Myths Associated with Recycling

Politicians have brainwashed us to the point of disbelief: we now see only the mist surrounding recycling and its falsehoods instead of seeing the actual truth. Recycling proponents would have us believe in the grand "benefits" instead of seeing the truths; the fact is that recycling uses more energy and resources for processing and separation than just not recycling. The sad truth is that recycling costs more than just a few extra dollars; the environmental consequences are well hidden behind all of the inaccuracies we've grown up with.

Simply put, we have nearly 20 years worth of landfill space that can be used to dispose of the non-hazardous trash that we place in the garbage can on a daily basis. Our resources, contrary to popularly held beliefs, are not in as much jeopardy as our leaders have been saying for the past 30 years. Right now in our country, the most daunting obstacle that plastic and glass recycling faces is that of an efficient, affordable separation system. We have been directly misled by corporations that are "eco-friendly" or "green" to believe that some of the common products we use are harmful to the environment, when it has been proven that there are more environmental dangers in producing their goods.

Everyone that was alive in the 80's is old enough to remember the huge constituency for recycling screaming that we were running out of landfills and landfill capacity to house our recyclable waste. What our political leaders at the time didn't add to that was that they were only counting the large number of smaller landfills shutting down because of mergers with larger waste companies with more landfill space. In 2001, the nation's landfills could support an additional 18 years of garbage; this is over 25% more than just 10 years before. There are regions of our country that are given many financial incentives to open landfills, only one is the fact that landfills are a profitable industry. If a state is given federal funding to produce landfill space, why would someone see a problem with that state generating more income from it? The land needed to dispose of all of America's garbage for the next 100 years is only 10 miles square.

Another argument that is given to the people of the world in regards to recycling is that all of our resources are thinning, we need to preserve as much of them as we can. Well, if we look at legislation and environmental protection laws and statutes, we will be very surprised at what is found. Our federal government has laws in place that enforce the planting of trees, not only that, the number of new tree growth compared with that of depletion is twenty times greater. That's correct, for every tree that is cut down, twenty trees that are planted. The sheer percentage of tree growth has skyrocketed in Russia, Europe, and North America. We have all heard that we will run out of petroleum products within the next few years, we're never given an exact number, at least lately. The Department of the Interior has told us three times that we'll run out in fifteen years, sadly, every time this is said, they've been wrong. For all of our petroleum usage increases, the measurements of petroleum reserves don't get smaller, they get bigger. That means that every time we hear them tell us we're running out of oil, about double what we've used has been found.

Tip of the iceberg; separating recyclable goods is one of the easiest steps in recycling. Absolutely not true, yet. Most of the plastic and a lot of the metals we usually place in the green recycling bins don't even end up at a recycling facility. The absolute honest part of this is that, normally it ends up in a landfill because of the sorting problems that are being encountered. There aren't any fancy sorters that measure weight, volume, capacity, material, or density of the object, if we want recycling to be sorted; it has to be done by hand by one of the employees of the waste management companies. Only if luck is involved, because the sad truth is that most of the recycling programs currently in existence do not take any sort of plastic at all. The multitudes of waste management companies involved in recycling take aluminum, the profit is always there to recycle that and resell it to companies with little to no material degradation.

While we are looking at the lapse in information regarding recycling practices, let's take a look at market impacting information in general. There was a big deal made many years ago regarding the use of Styrofoam, or polystyrene, containers and the potential hazards that surrounded it. The fact is that polystyrene is both cheaper and more recyclable than its paperboard competitors, why then, were the fast food restaurants pressured into using the paperboard containers? Because the leaders pushing for recycling only told one side of the story to the consumers forcing them to strong arm the chain fast food restaurants to pay more for the paperboard replacements. We also never heard that polystyrene uses 30% less energy to produce, resulting in 46% less air pollution and 42% less water pollution. This is at the bottom line: paper cups consume 33 grams of wood and use 28 percent more petroleum in its manufacture than an entire polystyrene cup. In addition, paper cup require 36 times more chemicals (it weighs seven times more) and takes about 12 times as much steam, 36 times as much electricity and twice as much cooling water to make, compared to its polystyrene counterpart. And, about 580 times as much waste water, 10 to 100 times the residual effluents of pollutants, and three times the air emission pollutants are produced in making the paper cup.

Looking back on the amount of publicity recycling has gotten over the years, no person can fathom the sheer amount of pollution that "Earth Day" caused. There are many images in existence today showing the thermal exhaust from the thousands of musical artists and politicians involved in that gloriously over rated attempt at ecological awareness. The basis for recycling is an admirable attempt at waste awareness and if we were given the entire argument from both sides, we would have still made the attempt to find a better solution than just bold-faced lies and misleading statements. In the end, recycling proponents would deny all of the evidence and try to get us to believe the benefits outweigh the consequences and that recycling is not was wasteful and harmful to us and our environment than what it really is.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4290631.html

http://www.perc.org/pdf/ps28.pdf

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/recycling-myths/