' circling in the ocean, made of a
soup of plastic waste that's never going to go away? Do we count those
thousands of square miles in the 'landfill equation'?

We have endless space, sure, as long as we're willing to consume it in those
ways. Ecology to burn! We'll never need it, surely. Certainly we won't miss
it, its outside of town and nobody goes there.

~~~
mason240
>You've heard about the 'plastic continent' circling in the ocean, made of a
soup of plastic waste that's never going to go away? Do we count those
thousands of square miles in the 'landfill equation'?

Yes, we have all heard of the extreme hyperbole surrounding it, such as
calling it a "continent."

>The idea that we cut thousands of acres of wood a year to make paper,

Paper has been grown a crop using fast growing, poplar-like trees for decades
now. In fact, we have tens of thousands of acres of paper trees that will
never be harvested because email caused the demand for paper to plummet.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Hyperbole notwithstanding, its an enormous volume of ecology impacted by
garbage. The words exaggerate the mass of the thing (its like 1 piece of
garbage per cubic foot of water) but not the extent of it.

The tree thing was about the space it takes to dispose of it all, not the
cutting of the trees. That a few square miles of landfill will be enough for
1000 years for everybody is a laughable notion.

~~~
vectorjohn
Paper decomposes so fast it's ridiculous to be concerned with the space it
takes up in a landfill. There is nothing to worry about with paper.

Also, "a few square miles of landfill"? Maybe you're talking about a different
country, but the US has such an enormous amount of land with low population
density, we could spend hundreds of square miles on landfill, and you know
what? Landfills aren't permanent! They turn into just land. Land you could use
for: a landfill. It doesn't take an ever increasing amount of landfill to deal
with garbage.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Paper doesn't decompose at all once its covered with soil. Landfills last for
centuries. Archaeologists love digging them up. Read up on it.

------
homulilly
Recycling is popular because, especially in America where we don't even sort
our materials. It provides a zero effort way for people to feel like they're
helping the environment. The only real way to produce less waste is to consume
less and most people aren't interested in actually inconveniencing themselves.

~~~
andallas
"...especially in America where we don't even sort our materials."

I've lived an 7 states from coast to coast, north and south, and in all but 2
we sorted our materials. Just because it doesn't happen where you are from
doesn't mean it's not happening everywhere else.

~~~
homulilly
I'm curious how much sorting is the norm where you've been. Where I've lived
"sorting" recycling has simply been one bin for glass and another for
everything else which barely counts.

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thaddeusmt
A Planet Money recently talked about which items are recyclable, which are
not, and how global economic trends effect them. Like how China buys our
recycled plastic, unless oil prices dip low enough it's cheaper to make new
plastic.

[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/27/395815221/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/27/395815221/episode-613-trash)

Also, this article is from 1996? I'd like to know what has changed (and what
hasn't) in the last 20 years.

~~~
jaderobbins1
Re: article from 1996

That is exactly what I was wondering. It would be awesome to have a follow up
on this!

------
api
The utility of recycling depends a whole lot on the material.

(1) Is the material common?

(2) Is recycling it less energy intensive than mining/refining it?

(3) Is it nasty in a landfill? Does it leak, pollute groundwater, etc.?

Aluminum, batteries, electronics, significant amounts of steel, etc. make a
lot of sense to recycle. In some cases it's quite profitable without any
subsidy. Glass and paper on the other hand, not so much. Paper is an
agricultural product, and glass is mostly SiO2 which is an absurdly common
material (sand).

As usual the truth here is a lot more complex than the sound bites.

~~~
henrikschroder
Moving from Sweden to California, the recycling system here is still
completely bewildering to me, and makes very little sense.

Where I'm from, recycling started by grabbing simple low-hanging fruit.
Newspapers. Aluminium cans. Glass bottles and jars. And it doesn't all go into
one "recycling bin", but each thing is separated. Later, that expanded so you
can now also recycle metal cans, plastic containers and cardboard. If you want
to.

And the default was never landfill, instead all household trash is incinerated
for heat and electricity. Sweden even imports trash to burn! And in the case
people throw the "wrong" things in general trash, the incinerators can handle
it, they're very good at exhaust filtering, and I bet you can even mine the
residue for rare materials.

