Is recycling really useful? A frank conversation.

Alright then, I'll just get straight to the point. The most common arguments for recycling are as follows:

-It feels good (sociological benefits) -It saves energy -It saves money -It creates good jobs -It saves trees -It improves the environment (Less pollution and all that) -It saves landfill space

The rebuttal against these points: -It saves energy: It doesn't. In order to recycle, you need to transport the recyclables to a recycling plant, and it costs $150 to transport a ton of recyclable trash to a recycling plant compared to $50 to just dump it in a landfill. It takes more energy to recycle than it is just to make something new.

-It saves money: Partially true. You can fill good about recycling aluminum cans, but people are already doing that before the recycling movement even exists. There is real money in recycling aluminum cans, it takes less money to recycle aluminum cans than it does to dig out aluminum and make aluminum cans, and homeless people were already doing it even before the recycling movement. You don't have to trick people into recycling aluminum cans. Recycling just about everything else is, however, not saving money. You can create better quality stuff starting from scratch (and its cheaper to boot) than you can create by recycling. In fact, the US subsidizes its recycling industry with $8 billion dollars worth of tax payer money, and if there is real economic benefit in recycling then people will profit will recycling and the subsidy wouldn't be necessary. The fact is there would not be any recycling industry without the subsidies.

-It creates good jobs: Since there is no real economic benefit in recycling, to argue that recycling creates good jobs makes no more sense than to hire these people to trim my yard with toe nail clippers. The jobs created by the recycling industry are make believe, fake jobs that amount to nothing but digging and filling ditches. Hell, if you want to increase demand, just give these people money and be done with it.

-It saves trees: Look, people grow potatoes so that they can make French fries, and people grow trees so that they can make paper. The amount of trees from 1920 has tripled, so we definitely aren't running out of trees. Believe it or not, the best way to increase the amount of trees is to increase the demand for paper so that more trees are grown to meet the demand. Even more stupidly, recycling paper is bad for the environment. You need to transport the used paper, which creates pollution, then shred it, which creates more pollution, and then de-ink and bleach the paper, which creates an unrecyclable bio-hazardous chemical sludge, and then ship it back for selling, creating more pollution. Hell, it's better for the environment to just burn the paper.

-It improves the environment: No, it doesn't. It doesn't save energy, since it's cheaper not to recycle the price mechanism dictates that we aren't running out of resources, and it's a polluting, wasteful activity. See the arguments above.

-It saves landfill space: A 38x38km landfill 200 feet deep can take in all US trash for 1000 years. There is no landfill crises. Most of the perception that there is a landfill crises is mostly due to media hysteria.

-It feels good to recycle (sociological benefits): I concede this point, since studies have already confirmed that recycling indeed does feel good. But if you want to feel good for no good reason, maybe heroin is for you.

So, in conclusion, there is no actual environmental or economic benefits in recycling. The question is then, why recycle at all?

Works cited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZTrJi9l3CM (Penn & Teller Bullshit Recycling episode)

and other sources.

This is actually an interesting conversation, though I wish it could be expanded to other green energy ideas. I mean look at incandescent light bulbs versus florescent light bulbs. On the one hand, the florescent light bulbs save on energy and waste. On the other, incandescent light bulbs are much easier to dispose of because florescent light bulbs contain possibly hazardous mercury vapor. In fact, many electronic devices like computers and cellphones have hazardous materials and require recycling by law.

Wizard Needs Food Badly

LED bulbs. They last decades, use even LESS power than flors, and are safe to dispose of.

They cost alot more, of course, but are well worth it in the long run.

I'm baaaaaaack

Aluminum is far from the only metal that gets recycled. If you know where to find things like brass and bronze you can make boatloads more money than with aluminum cans. Which suggest to me that there is indeed money to be saved in recycling the metals we already have available; digging out and refining these materials costs a whole lot, and recycling saves on those costs.

