Recycling...Bad for the Enviourment...?

[brady]

Ok, after watching several documentarys, Ben and teller,and reading some intertesting articles on the subject it would apear that recycling is on the whole actualy bad for the enviourment.......

 That is if the basic premis of recycling is to conserve resources by reusing a product..putting it through the mill again and geting someting new out the other end. It would seam that on the whole this is realy not saving anything, aparently for almost everyhting one could want to recycle, it actualy coasts more to recylce it than it would to just make a new one(whatever) from scratch. The added cost comes from Adational trucks to move the material, adational manpower to sort it and handel it, resources nead be put back into the used material to remake it and almost always an inferiour product is turned out in the end, and it consumes more resources to do all this than just making a new one to begine with.

 land Fill's: Part of the initial imputause to recylce, again a common conception is we dont have enough of these, well aparently this is not so, their are lots of land fills and places to put them, and many land fills actualy reclame land that would go to waste anyway, also modern landfils are designed to containe seapage,and collect compustable gasses that in the larger ones are used to generate power, some (or one) big one in Califorinia actualy produces power on such a scale that a small town can be suppled from it.

 Recycling is masivialy subsadised by the federal goverment to the tune of a few Billion a year, this is why it is even doable aparently as their is no real comercial benifit from doing it.

 Aparently alunimum is about the only universaly reclicable material,all others are largely not worth the effort, though apaently some local condations in a few comunitys make glass and a few other materials viable, but these later are the exception and not the rule.


   Some comunitys are actualy forced to recycle, it is not an option for them despite all this, aparently do to federal funding requirments?


 Thoughts?

[Hangtime]

Everything goes in the trash.

If the greenie weenies wanna go dumpster diving to sort my garbage, hey; who am I to deprive 'em of a fun day off from PETA rallies?

[Vulcan]

Doesn't take a genius to work it out. Recycling, the environment, etc, its all smoke and mirrors to some extent. You stop doing one thing and replace it with the "eco" friendly alternative, but the back end workings of creating the alternative create more carnage.

Unfortunately its a result of the Political Correctness of our times. Look at Greenpeace, what a con-job that organisation is, the live off the PC-ness as a profitable corporate entity. Yet what good do they do with the money? Do they research alternative fuel sources? No they change stage crap for the TV camera's.

[Hangtime]

No they change stage crap for the TV camera's.

the french get all the good parts.

[eagl]

In Cambridge they enforced recycling by cutting trash collection from every week to every other week.  They collect compostables and plastic bottles on the alternate weeks.   There's almost no way to go 2 weeks without a trash pickup unless you recycle.  We had a second trashcan (had to be purchased) but either the trash mafia took it one week for some reason or someone stole it.

[Vulcan]

Originally posted by Hangtime
the french get all the good parts.

Oh yeah gotta feel for the frogs when those "nooklear waste is evil" noobs try to ram the ships carrying said waste (whats wrong with that picture!).

[2bighorn]

Depends what are you recycling. Some materials are better suited than others.

Most of the metals are much cheaper to recycle then make them from scratch /ore. Glas recycles well too.
Paper and wood do well in some applications, so do some plastics.

Above examples are based purely on economics and done by certain industries voluntarilly simply because it is much cheaper to do so.

In some cases, recycling is not attractive, simply because the scale is not there yet to be profitable or material in question recycles badly, or technology is not yet available, is often subsidized to the cut off point and often beyond.

Saying that recycling doesn't work, or opposite, saying that recycling is solution to everything, is downright ignorant and based on political bias more than anything else.

Originally posted by brady
Ok, after watching several documentarys, Ben and teller,and reading some intertesting articles on the subject it would apear that recycling is on the whole actualy bad for the enviourment.......

 That is if the basic premis of recycling is to conserve resources by reusing a product..putting it through the mill again and geting someting new out the other end. It would seam that on the whole this is realy not saving anything, aparently for almost everyhting one could want to recycle, it actualy coasts more to recylce it than it would to just make a new one(whatever) from scratch. The added cost comes from Adational trucks to move the material, adational manpower to sort it and handel it, resources nead be put back into the used material to remake it and almost always an inferiour product is turned out in the end, and it consumes more resources to do all this than just making a new one to begine with.

 land Fill's: Part of the initial imputause to recylce, again a common conception is we dont have enough of these, well aparently this is not so, their are lots of land fills and places to put them, and many land fills actualy reclame land that would go to waste anyway, also modern landfils are designed to containe seapage,and collect compustable gasses that in the larger ones are used to generate power, some (or one) big one in Califorinia actualy produces power on such a scale that a small town can be suppled from it.

