Recycling = teh bullshit

Recycling causes more pollution than it stops. The only material that it worth recycling is aluminum, apart from that it helps no one.

/rebuttal?

 

Steel is the most recycled material

 

Granted. I should have been more specific. Home recycling. ie. newspaper, pop bottles, cans etc.

 

can you explain your side a little more? how does it help no one? what DOES it do?

 

I really can't figure out how it's helping anybody. We pay enormous ammounts of taxes so that recycling operations can stay afloat, and these operations expel termendous amounts of pollution from their machinery and trucks.

Nearly any product that can be made out of recycled materials can be made better and cheaper from scratch. One benefit I can find in all of this is that it creates jobs. Granted these are mostly very crappy jobs sorting garbage.

 

An immediate benifit of recycling is that stuff does not go into the landfill. The materiel that is recycled is being used. It is not shoved into a landfill where it sits and takes up space, doing no good for any person or other living thing.

Landfilling things is permently taking those materials out of nature. Even if you count human actions as natural, landfilling takes materials away from any organism using them.

Recycling keeps atoms in circulation, avaliable for use by the planet's biosphere.

 

All materials shoveled into a landfill will eventually be broken down and reused. An added benifit of this decomposition is the methane gas that is produced can be piped off of the landfill and burned as a clean gas to power automobiles and houses.

Recycling these materials costs us lots of money in taxes and increased product costs. And causes the emition of more toxic gasses into the atmosphere via trucks to transport said materials, and the recycling industry itself.

 

So you think a glass bottle should be made, used once for 4 minutes, then thrown away....

I don't know about that one kid.

 

Why?

I have nothing against reusing said bottle, but to recycle it is hurting more than it's helping.

 

thats what I'm saying, i don't believe thats true.

Plus recycling paper means you don't have to use as many trees, and cutting down on trash in general means you don't need to use as much space for landfill.... I also don't recall paying any taxes for recycling.

 

The U.S.A. is currently paying 8Billion$ a year in tax subsidies to keep recycling operations afloat. And most trees cut down to make paper were grown for that reason in tree farms. Trees are a renewable resource.

"The EPA has examined both virgin paper processing and recycled paper processing for toxic substances and found that toxins often are more prevalent in the recycling process. Often the pollution associated with recycling shows up in unexpected ways. Curbside recycling, for example, requires that more trucks be used to collect the same amount of waste materials. Thus, Los Angeles has 800 rubbish trucks rather than 400, because of its curb-side recycling. This means more iron ore and coal mining, steel and rubber manufacturing, petroleum extraction and refining - and of course extra air pollution in the Los Angeles basin."


/pulled from here

 

400 extra trucks in LA will really do nothing..around here one truck goes around and gets it all on different days...its free and the company does well without tax subsities.


Look into what else the US subsidises and you will find all kinds of things.

Seriously though, if you think 400 less trucks in the LA area will make any kind of difference at all then you've never been to LA......if LA county were a state, it would have the 7th highest poplulation in the US.

Not all paper comes from tree farms either.


I've heard one recycled glass bottle saves enough evergy to run a tv for an hour.

 

Well if you won't take my word for it take Australias
It's costing more, and polluting more to recycle than to make new materials.

I can't imagine how it would save you any energy by recycling a bottle- truck comes and picks it up, drops it off at sorting center, another truck takes it to a cleaning center, water and cleaning materials are then wasted, then another truck carries it to another plant to be melted down, goes in the furnace, melted and re-molded, and then redistributed.

Vs.

Truck gathers sand and brings it to be melted down, goes in the furnace, melted and re-molded, and then distributed.

 

Plastic never biodegredes.

 

Booya

 

Landfills are designed not to have the contents degrade. They keep oxegyn away from the refuse so that it won't degrade and stink (methane). Archeologists training their students at landfills have found newspapers from the 50's still legible. Industry standards for proper design and use of lanfills do everything to prevent decay.

 

All modern landfills encourage decomposition so that methane gasses can be collected and burnt.

"A significant emphasis was placed on active gas-recovery systems and potential "wet" landfill operation to accelerate waste decomposition and thus increase landfill gas (LFG) recovery rates."

-From here

 

Good! Apparently, my information was out of date.

What do they do with the non-degradable waste?

 

I havn't been able to find anything that isn't completly degradable. Granted it takes time. But I don't see a problem with that, as soon as the land fill is full and the methan gas is all vented off, they build greenspace overtop of it all. I see no downside to this?

I really bought into recycling at first...Like reeealy bought into it, like took part in recycling meetings in high school. But after reading about it... It just don't make sense!

 

They're too compacted and lined with clay and dirt, there is often very little oxygen, so they have to biodegrade anaerobicly, which takes much longer. I saw an article that showed stuff dug up from a long time ago (at least 50 years) and they had bits of hotdog, lettuce, and other stuff that should have decomposed looooong ago. But it was so unaltered that it looked almost edible.