Recycling is rubbish

[Lucy]

From a country with truly free media.


Why recycling is pointless

[hattra]

Penn & Teller - didn't one of them get eaten by his pet tiger - on stage

[Lucy]

I think you will find that was Siegfried and Roy. (or Victor and Rolf !)

[stackpole]

Lucy, are you a real woman or a cross-dresser like nearly all the rest of the women on here? I know at least one of the daleks isn't real either.

[tim123]

I confess that I can't play the Video so am replying sight unseen.

But the problem with things like this is that they treat recycling in isolation.

The producers forget that we have to get rid our waste somehow.

I agree that not making extra waste in the first place would be ideal, but IME most shoppers don't have the aversion to unnecessary packaging that I do, and trying to educate them not to take 15 new bags away each time that they go shopping is like trying to teach a tart to keep her knickers on (and I've chosen that metaphor deliberately).

So what do we do with it?

We are (now) banned by international law from dumping it at sea.
There is uproar from the locals each time someone suggests building a plant to burn it in.
And we don't have an unlimited supply of holes in the ground to fill up with it.

Recycling may not the the panacea that some make it out to be, but ISTM that it is a necessary part of waste removal and that, cost effective or not, we need to do it.

tim

[Lucy]

I’m tempted to ignore you. You might like to look at the post about the declining standards and have a think about your ‘tart’ metaphor.

Looking beyond that the argument isn’t really about recycling it’s about the hyperbole and hype that surrounds it, the nanny state and how some people need to feel guilty. For every person with a reasoned argument there are probably 10, like yourself, who seem to think they know the answers and it is their job to ‘enforce’ the rules and judge others, or a number of ‘consultants’ who made a hell of a lot of money from ill-conceived and inconclusive studies.

You’ve judged me (albeit hidden behind a pathetic ‘metaphor’) and you seem to need to judge those around you. Take care of yourself; take care of what YOU do. What I do is none of your business. If the overuse of ‘shopping bags’ bothers you then DO something about it, start a campaign, start a political party, we do live in a ‘free’ country apparently. Don’t lecture anyone, don’t pretend you have it all sussed. The point Penn & Teller make is that recycling has been a con and the cost of doing outweighs the benefits. It is for the nanny state and people who are silly enough to believe the hype without consideration but want to whinge.

Yes we do have to get rid of waste somehow and the majority of waste decays and degrades quite satisfactorily. There are a number of major distortions nowadays that, if fixed, would deal to the problem - which is a far smaller problem that the scaremongerers claim it to be.

The first step would be to privatise landfills, and require them to be fully user pays. Councils subsidise these and fully subsidise rubbish collection. In some parts of the world, rubbish is only collected from properties if it is in the official rubbish bag (yes people can put smaller ones inside) which is sold at a price to fully recover the cost of collection and landfill use. If everyone had to pay, say £1 to put out rubbish they may think twice. It may mean people put out far more recycling and less rubbish as a result.

The usual counter argument is that fly tipping will increase - well, if you have people who will trash other people's property then the law should step in. It is no reason to fully subsidise dumping rubbish. The fact is this has been done in New Zealand, and there is no more fly tipping than there was before, and landfills no longer cost taxpayers, but make a profit.

Modern landfills can be penalised heavily for leaching or leakage onto neighbouring property and should be. Despite scaremongering, there are plenty of holes for putting rubbish in - remembering rubbish compacts conveniently, once you take away anything organic (only plastics and metals don't, but all food, wood/paper products, fibres do) and crush the air out of things. If you have to ship rubbish further afield to do so, then it is an added cost that you pay when putting rubbish out. If it needs to go to the Sahara to be buried under sand, then so be it. The idea the planet is lacking places to put stuff is so naive - most of Siberia is empty. All of the rubbish for the next five hundred years in the US could fit into a 35 square mile area 200 feet high - the EU would be about the same - hardly a major problem. Think of disused mine shafts (properly sealed) as another possibility.

To say "cost effective or not" we need to do it, is remarkably arrogant. So other people should pay to recycle material that costs more to recycle than produce the raw product? Besides metals, which people willingly recycle (cars and planes are mostly recycled), glass is made from cheap commodities (sand!), paper is entirely renewable and biodegradable, and plastics are cheaper to produce raw than to recover, ship, clean, melt and reuse.

It is an enormous waste of resources to make people pay to do something that is less efficient than the alternative. If recycling was better, it wouldn't need subsidisation. It is about making people feel good, not about a better use of resources.

[tim123]

Sorry Lucy. In no way was my reply directed at you as an individual (or even at all). I most certainly haven't judged you. All I was doing was answering the general point that was made. The person who made it, is completely irrelevent to this.

I can't for the life of me, see how you could have thought anything else. If you start a general discussion on a BB, you get general replies, not personal ones.