 Recycling is masivialy subsadised by the federal goverment to the tune of a few Billion a year, this is why it is even doable aparently as their is no real comercial benifit from doing it.

 Aparently alunimum is about the only universaly reclicable material,all others are largely not worth the effort, though apaently some local condations in a few comunitys make glass and a few other materials viable, but these later are the exception and not the rule.


   Some comunitys are actualy forced to recycle, it is not an option for them despite all this, aparently do to federal funding requirments?


 Thoughts?

[Charge]

What 2bighorn said.

-C+

[storch]

Originally posted by Hangtime
Everything goes in the trash.

If the greenie weenies wanna go dumpster diving to sort my garbage, hey; who am I to deprive 'em of a fun day off from PETA rallies?

 sig material right there

[Eagler]

Originally posted by brady
Thoughts?

one
b4 you post to the board..
copy and paste your verbiage into Word, run spell check, select all, copy & paste over your initial post then submit it to the board

[mora]

The benefit of recycling is the reduced amount of waste not profitability. Of course it's not profitable if you have an abudance of cheap crude material.

[Mickey1992]

The number one US export by volume is recycled paper/pulp.  U.S. recovered paper exports totaled 13.9 million tons in 2003.

If you don't recycle your newspaper and carboard, you are filling the landfill with stuff we could be selling overseas.

[Ghosth]

Where do you think all those crushed car bodies go? Back to be smelted down & made into dishwashers.

Steel has been recycled for a LONG long time. And yes its cheaper than smelting out new raw ore.

Same for aluminum.

Glass, biggest problem is people mix it up. So then you end up with either an unatractive color. Or paying people to sort bottles.

Time to bring robotics to the recycleing industry in my opinion.
Heck if they can build cars they can be programed to sort it ALL!

Vegetable waste could be composted (or run through a methane digester)
Cardboard & paper recycle very well. Even a lot of plastics would recycle profitably with todays higher fuel costs.

Just need a cost effective solution for sorting & handling it.

[brady]

Metal- From what I gather acording to the various things I read and watched on documentry's, was largely an iffy thing, a lot of metal that was collected was actualy smeleted down into these odd round balls and shiped off to Mexico and buried in the ground. Copper I know is a very reclicable metal, or at least one worth some coin at the scrap yard.   Alunimum as I mentioned above is easly reclicable, it was the only universal metal (and materal in general) that was realy good to recycle. Most cars are made with Non Steal compontets I belave now days alinumium and plastics compose most of the boddy with some steal aloy in the frame I beelave.

 Papper- While it may well be true that, The number one US export by volume is recycled papper, it is still not nescessarly good for the enviourment to do so. Wouldent it be easer to just grow more pulp? 99% of all papper pulp (unrecycled) in the US comes from Hybride trees grown specificaly for papper, they are fast growing trees cultivated in huge tracts by farmers, no longer is papper pulp made from forsets aparently.

 Rememebring hear that- We recycle to, consume less resources from the planet for any given item or product we want, we trade an old one for a new one, instead of taking the material from the enviourment again to do so. If in doing this we nead to take more from the enviourment to do so than just making a  new one..Why recycle? (Bearing in mind that their is NO real landfill isue, we have plenty of places to dump stuff acoring to what I have read)

 I am not saying we should not recycle, but that we should be smarter about it, dumping all this federal money into it seams silly given how long this has been going on for.

[Mustaine]

i did a paper on this subject in college, about 7 years ago LOL

there is actually 20% MORE fossil fuels used to recycle curbside paper because of the different coatings and inks on it. (industrial printing paper aside, because they can seperate it properly early in the process)

all those plastics, over 150 types can not be recycled together.

i am not going to do all the research i did again.. but basically there are EPA studies showing the economic loss to curbside (residential) recycling, and the fossil fuels used to do it severly outweigh and possible gains.

if recycling was abandoned, there would be an estimated needed 5-10% extra regular garbage pick ups, but the cost savings of not having the seperate pick up's would save tons in gas for the trucks, and there would be 30% less garbage trucks on the road.

not to mention a 25 year old landfill was analyzed by the EPA, and in the official study, a hot dog was more recognizable than a plastic bag. even the bags from 30 years ago (before the new better bio-degradable bags) we deterioating that styrofoam and plastic made up less than 1/2 of 1% of the total volume of the left over garbage in the fill.


if you want to talk industrial raw material recycling, that is a total different conversation, but as far as curb side recycling, i think the case is closed. overall the total environmental and econimic impact data shows it is a wasted effort, completely flawed.