Today my ever present boss was at it again with insightful ideas like “recycling is worse for the environment than not recycling”(I think she read it in a book). So my mission right when I got home was to see if there is any truth to what she said. Is recycling worse for the environment than not recycling at all? This of course comes as a concern to me because I drink a good 4 liters of diet mtn dew/pepsi a day. I kill a lot of two liter bottles, but always make sure to recycle them on campus because my apt. complex just put their recycling bin contents in the trash. I even make bird feeders out of them, I know it sounds awfully gay, but hey, it’s being reused for a good purpose and the house finches and cardinals love it. When looking at recycling we have to take in the whole picture. This doesn’t mean only looking at a plastic bottle and knowing that it will get melted down and reused. Instead, we need to look at the whole process, which includes fuel costs, emissions, and chemical processing as opposed to just putting it under ground somewhere and letting microbes munch on it for the next thousand years. In my quick search for the answers I’ve found conflicting information. Some say it’s good and saves a non-renewable resource, while others say it’s using up more of the resource your trying to save by recycling. Although, plastic does take up an extremely large amount of space in landfills for its weight. One of the problems with recycling is that it’s costly. For companies it’s easier just to make it from a virgin product. However when oil and natural gas prices rise, the demand for recycled plastic does to. Aluminum is much more efficient to recycle than plastic, the most in fact. However, aluminum is also very abundant and easily taken from the earth. So which is worse spending the money on recycling or continuing to mine? Opposition says that because the ore that aluminum is smelted from is so abundant, we shouldn’t worry about recycling. The same goes for plastics, because they’re derived from petroleum, we shouldn’t worry. The theory being that with the price of gas going up it will leave more petroleum in the market for plastic production, because it’s so much cheaper to derive from petroleum than gasoline(although that sounds a bit fishy to me). Paper is another big one. My father is a paper salesman, so I have a bit of an interest in this. His company has an environmental specialist on board, but when dealing with larger paper product producers it’s something that must be hard to manage. Much paper comes from paper farms where the trees are grown specifically for paper use. This is a much better option than going and hacking down forests. However, where these paper farms once were, were actual forests. It could be said that now it isn’t posing much of an environmental risk, but it did at one time, and continues to be a poor ecosystem for native animals. This is especially true in the Southeast U.S. where much of the trees for paper production are grown, not to mention sprawl. Not too far from Wilmington you can see these tree farms. The ones I’ve seen have been owned by International Paper. So does recycling benefit or cause harm to the environment? It’s hard to say. There are pros and cons to both. Recycling saves a material from rotting in a land fill for years. Not to mention the greenhouse gases that landfills produce, like methane. I know a landfill back home was thinking about trying to capture the methane produced and using it to produce power. This doesn’t even touch on the issue that trash isn’t localized. Instead it’s shipped from one place to be buried in another. If people’s trash was buried in their own backyard, I think they’d be a lot more apt to save. However, it also takes energy to put it back into a reusable form. What’s the best answer? Let’s go way back to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Notice how recycle is the last one? REDUCE. If people would just cut back, use things more than once, and be creative about it. I use my paper bags over for things like ripening fruit or just a good cabinet liner. In the end consuming like we do will outweigh any benefits given by recycling. It just promotes the consumer ideology that is so engrained in our heads. We’re going to have to relearn how to live. Cuba is a great example. They get by on so little, but yet manage to make things work with ingenuity and creativity. America doesn’t award those ideals, instead it awards consumers to buy more stuff and make more money in a perpetual cycle that will be our demise. It’s time to wake up and start cutting back, reusing and yes recycling.
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There was a recent news report about all the plastic water bottles that are not being recycled. The fact that so many Americans are drinking bottled water now is having a negative impact because it’s not cost effective to recycle the bottles…plus they are ending up in landfills and using a lot of space.
I’m off to do my part….I’m going out to “play” in my gardens!!
Well said Justin.