And I don't 'believe' that I know 'all' the answers. But I do know that we have to dispose of our waste somehow. Just what is the long term solution if we don't recycle it? Personally, I'd prefer that we burnt it to produce electricity. But it seems that 90% of the population think that this is a bad idea, at least that is the impression one gets whenever there is a proposal to build the necessary infrustructure.

Oh and where was the lecturing? All I did is stated my position, just like (presumably) P&T did.

I don't believe for one minute, the claim that the total cost of recycling costs more than the alternative disposal methods (which is the required test, not the test of: does it return more than it costs). The numbers that are rolled out to 'prove' this, include the cost of collecting and transporting the rubbish, conveniently forgetting that we have to collect and transport it if we don't recycle it.

I can't see that there is an overall 'subsidy' in recycling. ISTM that to believe that there is, is to believe that there is a world wide conspiracy of governments involved. This isn't just a decision made by numpty borough council or even by control freak Bliar. Almost every developed country encourages its citizens to recycle, some have done so for 20+ years. The possibility that many do it far more sucessfully than the UK, just suggest that the UK's implementation is wrong, not that the policy is wrong.

tim

[shaunbhoy]

Lucy, are you "up on blocks" at the moment? You seem very tense and irritable.

[Bagpuss]

"Yes we do have to get rid of waste somehow and the majority of waste decays and degrades quite satisfactorily"

The majority of packaging I come across seems to be plastic, which AFAIK is here for a very long time. When was the last time you purchased something that didn't arrive in tons of packaging most of it is recyclable, but ends up in landfill. How much countryside should we wreck with landfill before it becomes obvious that we don't need to do it?

There seems to be a movement gathering pace who's mantra is if I don't like the ramifications of some issue, be it global warming/ recycling etc. then it doesn't exist/isn't worthy of merit or shouldn't even be considered. It's tweaking the argument to suit the desired outcome, rather than looking at the facts, keeping an open mind and coming to a reasoned conclusion. It's just as bad as PC.

[Lucy]

Sorry Lucy. In no way was my reply directed at you as an individual (or even at all). I most certainly haven't judged you. All I was doing was answering the general point that was made. The person who made it, is completely irrelevent to this.

I can't for the life of me, see how you could have thought anything else. If you start a general discussion on a BB, you get general replies, not personal ones.

And I don't 'believe' that I know 'all' the answers. But I do know that we have to dispose of our waste somehow. Just what is the long term solution if we don't recycle it? Personally, I'd prefer that we burnt it to produce electricity. But it seems that 90% of the population think that this is a bad idea, at least that is the impression one gets whenever there is a proposal to build the necessary infrustructure.

Oh and where was the lecturing? All I did is stated my position, just like (presumably) P&T did.

I don't believe for one minute, the claim that the total cost of recycling costs more than the alternative disposal methods (which is the required test, not the test of: does it return more than it costs). The numbers that are rolled out to 'prove' this, include the cost of collecting and transporting the rubbish, conveniently forgetting that we have to collect and transport it if we don't recycle it.

I can't see that there is an overall 'subsidy' in recycling. ISTM that to believe that there is, is to believe that there is a world wide conspiracy of governments involved. This isn't just a decision made by numpty borough council or even by control freak Bliar. Almost every developed country encourages its citizens to recycle, some have done so for 20+ years. The possibility that many do it far more sucessfully than the UK, just suggest that the UK's implementation is wrong, not that the policy is wrong.

tim

"what is the long term solution if we don't recycle it" Well then go ahead, be self sufficient - do it yourself. The long term solution is that most waste decomposes or compacts and is returned to the environment.

"the claim that the total cost of recycling costs more than the alternative disposal methods" in which case why do local authorities pay for it? The higher cost of recycling comes down to duplication of transport (you have two sets of people and vehicles doing the job, when one larger vehicle can collect it all), separating out the recyclable material (a highly unpleasant and risky btask, so unpleasant some councils export it to developing countries for them to do), then throwing away the material which IS useless. Useless because it is contaminated. Then after sorting, it gets transported again to a place that specialises in recycling that particular material - which then gets sold and transported again to a producer to use it. In other words, recycling can involve a lot of labour and energy that can also be used to produce the raw product.

Recycling is a perfectly economically rational behaviour when it is high value materials - when it is not, it is just a mantra with little justification. If it were so good, plastics, paper and glass producers would actively collect such materials to recycle. However you have subsidised landfills and "free" rubbish collection in the UK, so when people don't meet the cost of rubbish collection, too much rubbish is generated.

I am not for or against recycling, just against it being seen as inherent good and worthwhile to the extent that councils make it compulsory or use taxpayers' money to pay for the uneconomic collection and reuse of raw materials, while at the same time refusing to charge people for rubbish collection. It is treated as a religion - people are fined and prosecuted for not recycling! Who have they harmed?? No other free country takes such a fascist approach to it.

Let recycling stack up against commercially operated landfills and rubbish collection, and may it remain, change or fall.


And Tim, please do tell me what your 'tart' metaphor was all about as I obviously have completely misunderstood.