For decades, we’ve been told: recycle!
“If we’re not using recycled paper, we’re cutting down more trees!” says Lynn Hoffman, co-president of Eureka Recycling.
Recycling paper (or cardboard) does save trees. Recycling aluminum does save energy. But that’s about it.
The ugly truth is that many “recyclables” sent to recycling plants are never recycled. The worst is plastic. [emphasis, links added]
Even Greenpeace now says, “Plastic recycling is a dead-end street.”
Hoffman often trucks it to a landfill.
Years ago, science writer John Tierney wrote a New York Times Magazine story, “Recycling Is Garbage.” It set a Times record for hate mail.
But what he wrote was true.
“It’s even more true today,” says Tierney in my new video. “Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less.”
It would be smarter to just dump our garbage in landfills.
People think landfills are horrible polluters. But they’re not. Regulations (occasionally, government regulations are useful) make sure today’s landfills have protective barriers so they don’t leak.
Eventually, landfills are turned into good things: ski hills, parks, and golf courses.
But aren’t we running out of landfill space? For years, alarmist media said we were. But that’s not true.
In 1987, the media gave lots of publicity to a garbage barge that traveled thousands of miles trying and failing to find a place to dump its load.
But that barge wasn’t rejected because there was a lack of room. States turned the barge away after hysterical media suggested it contained “infectious waste.” The Environmental Protection Agency later found it was normal garbage.
Landfills have plenty of room for that. In fact, America has more space than we will ever need. Sometimes states and businesses even compete to get our garbage.
“If you think of the United States as a football field,” says Tierney, “all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line.”
Putting garbage in landfills is often much cheaper than recycling. My town would save $340 million a year if it just stopped recycling.
But they won’t, “because people demand it,” says Tierney. “It’s a sacrament of the green religion.”
The religion’s commandments are complex. New York City orders me to: “Place recyclables at the curb between 4 PM and midnight … Rinse plastic containers … Separate paper from plastic, metal, and glass.” Paper must be tied “with twine into bundles no taller than 18 inches,” and so on.
“That’s one reason recycling fails,” says Tierney. “It’s so complicated; people never learn the rules.”
Worse, some recycling is pointless, or harmful.
“If you rinse a plastic bottle in hot water,” Tierney points out, “the net result is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than if you threw it in the garbage.”
Since most plastic can’t be recycled, what’s the environmentalists’ solution now?
“Stop producing it,” says Greenpeace’s John Hocevar.
Lots of environmental groups now want to ban plastic.
That’s just silly. Plastic is useful. Using it often creates fewer emissions than its alternatives. Plastic bags create fewer [emissions] than paper bags.
A metal straw has to be used 150 times before it creates less pollution than a plastic straw.
Environmental groups rarely mention that or how they misled us about recycling year after year.
“It’s appalling that after telling people for three decades to recycle, they don’t even apologize for all the time and money that they wasted,” complains Tierney. “Instead, they have a proposal (banning plastic) that will make life even worse.”
Plastic is not evil. Recycling is no climate savior. When Los Angeles mandated it, they added 400 big noisy garbage trucks.
That creates lots of pollution.
But environmentalists still demand we do things like pick through our trash, and switch from plastic to paper bags that rip. California even banned small plastic shampoo bottles.
“Some of these rules are just so arbitrary and silly,” complains Tierney. “It’s simply a way for greens and some politicians to pretend that they’re saving the planet.”
Read more at Daily Caller
I can still remember when soft drink bottles were glass Coke,Pepsi,7-up Etc. and the trucks were open sided you could buy the big 16 oz glass bottles and turn them in for a dime the first cans were steel and you needed can opener pop tops came later then the all Aluminum cans we have today
The world is missing an opportunity in failing to burn plastic waste for energy generation. Burned at high enough temperatures, the pollutants often seen in burning plastic are incinerated. Those who believe in the climate fraud might object on the bases of the carbon dioxide emitted. However, if it isn’t emitted from burning plastic, other energy sources would be used such as coal and natural gas.
The EDF putting on their stupid commercial IF YOUR NOT RECYCLING YOUR THROWING IT ALL AWAY just as bad as their using Kids to push this Global Warming/Climate Change load of Malarkey
The oil that plastics are derived from took millions of years to compose. Return it to earth and over millions of years it will decompose and be recycled for the next generation of plastic.
Go to the grocery store, hardware or hospital and see how many things are wrapped in plastic. Read Patrick Moore’s book Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. Relax and enjoy the gifts of plastic.