# Is recycling BS? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 10, 2008, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481 "2008-06-10T19:28:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Do\_Not\_Taunt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/do_not_taunt/32/2968_2.png) [@Do\_Not\_Taunt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Do_Not_Taunt)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2008, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/61 "2008-06-13T03:34:14Z")
[QUOTE=robby] Where do you see a math error? It wasn’t 35 square miles. It was 35 miles square (i.e. 35 miles by 35 miles, or 1,225 square miles). This was for the “1,000 year landfill,” and at 12.25 times bigger than the 10 mile by 10 mile square landfill, (which was supposed to be for the “100-year landfill”), the math appears to be reasonable, within an order of magnitude. [/QUOTE] :smack: Ah, yes, as you probably figured out, I interpreted “miles square” to be “square miles”. I find that wording to be a little ambiguous, but some brief googling makes it seem to be a standard, albeit archaic, usage. Thanks for pointing this out to me. > [@](#): > > None of these numbers included ancillary structures and access roads, transportation to the landfill, operating costs, or landfill closure and monitoring. Besides, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money. 😉 Well, so say we add those things in, or at least the things that are specific to the landfill (ie, not transportation). What are we looking at - a 2x increase? Less? More? ---
**Author:** ![Balthisar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/balthisar/32/2825_2.png) [@Balthisar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balthisar)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2008, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/62 "2008-06-13T12:19:36Z")
[QUOTE=Do Not Taunt] :smack: Ah, yes, as you probably figured out, I interpreted “miles square” to be “square miles”. I find that wording to be a little ambiguous, but some brief googling makes it seem to be a standard, albeit archaic, usage. [/QUOTE] I’ve just got to ask, which web site indicated that this was archaic usage? While not everyday speech merely for the fact that we don’t speak about area daily, it’s something that I use frequent enough. I’m not saying, “hey, you should have known better!,” but rather asking sincerely, where the heck is that mentioned as being archaic? ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2008, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/63 "2008-06-13T12:30:53Z")
I don’t think ‘miles square’ is so much archaic as just rather uncommon - how often are things discussed that are: –A couple of miles or more on a side –Square ? I must admit, if someone conversationally said “ten miles square” to me, I’d be in doubt whether they really meant something that is square, and ten miles on a side, or whether they’d mis-spoken and were talking about an area of unspecified shape, covering ten square miles. It’s semantically unambiguous, only if you’re sure the person means what they say. ---
**Author:** ![Do\_Not\_Taunt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/do_not_taunt/32/2968_2.png) [@Do\_Not\_Taunt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Do_Not_Taunt)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2008, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/64 "2008-06-13T16:11:53Z")
[QUOTE=Balthisar] I’ve just got to ask, which web site indicated that this was archaic usage? While not everyday speech merely for the fact that we don’t speak about area daily, it’s something that I use frequent enough. I’m not saying, “hey, you should have known better!,” but rather asking sincerely, where the heck is that mentioned as being archaic? [/QUOTE] > **[Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Questions](https://www.answers.com/redirectSearch?query=square-mile)** > > Answers is the place to go to get the answers you need and to ask the questions you want If I wanted to talk about a piece of land which was literally square with a side length of 10 miles, I would almost certainly say “10 miles by 10 miles.” It’s strange to me that “10 miles square”, which seems like it could mean either “10 mi^2” or “(10 mi)^2” seems to unambiguously mean the latter. But English is a weird language - I’m happy to chalk this up to a usage I was simply unfamiliar with.. ---
**Author:** ![HookerChemical](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/278dde/32.png) [@HookerChemical](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HookerChemical)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2008, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/65 "2008-06-13T16:56:59Z")
[QUOTE=Cicero] Also with landfills- isn’t there a by product of methane production to offset the maintenance costs? [/QUOTE] I’m still reading the thread, but it doesn’t look like this question has been answered yet. I work for a major environmental and solid waste consulting company and have worked on feasibility studies for energy projects for landfills. Energy projects frequently have to be subsidized by grants from the government or power company to turn a profit. The generators and maintenance are’t cheap. The backbreaker is frequently the cost of running utilities to the facility. Landfills are frequently located large distances from residential areas, for reasons anybody who lives downwind can attest to, so some only utilize enough gas to generate power or run the heaters at the facility. An additional problem of using landfill gas as pipeline gas is that it contains all kinds of trace toxins that aren’t in natural gas. California essentially bans landfill gas from injection to natural gas pipelines because of health concerns. It costs a lot of money to purify the gas of the toxic components. There is some movement in the energy community to increase “green” energy portfolios, which is making landfill gas to energy projects more appealing, so there may be some increase in energy projects. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2008, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/66 "2008-06-13T17:15:37Z")
[QUOTE=HookerChemical] An additional problem of using landfill gas as pipeline gas is that it contains all kinds of trace toxins that aren’t in natural gas. California essentially bans landfill gas from injection to natural gas pipelines because of health concerns. It costs a lot of money to purify the gas of the toxic components. [/QUOTE] I thought natural gas was toxic anyway…? ---