The other thing about the little plastic water bottles is that sometimes they travel far and wide to deliver you their “special” water. Like Fiji water, or Artesian water from Norway. The bottles are manufactured in the US or China or wherever, shipped all the way to those countries, bottled, and then shipped back to the US.
Here’s a link with more information:
http://www.container-recycling.org/mediafold/newsarticles/plastic/2006/5-WMW-DownDrain.htm
Another not so surprising feature of living in New Hanover County is the lack of recycling. Everywhere I’ve lived had a recycling program. I had become so used to it that when I moved here the thought of throwing everything away really drove me crazy. I really don’t know how people here can just throw stuff away like that. So I recycle just about everything and my folks bring their stuff over too.
Welcome to dumpnation.
Comment by sirbikes 09.22.07 @ 8:30 pmI agree with you abot the recycling. Back home is the same thing. You separate all your bottles, cans and cardboard and put it out with the trash. Down here the only way it happens is if you do it yourself. No incentive for the lazy folks.
Comment by Earth Walker 09.23.07 @ 9:58 amOne more thing. I think the biggest problem isn’t that people aren’t recycling, because in the end that’s the easy part. It’s the ideology that plastic bottles are a throwaway item. You can reuse plastic bottles over and over. Not to mention the big swirling mass of plastics in the pacific. Plastic should never be a throwaway item. It is pathetic in this day and age that recycling infrastructure is so poor people have to go out of their way to recycle.
Comment by Earth Walker 09.23.07 @ 10:52 amI have to disagree with your comment about recycling at home. While it is true that the trash truck picks up the recyclables….they are not combined with the actual garbage. They are sorted into into separate compartments…and I assume (I realize I’m taking a big risk here) they are then recycled….hmmmm….now you got me thinking….guess I might have to look into this a little further….
Comment by mom 09.23.07 @ 7:24 pmYes, Mother, that is exactly what I said. : )
Comment by Earth Walker 09.23.07 @ 8:49 pmI hate it when you’re right!!!
Comment by mom 09.24.07 @ 3:07 pmNeed more exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Comment by Justin 09.26.07 @ 6:56 pmReturn to www.theearthwalker.com
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That’s the same argument the “wasters” use for everything. You can interpret a lot of information to make it send whatever message you want - for instance, it’s easy to say hybrid vehicles are bad for the environment by assumng a few things, one being that hybrid drivers will drive them more. My experience tells me that isn’t true, as typically anyone willing to spend that kind of money on a vehicle to not contribute so much toward our oil shortage and pollution problem is smart enough to not be a lazy ass who drives everywhere. For the most part, these are intelligent, educated people whose happiness and satisfaction cannot be bought … it takes more than driving just for the sake of driving (kind of like rednecks do with their big trucks and sport cars) to bring satisfaction to these people’s lives. Getting off track there.
My point is this: if you want to take a practice that you do not participate in simply because you are too self-absorbed to make a sacrafice for future generations, chances are you’re ashamed of that and will go to great lengths to justify not doing it. Thus, you have the “recycling is actually worse for the environment” argument. Let me guess - Ann Coulter wrote the book your ignorant boss read that in. Ambiguity can be found in a lot of things, not just text like the Bible, where it is so rampant. Speaking of which, look at the millions of different ways Christians have been able to construe that to say whatever they want it to say. People opposed to caring about the Earth’s future do the same thing, but with other shit. It’s no surprise that the majority of the ones who do this are conservative, Christian, Republicans. They’ve made a lifestyle out of manipulating facts so they say anything that doesn’t call for effort on their part.
You did leave out one elementary principle in the recycling argument: how about all the space in landfills that is not used by recycled products? Yeah, it uses a little bit of resources to break the products down and so forth, but geeze, that’s a small price to pay compared to that much less of our planet being taken up by man’s waste.
Your boss remains a stupid whore in my book. Adult abortion, adult abortion, adult abortion …
Comment by Justin 09.21.07 @ 9:57 pm