And that all makes sense to me. I can see the economics of it, and I can see
the environmental impact of sorting. But the California system of one big
"recycling" bin that you're supposed to throw god-knows-what in is completely
opaque to me. How does anything useful come out of that? How much labour is
needed to sort it at the station?

~~~
ZeroGravitas
There's videos on YouTube of "single-stream" MRF facilities. I think Ars
Technica just visited one and did a story on the machines involved. They use
all sorts of cool tech like computer vision to sort flakes of plastic with
tiny jets of air, eddy currents and magnets to sort metal and sonic imploders
to disintegrate glass.

There are people involved to pull out things that would jam the machines, but
generally it's fairly automatable.

Inside New York City’s newest recycling center - Machines use science to
separate a stream of waste into valuable raw materials.

[http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/inside-new-york-
citys...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/inside-new-york-citys-newest-
recycling-center/)

Recycling in the US: An off-again, on-again love affair - It became a booming
industry despite facing a series of intractable tradeoffs.

[http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-
us-a...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/recycling-in-the-us-an-off-
again-on-again-love-affair/)

------
beefman
The first thing to realize is that trash is only a problem by some guilt-
ridden religious argument. Civilization takes its materials from the ground
and it can return them there quite easily. It was John McCarthy who first
convinced me (all my life a recycling crusader) of this.[1]

Recycling therefore only makes sense when its energy balance is positive.
Aluminum and steel are the only materials for which it is, or ever will be.[2]
The process could be greatly simplified by having two bins: "mostly metal" and
"everything else".

[1] [http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/](http://www-
formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/)

[2] And lithium in car batteries. But they're not a municipal issue.

------
Eric_WVGG
If you want the snarkier, video version of this argument: Penn & Teller’s
“Bullshit” episode on recycling — [http://www.sho.com/sho/penn-and-teller-
bullshit/home?episode...](http://www.sho.com/sho/penn-and-teller-
bullshit/home?episodeid=s2/r)

I wasn’t quite convinced, but they make a few cogent points.

the “Straight Dope” rebuttal to the NYT article:
[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2346/is-
recycling-w...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2346/is-recycling-
worth-it) — among his points is that recycling is effectively an experiment.
Twenty years of ensuing data should be regarded before taking anything in the
NYT piece at face value.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Yeah I'm convinced by Penn and Teller of only one thing: they want to be hip
and snarky and sell views. Because their arguments are lazy and mean and
rarely cogent.

------
zo1
Has anyone else noticed the unusually-high level of indoctrination that goes
on regarding recycling/environmentalism in schools? I remember spending
countless hours in school as a small child being taught to "heal the world"
and "green something" or other. Or cartoons: "Captain Planet" anyone? There
were large concerts that were held place at the schools I attended, talking
about the topic, singalongs, etc. And then there were the huge "scary number"
scenarios: "If each person in the world, turned off X for Y time every time
they did B, then we would have _saved_ X,000,000,000 million somethings of C".

I'll leave the discussion of pro/cons regarding recycling et al aside. I am a
tad bit disturbed at how intensely I was bombarded as a child to believe in
these things. I exaggerate a little in my examples, but these things existed
and happened to me, as an innocent blank-slate child.

~~~
ptx
Recycling etc. is tedious and inconvenient (much easier just to ignore it!),
so why would people do it unless society emphatically instills that it's
important?

------
Tharkun
Over here in Belgium, recyclables are sorted by the consumer: glass by colour,
paper, plastic/aluminium drink containers, compostables. Whatever is left is
burnt for power generation. It's not a perfect system, a lot of plastic
especially ends up being burnt. But it's a pretty decent system.

Please don't think that your head-in-the-sand attitude is a good one in any
way. Recycling isn't perfect, but polluting oceans or landfills is a lot
worse. Dead wildlife, toxic sushi, decreased land value are all real problems.

And sure, getting the mileage of your gas guzzling SUVs up by 1mpg would be
nice as well, but please don't delude yourself into removing all personal
responsibility here.

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laurentoget
I wish there was some reliable data to support or refute this argument.

~~~
rgupta1
If we dumped all the trash in your backyard, I'm sure the data would be
obvious ;)

------
ZeroGravitas
Recycling (and the intertwined issue of global warming) are hot button items
for those who believe in unrestrained free markets as they're both widely
popular examples of government interventions into markets.

Luckily the US has lots of political pundits ready to save us from leftist
plots like climate change, recycling and evolution.

------
Animats
It's frustrating. Aluminum is a big win. Steel is a modest win. Paper used to
be a modest win, but with the demise of printed newspapers, it's not any more.
Cardboard can be recycled, but each time it goes around, the fibers get
shorter and it becomes more fragile. Glass unsorted by color is not too
useful.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Amusing: around here, aluminum cans go to the local steel recycling plant.
Carloads of cans are dumped into the molten steel vat, to precipitate out
sulphur. Then the aluminum and sulphur is poured off and hauled to the
landfill as slag.

So, its recycling, sort of. And it goes for a useful purpose. But its not new
aluminum.

