Is recycling really useful? A frank conversation.

Except that landfills are carefully designed to prevent decay of the stuff that goes into them. So the paper you throw in the trash that goes to the landfill doesn't biodegrade at all. Read the last sentence of the first paragraph of this article. It's not an exaggeration.

Yeah, decay tends to stink. Mulching the stuff is much more effective. Hell, toss it in with the generic biodegradable junk.

What about the chemicals that go into producing paper? You know, bleaches, dyes, that sort of thing.

Hm, I've never been sure on that stuff.

I think it's a bit daft to just say all paper or whatever should or should not be recycled, burned etc. The answer lies somewhere in the middle, recycling what's easy and cheap to get at (and if we're literally throwing this stuff away, it's hundreds of miles closer than suitable forest land and you can practically recycle it at home...) and using new trees for the rest. That's pretty much what most countries are already doing.

You could argue that we should be recycling more or less, or that only businesses that produce large volumes of easily recycled waste (paper shredders etc.) should be doing it, but to say that paper is worthless to recycle for any reason is to ignore that at a certain point it's way easier to do than get it from forests.

And that's probably where the arguer's reasons come into play. If you don't want to faff about seperating your rubbish you can argue against residential recycling. If you hate 'big government' making you do stuff you can argue that it should only be voluntary and/or for profit only. And if you want to make an entertainment show that comes to snappy and juicily controversial conclusions regardless of facts you can say almost all recycling is teh evil

Actually, burning paper makes more sense if you ask me. The landfill at the end of that episode used the methane from decomposition to power homes; but some trash can be burned directly, and I see little apparent reason why burning it directly would necessarily be less efficient than burning the gases that result from decomposition, especially for something that burns as rapidly as paper. We already burn fossil fuels to boil water to turn turbines; if we burn paper for the same purpose, we could probably use less fossil fuel. Not much less, but presumably every little bit helps.

edited 10th Mar '12 9:40:06 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

Of course, a community of individuals reusing things is generally more effective than a recycling program. I tend to reuse scratch paper and such things.

You would want smart reusing, though. You don't want to reuse those cheap plastic $1 water bottles. Those are just for shipping water, not for using them as bottles.

Hidden Faced Matt: Indeed. According to Green Lantern there's no clear environmental winner between incinerating and recycling paper, though both are definitely better than landfilling it. Probably depends on how much any given region lacks in energy or space to grow trees.

Abstractematics: 'tis true. And single-use water bottles start becoming poisonous if used repeatedly.

We burn a lot of our trash here on Oahu. Fuel for the powerplants, as importing crude oil and processing it is more expensive.

It works, in a sense. I'd have to look into it, but I'm sure they sort out the safe-to-burn stuff from the don't-burn stuff.

It occurs to me that there may not be much difference in the need for chemicals to recycle paper vs. turning trees into paper. I would like to see some numbers on that. Also there is a big deal about using unbleached paper. I'm sure you've heard companies brag about that.

Doesn't Japan have some kind of special collection for "burnable trash"? Does anyone know how that works?

@Betaalpha, Abstract: Actually, the PET bottles are safe for reuse.

edited 10th Mar '12 1:08:34 PM by DrunkGirlfriend

Thinking on it, I'm not quite comfortable with using aluminum for structural beams in houses. Steel would be fine, but I dislike using a material to support a house if it can be dissolved by a household cleaning agent.