I see that in recent decades technology has changed, both with filters, and maybe with higher temperatures, so that today, waste incineration no longer regularly release Dioxin, as used to be the problem in the 70s and 80s. (It’s a bit weird to see that a lot of the things the enviroment groups fought against in the 80s - lead in gasoline, sulfur causing acid rain, dioxins in the air - were really eliminated or greatly reduced through laws mandating better technology, filters, catalysators etc., and are no longer a problem now because the campaigns succeeded.)
I don’t understand two points that keep getting reiterated in this thread. Can somebody clarify?
[li]Running out of stuff like aluminum or steel.[/li]
If you mine something and don’t recycle it, you still have non-recycled something somewhere. You only run out of non-organics once you’re actively using all of them or you’ve dispersed them to the point where it’s more economical to find alternatives than to try to mine your old garbage. Sure it makes economic and environmental sense to recycle aluminum and steel but those are completely renewable resources – they don’t get used up in the same sense helium (by escaping) or uranium (by fissioning) do.
[li]Recycling paper makes any sort of sense[/li]
As far as I know most paper comes from trees planted by paper companies to be cut down and become paper. Those trees take carbon out of the atmosphere to grow, we then cut them down, and turn them into paper. I thought taking carbon out of the atmosphere was a good thing – how does it make sense to keep reusing the same carbon rather than burying it somewhere?
Pardon me – this thread fell of my radar for a while.
In British Columbia, it is legislated that domestic beer and wine bottles are refillable. You return the bottles to the store and the go back to the brewer/winery.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not “dissing” recycling - I can out-recycle any y’all with one arm tied behind my back. I’m from Vancouver - when I was working from home, I produced one bag of landfill garbage every two months or so. (I don’t do nearly as well, now that I have a family and a nine-to-five, and convenience is weighted higher than idealism and I don’t have a compost heap, now that we’re apartment-dwellers.)
What bothers me is dogmatic recycling, where it doesn’t make sense. I still sort my glass into the blue bin, although intellectually I know that it’s a net loss. If you think that it makes any kind of sense to expend the energy to collect and warehouse glass (at a loss) for 50 years in anticipation of the time when the technology will exist to recoup that loss, you are confused. You are burning increasingly-scarce oil to conserve abundant sand. This is a false economy.
Mining Bauxite to make new aluminium destroys huge areas of land which are turned upside down. Then, smelting down a load of bauxite to get some small amount of aluminium requires a lot of electricity.
If alumunium isn’t recycled, just put into the incinerator, then to all practical purposes it’s lost - it’s either blown into the air, or ends up in the ash. If you put the trash in a landfill instead, that means you have the opportunity later to dig up the landfill, but that means more work later.
Recycling alumunium therefore saves a lot of energy and land area from the bauxite mining, at little cost - assuming you do it by educating the consumers to seperate, instead of doing it at the trash plant.
While trees grow by themselves, paper doesn’t. It takes a lot of energy and more importantly, clean water, to turn wood into paper, but far less clean water to turn used paper into recycled paper. The US especially in many areas is a dry country and already overuses too much water.
Secondly, growing trees take time - minimum are 20 years. If you need more paper than trees keep growing, it will lead to chopping down of rain forests and other places. So limiting paper use (by writing on the back side and so on) and recycling helps meet the demand.
Thirdly, the trees in the planted forests are not only for the paper companies. Ideally, that is, making most sense, the trees are cut down at a certain thickness to use for construction and furniture, and the rest of this plus branches and so on are turned to paper (or heating pellets). This makes the most use out of the trees, instead of cutting down cold rain forests to turn into tissue paper, as happens in the US north east coast.