Also, transportation costs; those exist in both recycling and in digging the stuff up raw. So I wouldn't really count that as a loss or a gain in this argument.

This reminds me of a couple of shows I've seen on this, actually. Older cars end up getting recycled because taking something that's not broken off a junked car is a hell of a lot less expensive than just making the thing new. People make money just by having the cars sit in a lot and letting people come in and pick out engine parts and other things like hood ornaments and doors. After that, they send it off to get cubed and melted down into usable materials again. Given the money to be made in the car industry already, there's certainly a thriving business in recycling the old car bits. Another show, a little more general, shows that things like old tires get put into making new tires or sometimes shoes.

Interestingly, even old bricks get recycled! There's a business that thrives on collecting old bricks that aren't broken after old buildings get demolished, and sending them off to other building projects. Apparently people like a)how the old bricks look because of things like patina, b) there's a lot of cases where making or buying new bricks really is more expensive. And a lot of those aluminum cans? Are going into houses now, replacing wood as the skeletal structure of the houses in question. This apparently leads to sturdier houses.

So yeah, there is money to be made in recycling, so long as you know where you're marketing the specific product. Which pretty much goes for everything.

I'd have to discount anything that says it's always better to make things brand new, though. For one, we're not having a landfill crisis in large part because we're recycling. And we've got more trees than ever in large part because of environmentalist efforts to ensure that more trees are planted. (Also, I'm not exactly sure how you would increase demand for paper specifically, but even then it doesn't mean that it would increase the number of trees over all, just the number of trees being farmed for products.) Anyway, if we never re-used or recycled any of these things we'd be facing a crisis currently. It's about preventing those thing, not letting waste run amok until we do have a problem.

Regarding subsidies; there's issues with government subsidies in general. That's pretty it's own issue, and everyone wishes that government would cut wasteful ones. I don't really consider a subsidy for recycling programs to be a wasteful one, though.

I thought the point of recycling wasn't so much that it's cheaper in the short term as that in the long term, we're eventually going to run out of materials, and also that accumulating massive landfills isn't all that sustainable.

Also, mining (and other methods of production) causes problems of its own that might make us want to do less of it even if it is cheaper. For example, mining is royally messing up the water table in some places in Australia, leading to poisoning of lakes.

In terms of other green energy, it might be interesting to discuss how 'green' they really are - for example, and eco-friendly shampoo bottle that I saw that claimed it was greener because the bottle was made of corn or something instead of crude oil. Is that off-topic?

Be not afraid...

There is one way wood gets recycled efficiently, and that is from old buildings.

Now, don't get me wrong; it's expensive and time-consuming to do it. But in a good many cases re-purposing these old beams is the only way to get sticks of those dimensions. Because the trees used to get those huge beams cannot be cut down anymore. "Barnwood", as its referred to, is actually big business in the timber field.

Wood lasts a hell of a long time when its properly taken care of, and when one purpose is done it is often quite possible to put a piece of it to another purpose. Especially because when it ages it takes on a unique look that is not possible to attain any other way. People pay top dollar for this product; I know, I've helped to craft and sell it.

Paper recycling irritates me, because it hasn't really worked out so well. Which is ironic, because the dumb hippies who live around where I do short-stroke recycling and hate guys who work in my industry...when we've done more for sustainable forestry than any recycling plant.

EDIT: @Loni: This is why I'm totally for recycling metals. Getting them out of the earth is expensive and dangerous (to say nothing of the pollution quotient); we ought to get as much mileage out of what we dig up as we can. However...wood is a sustainable resource. you plant trees, wait a while and cut them down. It's like any other sort of farming.

edited 2nd Mar '12 9:14:33 PM by drunkscriblerian

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

@Drunk: Yeah, I agree about wood, as long as it's farmed on plantations and not old-growth forest. The wood is soaking up carbon from the atmosphere as well, which you'd think would be a good thing.

Be not afraid...

