Is recycling just a PC woo woo?

Shane Costello

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A newspaper article I read recently raised a few points on the commonly presumed benefits of recycling. Does recycling actually deliver real and tangible benefits for the environment, or can it be, as the article claimed, in fact harmful?

Take recycling of paper products for instance. What's the point? Trees are a renewable resource, and paper is produced (unless I'm mistaken) from plantation grown trees. No danger to the rainforest as far as I can see. Is the process of paper recycling itself damaging to the environment? How much energy is required to recycle paper, and does the recycling process produce toxic by-products? Ditto glass recycling.

So is recycling just another eco-myth, on par with the supposed benefits of organic farming or a chemical induced silent spring?
 
it takes more energy to turn recycled paper into "new" paper than to turn trees into paper.

it's time consuming.

trucks have to haul those bundles of paper all around town (polluting the air in the process).

the paper companies plant trees to replace the ones they chop down.

paper breaks down readily in landfills.

I think recycling paper is nonsense. It doesnt make financial or environmental sense. (as opposed to aluminum recycling which is worthwhile)
 
It makes sense for some things, aluminum, for example, maybe steel. But paper, no way. Landfilling used paper is better all around than recycling.
 
Some recycling is woo-woo, some is not.

Recycling aluminum is definitely not. Smelting existing aluminum takes considerably less energy than the electrolysis of bauxite. And aluminum is aluminum. Not much alloying to confuse the issue.

When recycling paper, plastic, scrap ferrous metal, and glass there is a trade off. The recycled product is of lower quality, but useful enough for some purposes.

But the demand for the recycled product might not match supply in either direction, depending on circumstances. This has to be taken into account when making regulations.

For example, a regulation requiring cardboard to be made of recycled paper is reasonable.

Strict garbage sorting laws as a cure-all for our environmental ills (as is done in Chicago) is woo-woo.
 
Ferrous metals and other metals have been recycled for centuries now. Glass has been recycled for MANY centuries. The amount of energy required to sort and process recycled material is roughly equivalent to obtaining them from raw materials, NOT counting the cost and effort of mining, refining and transporting the raw material.

Paper recycling depends on the quality of the paper product being recycled, the quantities involved, and the end-product in mind. For example, news-sheet is already low-grade product, is voluminous, can be easily recycled, but the resulting product quality is still low - you won't be making laser printer paper out of news-sheet. But you CAN make cardboard and packing products with it, which require no bleaching or refinement of the source material, and is therefore easier, cheaper and more environmentally friendly to do than making white laser-print paper. That is, it's a potential economic prospect.

Sorting of garbage for recycling can get WAY too silly at times, but there is little reason not to separate recyclable material from unrecyclable. The only issue would be if there is no efficient infrastructure in place to use this to advantage.
 
Dittohead to Zep.

How cheap is landfill? I know if I take a load of stuff to the tip, it costs a small fortune. Landfill doesn't grow on trees. Sure you can transport it to a new landfill, but try opening a new landfill in economical transport distance to a population centre.

Councils are not just looking at the paper recycled, they are looking at the whole cost to them. For councils, garbage is a major cost, and it gets passed back to us in the form of rates.

Much of the anti-recycling info comes from the economic conservatives who use this example as part of an all round attack on any form of conservation. Guilt by association, etc. The real agenda is that nothing should be done to impinge on economic interests by conservation considerations.
 
Originally posted by HarryKeogh

paper breaks down readily in landfills.
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Maybe it depends somewhat on what form the paper is in, but I've heard claims that stuff like magazines and telephone books are practically eternal in landfills (not enough air circulation between layers to facilitate decomposition).

Originally posted by a_unique_person

Landfill doesn't grow on trees....

Councils are not just looking at the paper recycled, they are looking at the whole cost to them.
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There it is.

Whether recycling is an important environmental issue, it can make good economic sense -- especially if the material is presorted by the consumer (er... the producer, I guess it is).
 
Zep said:
Ferrous metals and other metals have been recycled for centuries now. Glass has been recycled for MANY centuries.
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I know that. The question to me is whether strict garbage sorting laws are of any use.

