You're not still recycling, are you?

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
You're not still recycling, are you?
23
Mon, 12-29-2003 - 5:15pm
Why the Trash You Sort Isn't Getting Recycled

by Dennis T. Avery

My neighbors are unhappy to learn that the trash they’ve carefully sorted for years into brown bottles, green bottles, cans, and paper is being dumped back into one pile at the local landfill. Except for aluminum cans, no one wants the sorted trash items. Is this bad for the environment?

Probably not. I checked with Dr. Daniel Benjamin of Clemson University (and the PERC Center for Free Market Environmentalism) and he says: First, don’t worry that the trash going into our landfills will take over too much of the land area. People today are actually throwing away less trash (in both volume and tonnage) than in previous, less-affluent generations. Dr. Benjamin says the average U.S. household today generates one-third less trash than the average family in Mexico!

How can this be?

In significant part, it’s because we throw away less food, thanks to commercial processing and packaging.

When chickens, for example, are commercially processed, the beaks, claws, and innards are turned into pet food instead of going into the kitchen garbage can. Commercial processing and packaging of 1,000 chickens adds about 17 pounds of paper and plastic wrap—but turns (recycles) about 2,000 pounds of chicken by-products into useful purposes. Ditto for such things as the peelings from frozen French fries and the rinds from making orange juice. (The “factory” potato and citrus peels go to feed livestock.)

Millions of additional tons of organic waste go down the garbage disposals and so on to waste treatment plants, instead of drawing flies at the landfill.

Companies have also turned to lighter-weight packages (mainly to cut transport costs) and the total weight of the packages entering landfills, says Dr. Benjamin, has fallen by 40 percent. Plastic two-liter soft drink bottles weigh 30 percent less than the old glass bottles. Plastic bags weight 70 percent less than paper. Even aluminum beverage cans now weigh 40 percent less.

Thirty years ago we were told that we were running out of landfill space. New York City wasn’t able to dump its garbage at sea any more, and it got piled up on Staten Island. What happened?

A new rule on ocean dumping and a temporary shortage of landfills with permits basically caused a bottleneck. New York initially started exporting its trash by rail. (Some if it came to Virginia, where we had lots of rural gullies to fill, and were very cheerful about the dumping fees.)

Today, the United States has 25 percent more landfill space permitted than we had 25 years ago. And all the trash we’re expected to dump in the next 100 years would fit into a landfill about 10 miles square.

There are no plans for one centralized national dump, of course, because it’s more advantageous for most communities to save the transportation costs, and turn their completed landfills into parks and tennis courts within their own borders.

What about pollution leaking from the landfills? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), never likely to minimize a pollution risk, says leakage from modern America’s landfills can be expected to cause one cancer-related death over the next 50 years. In other words, the danger is too low to be measured. Today’s landfills are sited away from groundwater sources; built on a foundation of several feet of dense clay; the foundation is covered with thick plastic liners, and the liners are then covered with several feet of sand or gravel. Any leachate is drained out via collection pipes and sent to the municipal wastewater treatment plants.

Won’t we be losing irreplaceable resources if we landfill instead of recycling? Too often, recycling proponents focused on the aluminum or newspaper being recycled, and forgot about the fuel, manpower and other resources it took to turn the trash into something useful. And with new technology, resources such as copper and wood have declined in value.

Franklin Associates, which consults for EPA, says extensive recycling is 35 percent more expensive than conventional disposal, and curbside recycling is 55 percent more expensive. In other words, recycling takes more resources than landfilling.

Why did people promote recycling so heavily in the first place? Lots of people probably misunderstood the costs and benefits. It’s also true that eco-activists urgently wanted everybody to feel a direct stake in saving the planet. Telling us all to recycle was their way to make us feel eco-involved.

Today, however, when environmental concern is near-universal and conservation techniques are far better, we don’t need “phony” recycling campaigns.



Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, VA, and is director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Wed, 12-31-2003 - 3:01pm
WoW! Whoo-hoo! Bells ring! Horns blow! Cimbals Clash! A defening clap of thunder silences all expressions of wonder and disbelief as all of creation contemplates the ramifications of jadetheif and wrhen agreeing on an issue.