You also have to be careful saying you have "more trees" than before. Not a hell of a lot of them are old-growth anymore — they're mostly stringy fenceposts, and you'll need several more of them to make up for the timber, habitat, water retention, shade, and carbon consumption of a big tree.

Just looking outside my house, I see three hillsides that in the last 20 years or so have gone from solid forest to solid dirt.

edited 2nd Mar '12 9:26:45 PM by Pykrete

@forest rape: to be sure, rampant clear-cutting is a pretty big problem. But one thing the tree-huggers don't want to acknowledge...trees grow. You can plant them, leave them alone for a while, come back and cut them...wash, rinse and repeat, you've got yourself a product.

Also, Glu-Lam *

technology has largely ended the need to cut down big trees to get big beams, at least for structural applications. Especially because the end result is much more predictable than solid-sawn timbers.

Humans need to build structures. I say, let us build them out of something that can be grown rather than a finite resource that must be dug out of the earth...at a great risk to those who do it, and great damage to the world around us.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Debatable. You can't make flat statements on cost without back up, nor can you make flat statements about how much it will cost, unless you look at the geography and other costs. However, you should look at them before deciding if you need to build a recycling plant closer to reduce the cost. Transportation costs are far from static. Energy cost is dependent on material and several other factors. For instance, aluminum is very cheap to recycle, but things like motor oil are expensive*

.

As for the economic cost, it isn't bad as long as you set it up properly. If you're depending on dirty hippies for support, you've fucked up somewhere when planning your business.

Fight smart, not fair.

Not only are you right about recycling (in most cases), a LOT of industries marketed as "ecologically sound" are anything but. You could add hybrid cars to this list, because constructing the batteries used by the car requires lithium and other rare earth metals (whose extraction from the ground is highly toxic to nearby river systems), and the energy that goes into making the batteries about equals out the energy that you save on gasoline.

Then there's wind power, which gives you no net carbon gain, because welding all the parts together is done with coal power, and in the 20 year lifetime of a windmill between construction and transportation costs the windmill runs at a net carbon gain, not sink. Plus it is hazardous to migratory bats and birds. Not to mention the idea that carbon dioxide is dangerous is a bunch of bunk. Carbon dioxide is not the Earth's primary greenhouse gas, methane is, so really the ones to blame are the cattle industry and natural gas pipelines. Not to mention that it would be oh so easy to sequester carbon dioxide if we'd just stop clearcutting the rainforest for farmland (again, you are right about the lumber industry being wrongfully blamed for deforestation - its ignorant farmers in the third world who are chopping down trees without realizing just how bad rainforest soil really is for farmland. It is an irony that companies that plant trees - in other words, practice forest reclaimation and thus sequester carbon - are being blamed for deforestation).

Ethanol would be good if they didn't go the "harvest plants as the seed material" route, and instead used landfill and liquid waste. But since they do harvest plants, it is encouraging destruction of previously pristine habitats, like marshlands, which are being converted into algae farms.

The only time that recycling is really worth it is when you recycle such things as electronics and batteries - the precious rare-earth metals can net a nice profit, and cut down on the amount of strip mining we have to do. But plenty of companies have drop off bins for used cellphone batteries and will accept old laptops (even wipe the harddrive for you), you don't need some door to door recycling scheme. Plastics will also eventually be collected in this way - as oil runs low, plastic will start to become more and more precious.

@OP:

- Penn and Teller say so.

So? They're not the experts. You have to take their advice with a grain of salt too.

- It doesn't save energy.

The point of recycling is not to save energy. It costs energy to purify and make the raw material reusable. The point is to save those raw materials. We don't have an infinite amount, you know.

On a related note, apparently air-based energy generator can break down CO 2 (link). It costs more energy to do so. But why do it? It eliminates CO 2 (a problematic greenhouse gas) and returns it to base materials.

- It creates fake jobs.