Chicago has gone crazy!

Maybe you don't know what it's like having to buy different color (plastic!) bags? For the sanitation department (otherwise known as the garbagemen)?

Sorting your garbage, OK soda cans and old magazines are easy. So are bottles. Not much scrap ferrous metals.

I have been cited for including metal with glass for disposing of burned out lightbulbs. First offense no punishment. The burned out lightbulbs are now accumulating in my closet.

It's getting ridiculous!
 
Abdul Alhazred said:


I know that. The question to me is whether strict garbage sorting laws are of any use.

Chicago has gone crazy!

Maybe you don't know what it's like having to buy different color (plastic!) bags? For the sanitation department (otherwise known as the garbagemen)?

Sorting your garbage, OK soda cans and old magazines are easy. So are bottles. Not much scrap ferrous metals.

I have been cited for including metal with glass for disposing of burned out lightbulbs. First offense no punishment. The burned out lightbulbs are now accumulating in my closet.

It's getting ridiculous!
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So why not start a business recycling used lightbulbs? :) C'mon! Lightbulbs blow by the millions daily in Chicago alone I'll bet, so it's not like there's going to be a shortage of product AVAILABLE! The glass can be sold back to the glass people, the metal to the scrap-metal people - make the bucks there.

You could employ some otherwise dead-end streetkids to bust the lightbulbs, and put glass in one bin and metal in another. A few of them could tour the city doing pickups. All you would need to invest in are some metal mail gloves (like butchers use), a few hammers, big bins for storage and transport, and some decent advertising.

You KNOW this makes sense!!! :D
 
Is there information available to tell us about the whole-life costs of recycling? I worry about not the CO2 emitted by the lorry collecting my recyclables but the energy and resource costs of that lorry's own manufacture. I've heard that wind farms fail under that test: they can't repay the energy taken to make the windmills themselves. And no I'm not one of the NIMBY's objecting to a wind farm on a hill next to me. I quite like them, but none of the 'greening' of our economy makes sense unless energy and resource loops are genuinely being closed. If it all tracks back to irreplaceable depletion of energy and physical resources then, in the long run, we're still heading downhill as a civilisation.

As a question to come at this from another direction, does anybody know whether the feasibility of maintaining a fully technological society based on 'green' principles has been studied properly and obtained usable answers? The answer to this leads to two possible conclusions. If technological society is compatible with 'greenness' then we should make the necessary changes before it all goes wrong and the opportunity is lost. If technological society is incompatible with 'greenness', then either we have a one-shot opportunity to open the loop and get off the planet working against a ticking clock, or it's back to the farmstead chaps via the tricky transition of a global population collapse.
 
Originally posted by Zep

So why not start a business recycling used lightbulbs? ...
You could employ some otherwise dead-end streetkids to bust the lightbulbs, and put glass in one bin and metal in another.
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I got it. I got it. You set it up like a shooting gallery. Charge 'em a quarter for ten shots with a bb gun, and if they hit ten bulbs they win a prize (worth like a nickel).
 
I object to the term woo-woo in connection with recycling. There are many concepts that are faulty, but that does not make them woo-woo. I think woo-woo should be limited to things that break known physical laws.

That being said, I have no idea what are the cost/benefit of paper recycling. But in Denmark we use very little landfilling. We simply have not enough space for something like that. Most garbage is incinerated, and that may make a different economy for recycling.

In Germany, consumers are asked to sort their garbage in many different kinds, but where I live, normal household garbage is not really sorted (apart from newspapers and glass). In some Danish cities consumers have been asked to sort their garbage into more categories, only to find that the council have ordered the garbagemen to mix it all together again, because recycling was uneconomic! (The consumers were presumed to continue sorting for the case that some day, an economic recycling solution was found).
 
As has been said already, one problem with landfills is that there is not an infinite amount of landfill sites, so anything we can do to reduce the amount of stuff going into the ground is a good thing.

