Ok,
I can't stand it. I have to speak up on this too.
To start with, I think P&T are right that most people have only vague
or misinformed reasons for recycling, and that in a real impact
analysis recycling has a lot of drawbacks. As well, I applaud P&T for
having the courage to question one of America's bigger "gree-gree's"
Nevertheless, I think their gratuitous attention-getting ad hominem and
high-speed hard-sell on their own opinion might have detracted from
their analysis. Important things I think they missed:
1. I think people's love of recycling does grow out of environmental
movement of the 70's and 80's, during which the big push was to prove
to the nation that "pollution" (a word you hardly hear any more) was a
problem and that people who didn't think carefully about what they
threw away and where they threw it were causing that problem. I think
that was a lesson well-learned, and now, recycling is the individual
response -- people are trying to be careful about what they throw away,
and where it goes. I think that that mindset is precious all by
itself.
2. While we may not be running out of landfill space, land itself is
still a fundamentally limited resource. While a landfill does have
it's uses after the trash is buried, it still has a lot less value, I
think, than an unmolested piece of earth. To what extent can you build
houses, citiies, farms, etc. on top of a landfill? It's just not the
same, I don't think, and so I'd try to conserve or better manage the
space we've got, rather than gradually covering the earth with buried
trash. I realize that this ultimately comes down to a related rates
problem of how fast the stuff decomposes versus how fast we pile it up,
but which side of that equation to we want to be working toward, either
way? I just don't think landfills are that great, and would rather
have less than more, and I'm willing to pay some to avoid them.
3. The oil too is going away -- it's a finite resource as well. While
it's certainly cheaper make plastic bottles out of oil that literally
comes out of the ground by itself once you punch the hole, that
fountain's not infinite. At some point, you're going to want to keep
making plastic even though there's no more oil. I'd rather have it
sorted out now, and have an infrastructure and technology base for
re-manufacturing it in place than have to go digging through the
landfills for the material and figure out how to make use of it only
when it's a crisis.
4. Ultimately, all our efforts at recycling are tiny in comparison to
the one on-going juggernaut event that is the growth of human
civilization. When I was in high-school, I read something about
recycling and environmental policies that stated with some statistical
authority that the one biggest impact any person could have in
protecting the environment was to not reproduce. Talk about a
gree-gree. You can rail against urban sprawl and pray for
sustainability all you want, but people just keep having children, and
every single one of them wants to grow up, have a house, stay warm, eat
food, drive a car, have their own children, etc., and it's pretty tough
to tell folks that that might be bad. Moreover, living longer (and not
dying) makes it even worse. Damn doctors! Keeping the Earth polluted
with people!
So, I'm still recycling in the hope that maybe, years from now, a few
less people have to be euthanized to make space for the next
generation. It's about the principal, and the long view -- not the
current pains. I'll shut up now, before I move this discussion into
religious grounds. . .
Dan Brashler