Honestly, tell that to politicians that use "this creates jobs" as a counterargument against anything... I honestly think jobs aren't ends-meet, but, oh well. Even if the jobs are not as effective as people want them to be, they do have benefits, so they should stay.

- It doesn't save trees.

Good point there. Trees aren't grown just for cutting down, though. They're also there for ecology and environment control, and mass-cutting trees tends to be a bad thing.

- It doesn't improve the environment.

I think it's not really about improving the environment anyway. At least, it only handles one aspect of it, waste management and recovery.

About price: I think even if recycling is more cost-effective, new paper will still be sold cheap, because of the way the consumerist market works.

- Landfill space gain is negligible.

Maybe. There is an additional problem besides space. The waste, after being compressed and all, can leak underneath and cause problems. This is especially a concern if there are valuable aquifers below. Water is after all an important resource to recycle.

Eventually you're going to have a lot of trash and waste that's just that - waste. It's useless. We don't want a random garbled mess of waste. We want to make use of the material we have.

---

Recycling is a bit overrated, but there's no need to end the practice when you have a sustainable habit for it.

Now using Trivialis handle.

I think we should address the issue that the OP thinks that recycling is supposed to be end all answer to the environmentalist issues facing us.

Which it's not; it's just one part of the answer. It's cheaper and more environmentally friendly to recycle, but doing only that is just going to end up in failure. That's not to say that we should stop doing it, it's just that it's something that everyone can do without having to change their lifestyle very much, so it's pretty easy to get everyone to participate in this one activity.

As for companies that aren't as environmentally friendly, that feeds into the separate issue of corruption in big businesses that are pretty much running rampant. Which basically calls for more transparency in business practices regarding their environmental policies and stricter enforcement of the government set policies. And also rewards for doing so; carrot and stick approach, I guess.

Take the politics out of the science and do a serious cost-benefit analysis, I say.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Well I have to say that I find the studies indicating that recycling is not helpful as very dubious.

All the countries that have extensive recycling programs based it on scientific study, not on political games. Notice how the more science-minded Canada, Europe, Japan and China all recycle a lot but USA and so on do not.

Plus, the analysis given in the OP adds all sorts of costs to the recycling program and none to the "new" materials. Ever consider that it costs $150 (I'll just take that as a given) to transport materials to a recycling plant, but something such as aluminum is shipped in from Africa? Americans get a lot of copper and iron from the Canadian shield. A lot of American new lumber comes from Canada after restrictions put in place for cutting forests in the USA.

Creating new glass is problematic. If it were cheaper to use new wine bottles, for instance, why do wineries always ask for their bottles back? Or why do beer companies ask for their bottles back? These are purely business decisions, they were not forced by the government. So, at the very least, glass recycling appears to be better than producing new glass.

For hybrid cars, the problem is that oil is running out. Recycling and reuse is about resource management of items that we have a finite amount of. We can't just keep burning oil as an energy source when we need it for more important products such as plastic. So when you talk about adding some cost to an item instead of just using a particular resource, evades the entire purpose. We are running out of oil, so we build products that use less oil. The point isn't to take a short-term view and say, gasoline is cheap now, let's keep burning it without worry.

edited 2nd Mar '12 11:15:25 PM by breadloaf

We've had bottle return since before my dad was alive, so I think its safe to say it works pretty well. Refilling a bottle costs a fuck of a lot less than making a new bottle to put unhealthy beverages in.

Same goes for metal recycling; that's existed for a good long while as well. I think paper recycling is the white elephant in the room here.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Well, the issue with forest replanting is the politics surrounding it. Lumber companies want to make money as fast as possible and aren't willing to wait the 20 years for a hardwood tree to grow and so they keep replanting faster softwood tress. But those aren't the trees of the forest they cut down, so they end up putting the wrong trees in the local ecosystem. If the government were serious about forest management, they'd lay the crack down whip on forest companies OR just charge them a higher crown fee for cutting trees and have government workers run a proper replanting program, paid for by taxation the industry or lumber sales.