I'd like to see a return to the old deposit system on bottles- milk bottles, beer bottles, lemonade bottles et al always used to have a deposit paid on them. You returned the bottles when you were done with them, got your deposit back (a few pence), and the bottle was returned, washed and reused. That's the best sort of recycling IMHO.
 
richardm said:
As has been said already, one problem with landfills is that there is not an infinite amount of landfill sites, so anything we can do to reduce the amount of stuff going into the ground is a good thing.

I'd like to see a return to the old deposit system on bottles- milk bottles, beer bottles, lemonade bottles et al always used to have a deposit paid on them. You returned the bottles when you were done with them, got your deposit back (a few pence), and the bottle was returned, washed and reused. That's the best sort of recycling IMHO.
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Good call.

On a related topic, I think it's a good idea that supermarkets encourage people to use less plastic bags, or to bring their own bags from home to reuse. I often decline getting a plastic bag when I shop, especially for a single item that will fit in my bag anyway. There are more and more companies charging extra for using them, which is positive.

It's simply pointless using them when there are alternatives. They take up landfill space, and unless I'm mistaken they do cause needless harm to wildlife (having been involved in the treatment of a sick turtle who had eaten several blue shopping bags thinking they were jellyfish, it's pretty sad).

Athon
 
As has been said already, one problem with landfills is that there is not an infinite amount of landfill sites, so anything we can do to reduce the amount of stuff going into the ground is a good thing.
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According to P&T's Bullsh!t episode on recycling, you could landfill a millenium's worth of trash in an area 35 miles by 35 miles.

David
 
davidhorman said:


According to P&T's Bullsh!t episode on recycling, you could landfill a millenium's worth of trash in an area 35 miles by 35 miles.

David
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Reckon we're likely to find one in Britain?
 
Are you nominating Jersey as a suitable area? :D

The original paper/card recycling craze came about precisely because of the deforestation problem. Since all that the paper producers are now using sources which plant at least as much as they take.

There are still deforestation problems, but as far as I know the purposes are not paper production.

To 'de-bunk' recycling as not efficient first one needs to decide whether we are looking at a purely economic or purely environmental argument, or whether we are quantifying environmental cost/benefit in some fiscal way. In environmental terms, we tend to resort to carbon balance equations or energy use equations.

As others have pointed out, most analyses are deficient in missing important parts of the production cycle ... such as the carbon costs of extraction of raw materials or the actual costs of garbage disposal. So, for instance, use of lorries to move paper and card for recycling can only be valid cost in the equation over and above the cost of moving these materials to a landfill or incinerator, and then only if we compare it to the costs of transportation for raw materials in normal paper production.

I wonder if the US situation is different, as large sparsely populated areas may mean landfill is not such an issue? In the UK (especially in the South East) the costs of disposal are rising sharply as councils have to obtain more land to dump junk in.

The problem with newspaper articles like that one is they make their point with lots of questions and show no quality scientific data or studies ... they stop just short of a fallacy of presupposition and shift the burden of proof.

Not that there is necessarily a problem, I'm all for proper cost-benefit justification of things like this, but what is called for is proper analysis not hast generalisations and decisions based on incomplete evidence ... now that would be woo-woo!

I'd heard that wind farm one too ... but lots of things are said about wind farms that are just cooked up by people who don't like them. I'm not suggesting that you fall in that category, BSM .... if your assertion were correct I'd also disagree with them, but I've never seen it properly supported. This starkly contradicts the assertion.

And I also think RichardM makes a good point there !!
 
P&T claim in their show that with the exception of aluminum, recycling has to be subsidized by the govt. to the tune of millions of dollars. It is much more expensive to do and largely unnescessary since landfill space is more than adequate for our needs.

Share and Enjoy - Aaron
 
MacGuffin said:
P&T claim in their show that with the exception of aluminum, recycling has to be subsidized by the govt. to the tune of millions of dollars. It is much more expensive to do and largely unnescessary since landfill space is more than adequate for our needs.

Share and Enjoy - Aaron
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As long as there's Arizona, there's somewhere to dump rubbish. That's not convenient for people outside America, or even in the far reaches of America, though.
 
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