**Author:** ![HookerChemical](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/278dde/32.png) [@HookerChemical](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HookerChemical)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2008, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/67 "2008-06-13T17:23:19Z")
Disclosure: I work for a solid waste consulting company. The solid waste industry, the recycling industry, and the incineration industry are not always cordial. That said, these are my opiniions and judgments, and I consider myself a moderate environmentalist. I want to add one point I haven’t seen addressed so far: geography often has a major influence on the benefit or recycling. Here in California, San Francisco is a very dense population that has a great potential for recycling. Yreka, a much smaller city in the much less densely populated northern portion of the state doesn’t have as much potential. Waste and recycling hauling cost money. In high population areas, the landfill is probably far away and costs a lot of money, but recycling can be done on a large scale without as much hauling. In wide open areas, the landfill is likely much closer but it’s difficult to develop an economy of scale for recycling without large hauling distances. Other than that, I think **robby** has hit the major points. Plasma gassification is experimental, but it shows promise. Incinerators are polluting. Good luck permitting one in California. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2008, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/68 "2008-06-13T17:35:48Z")
[QUOTE=Colophon] The benefit is that you can keep doing it indefinitely, as long as you have an energy source – and energy, whatever our current crises, is going to keep coming at us a lot faster than we can use it thanks to the sun. If you don’t recycle, then you are constantly using up raw materials, of which there is a finite supply. [/QUOTE] And if they get in sufficiently short supply, the “landfills” become “mines”. It’s not as if throwing stuff away makes it vanish. ---
**Author:** ![flodnak](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/838e76/32.png) [@flodnak](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flodnak)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2008, 10:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/69 "2008-06-14T10:09:04Z")
[QUOTE=JoseB] Chiming in from the Netherlands, my local supermarket gives me a discount ticket when I take plastic soda bottles to be recycled, to the tune of 0.25 EUR per bottle. That discount ticket is valid for purchases from the supermarket itself. When you buy the bottles, depending on the place, some will charge you the 0.25 EUR per bottle, but others won’t. Judicious buying in one place and redeeming at another can lead to a net gain when you do your shopping. [/QUOTE] Here in Troll Country, nearly all bottles and cans used for beverages have a deposit mark on them. You pay 1 krone for containers of 0.5l or less, 2.50 kr for larger containers. When the bottles are empty, you feed them into a machine at any supermarket that looks for the mark, and gives you a redemption slip for the amount of deposit you have paid. You can choose to use the slip to pay for purchases at that store, or to take it to a cashier and get cash back. All bottles and cans so marked can be returned to all stores with the deposit-return machine, which is essentially all food stores. The store does not need to carry the product or even the brand. And the bottles are not recycled, at least not immediately; they are _reused._ Only when a bottle is worn out is it sent to the recycling stream. This means at least twenty reuse cycles for the average plastic bottle, and for the glass bottle essentially until it cracks or breaks. Aluminum beer and soda cans, on the other hand, are recycled. However, bottled sodas and beers greatly outsell canned. ---
**Author:** ![monavis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e0b2c6/32.png) [@monavis](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monavis)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2008, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481/70 "2008-06-14T11:01:36Z")
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train] But the question is whether it is economically feasible to recycle versus production from raw materials and disposal. For aluminum, this is a no brainer; the amount of energy required to refine bauxite ore makes it much more profitable to recycle finished aluminum. Iron is somewhat of a toss up; recovery and reprocessing costs of iron and steel scrap are roughly comparable to production from iron ores, and we are in no way close to running out of iron. On the other hand, known and speculative copper reserves give only 60 years before depletion at current rates. Fortunately, pure copper is a rather easy metal to recycle, and one of the traditional industrial uses of copper–communications medium–is rapidly being replaced by silicate fiber optics. However, the need for copper for power distribution, stator windings, alloying components, and other industrial applications will continue to expand. Paper and cardboard are also relatively easily processed, although paper production is mostly a byproduct of structural wood production. Two of the major classes of recyclable materials–glass and plastic–make relatively little sense to recycle at all on a fiscal or energy basis. Solid glass actually requires considerably more energy to process into material suitable for glass manufacture as compared with using raw silicates, and sand is hardly a scarce resource. Plastics are primarily manufactured from the residue of raw petroleum refining, turning a nasty useless goo into a consumer packaging product. Some classes of plastic can be reprocessed with a reasonable degree of cost-effectiveness as a replacement of supplement of other materials (i.e. plastic lumber, fiber-reinforced building materials, polymer textiles, et cetera) but you’re not really saving a scarce resource. The primary reason for recycling these materials isn’t that you are prevention depletion as much as reducing bulky, non-degradable landfill waste, and while it is a common meme among the environ-set that we are going to “fill up all the landfills,” there is really no practical limit to landfill space for inert solid waste. The free market price is not always a great indicator of scarcity and the necessity or value of recycling or alternate use. Until the last few years the price of raw petroleum has been at near record lows when corrected for global inflation. The cost of refinable-grade uranium has also held pretty steady even though there is a definite limit on the availability of fissile materials for power generation, which has retarded development and acceptance of fuel reuse, breeding, and reprocessing technologies in the nuclear power industry. There is, of course, a virtually incalculable amount of metallic resources all around us, vastly more than can be mined from Earth’s crust (and without the environmental impact); however, it would require the capability of economically viable space transportation and habitation. Stranger [/QUOTE] I worked as an inspector for Anchor Hocking( in the sixties) Any container that had a flaw was put in a bin and was recycled in to other bottles, vases etc. Monavis [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-recycling-bs/452481.md?page=3)