I'm not sure how much more helpful recycling paper is, as I've not seen studies, but Canada has been doing it since before I was born.

Several provinces have already moved ahead and banned incandescent, and while fluorescent isn't perfect, the energy saved by using fluorescent has been so enormous, it's hard to say anything bad about them. My province is having serious trouble trying with energy production because hydroelectricity spots have basically run out and nuclear is the only option but it isn't cheap. Right now, every megawatt saved counts, especially since population growth due to immigration is very high, controlling growing electricity demands is becoming impossible.

edited 2nd Mar '12 11:31:11 PM by breadloaf

Argument: Recycling is economically beneficial. Counter argument: It is not. Mostly, at least. Countries, even 'scientifically minded' ones subsidize their recycling industries with tons of money (scientifically minded does not always equate to economically minded). The worst is probably the US, who uses $8 billion dollars to subsidize the recycling industry. Oh, and it's also a net loss of government money. But hell, the US government has a habit of spending like crazy, such as spending $300 billion to subsidize the production of crops that don't sell very well. Recycling metal cans and glass bottles make sense, but they will survive without any government subsidies. People are already doing that before government subsidies, you don't have to trick people into recycling them. Everything else that needs subsidies to work, from paper to plastic, is a net loss. If we lump all kinds of recycling together, it translates to a net loss, despite the fact that at least some recycling works. On average, it makes more sense to make new stuff than it is to recycle.

Argument: Were running out of resources. Counter Argument: No, we're not. If we are, the price mechanism will immediately raise prices for the stuff that is expensive. Interestingly, copper and tin actually (after adjusted by inflation) got cheaper from 1950. Also, note that when inflation adjusted, the trend in the price of oil actually goes downwards instead of upwards. So, no, we are not running out of resources. The law of economics state that it is nearly impossible, and even if we do, the law of economics state that it would barely be noticed. See the TV Tropes page on economics (although TV Tropes might not be very accurate).

@bread: forestry is one place where Canada is worse than the US. Canada has been called the "Brazil of the North" for its forestry practices...and I do know a lot of cheap lumber comes from there.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Um, the fact that we're running out of resources is a fact. A physical one. Economics itself is about allocation of scarce, not infinite, resources.

I agree that the source of the argument seems one-sided: what you said mainly focuses on paper, which isn't the only thing. Also, just because there are bad arguments for recycling doesn't mean the procedure itself is invalid. You have to see the possibility of a better justification for it.

Now using Trivialis handle.

Recycling is for the sake of reducing material loss through time. The fact that we humans are increasing makes those materials all the more precious than last decade. This much is true. So you can't possibly pass recycling as not' useful

What profit is it to a man, when he gains his money, but loses his internet? Anonymous 16:26 I believe...

Uh... yes, unrenewable materials are running out. How fast they are doing that is up for debate, but not that it's happening.

What do you think, the Earth just makes more of these minerals when we dig them out of the ground? They're not plants. They don't grow. Once we dig up the last seam of aluminium, or steel, or whatever, that is it. That day may be far off, but it's going to come eventually if we keep going like we are.

Be not afraid...

QFT.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

It is happening for unrecyclables. Case in point : FUEL

What profit is it to a man, when he gains his money, but loses his internet? Anonymous 16:26 I believe...

If resources are indeed running out, the prices of said resources after adjusted by inflation will go up. Exactly the opposite has happened. Also, if resources are indeed running out, the percentage increase in (nominal) price of said resources will outpace the (nominal) increase in wages. Again, exactly the opposite has happened. Frankly, to say that resources are running out discounts the fact that we probably will be able to mine resources in space soon and that even if we do run out of resources, we would barely feel its effects (because an increase in price will encourage efficiency an the exploration of alternatives). Until recycling is cheaper than producing stuff from scratch, investing in recycling is a net loss to society if you include the opportunity cost of producing new stuff.