The Cons Of Recycling-00-5120

By Author: chuck
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One likes to think that by doing their part and recycling their household waste, they're providing a great benefit to society, but how much truth does this statement hold? Think of recycling newspaper for example. By doing so you save precious trees that provide clean oxygen and cut down on carbon emissions from the equipment used to do the job, but trees are renewable and don't pose a threat of runnning out if new ones are planted immediately after harvest. The gas you save and more is spent on the hauling of the newspaper to the refinery plant, and as you know, gas is not renewable! Glass is made from sand, and we have copious amounts of that. Commonly used metals like iron and aluminum come from the earths crust making up 14 percent of its total composition. Now lets look at some numbers: In 2007, Britain recycled between 150,000 and 170,000 tons of scrap food and beverage cans amounting to merely two percent of the total waste metal recycled in the UK, the major donators being steel and metal industries accounting for 70 percent.

The act of recycling is an expensive procedure as well including collection, ...
... processing and transportation costs, all of which require oil or gas in some way. Capitol investments for storage and container costs as well as equipment costs are required, and then labor fees kick in. To store anything in mass quantities, which would be required to make recycling useful, one would need warehouses and more labor costs to run them. Some materials might require a specific condition to be safely recycled and therefor will require recycling fees, more money. With materials like plastic, it can only be recycled so many times before it becomes too polluted and unusable, and what do you do with it after that? Incinerate it, letting off more harmful emissions into our atmosphere? Put it in the ground so it can pollute our drinking water? A great writer once said that man is the only species that knowingly pollutes the water it in turn drinks from. Plastic is already a by-product of oil, eventually there will be no more and what then? We rely on plastic for everything.

On a side note, does anyone know how recycling came to be? In 1987, a trash barge, the Mobro 4000, came up with the idea to take trash from a New York dump site, and dump it in Louisiana to save money. Along the way they tried dumping it in North Carolina, but they didn't want it, so this barge floated up and down the east coast for 6 weeks looking for a cheap place to off their load. Throughout all this, the media reared their ugly head with accusations leading to the assumption that we were running out of landfills and would eventually be consumed in our own garbage. After the media had its way the idea, the EPA wrote an article with the statement "recycling is absolutely vital", and with the help of former assistant administrator Jay Winston Porter, the idea took off.

So another question you might have is if the alternative to recycling is landfilling, what is the average cost difference between the two? Well, 8 billion dollars per annul is spent with subsidized money to recycle material that we have an over abundance of, and if your unclear as to subsidized money, it consists of taxes that the government takes from you to invest into businesses for the better interest of the people under the grounds that we ultimately don't know what's good for us. 8 billion dollars is a lot of money that could be used to pay scientists to research a more sensible approach to getting our society back on its feet. In the greater picture, recycling isn't getting us anywhere considering it wouldn't need to be recycled had we not made it in the first place. The average landfill dumb rate is between 50-60 dollars per ton, where as the average cost to recycle a ton of garbage is 150 dollars. that's 3 times the difference! I don't want to sound like I'm preaching landfills, more so the point I'm trying to reach is that if we didn't waste all these materials on items created created entirely for the purpose of convenience, we wouldn't have so much garbage to throw away. We don't need plastic bottles for soda or water, soda tastes just as good out of aluminum cans (which are actually the only thing that would be beneficial to recycle) and water filters provide the same crisp taste but save money and landfill space.

The sum of my argument is this: It takes more money than it saves to recycle, its far more harmful for the environment in both the short and long run, and everything we recycle isn't running out any time soon. The real problem is people don't want to put forth any more effort than they have to or go without the convenience of crap like bottled water to take a couple steps towards the greater good. I could write novel on ideas that would benefit far more than recycling with an 8 billion dollar fund.

Written by Jake

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