I recycle what it makes sense to recycle, and environmentally, few materials make sense.

Since treehugger has claimed yard waste that can be composted as part of her recycling efforts, I suppose I'll have to do the same although always thought of it as part of the city's recycling efforts, not mine. I simply have the stuff put into the biodegradable bags because they're big, stand up on their own, and hold pokey, sharp, heavy yard waste much better than plastic bags do.

I have grass clippings left on the lawn because it doesn't harm it and my be beneficial, it saves human time & effort, & it is less stuff that has to be collected & transported.

When I had real X-mas trees, the city receycled them w/o us having to chop it up & bag it, so that made sense, too.

Unfortunately our composting program depends on a regional grant. I think it should be self-sustaining. If the costs of the program can't be covered by the sales of the compost and mulch, it should be outsourced to a private business who can make it profitable, or the raw material sould be sold to cover as much as the cost as possible.

I also recycle my moving boxes. I never buy new, pass along what I can to others who are moving, leave them out by the trash for 2 or 3 days before pick up so others who need them have an opportunity to grab them(I do that with old furniture, too), and what's left, put with the yard waste, but again, it makes sense because that way they don't take up all the room in my garbage can.

As for common household recycling, IMO, most of it is hogwash. No one is cutting old growth forests to make post-it notes. Trees used to make paper are simply a crop to grow, harvest, & replant like any other, and the transportation costs and chemical processes that are necessary to recycle paper are more wasteful and damaging to the environment than making virgin paper. Also, a lot of what people think is being recycled, will be rejected by the reclamation plant such as yellowed newpapers or material that shows water marks and will wind up in a landfill 200 miles away instead of 20 miles away.

I suppose you could say I recycle my paper since the bin is the perfect size to hold a newspaper folded in half, and I thow them and my junk mail in it, but I am not under any illusions that I'm saving the environment. I'm just using the most convient system for dealing with papers & mail that I've come up with. Likewise, I now that glass recycling makes no financial or environmental sense whatsoever, but if I have a broken vase or something, I throw it in the bin so it won't cut through the trash bag or cut anyone. Glass jars, just like cans, go into the trash and are taken to the garage daily because I don't want those dirty smelly things in the kitchen. I run my dishwasher when it's full of dirty dishes, & I wouldn't want bits of sticky paper labels damaging it, so I wouldn't consider putting trash through the dish washer, and washing it by hand is unbelievably wasteful. I think metalic items are collected before the day's trash is covered up with soil at the landfill, and contrary to popular opinion, outside of the northeast, there is plenty of space in existing landfills and plenty of land to build new ones.

Occasionally, I'll have a causual get together and will put the recycling bin in a visible but discrete area to collect coke & beer cans, but again, that's for convience, not to purposefully recycle. I never recycle plastic. Only a teeny tiny fraction is used in carpet mfging or anything else, and all those good enviros like treehugger provide a larger supply than is used. Plastics really should be incenerated. The fire porvides energy and the melted plastic is returned to it's natural state--oil. The EU & Japan have improved the technology so much that air pollution is no longer an issue, but incenerating just doesn't sound as friendly as recycling and it doesn't provide that warm feeling of self-congratulations that recycling does.

I rarely use anything canned in my cooking, reuse plastic grocery bags, and prefer reuseable packaging. I will pay a little more for a game in a wooden box instead of a cardboard one or a roll of stickers in a polystyrene box instead of a plastic & cardboard package that goes directly into the trash. I also like to give gifts in reusable cloth bags or decorative boxes instead of wrapping them in paper.

I donate computer equipment to a computer literacy program, books & magazines to several nursing homes in the area, I save coats, Bibles, & eyeglasses for specific charity drives, and most other useful stuff for a garagesale and then call the Salvation army to pick it all up.

Once a year I put my used cooking oil, & unwanted chemicals out for recycling, but that's to save my kitchen drain & for charity. The products (paint, yard, pet, & pool chemicals, & cleaning stuff) that is still usable, is free for anyone who wants it.

We also have private businesses that will accept recycled electronics, computers, styrofoam peanuts, & wire hangers.

I throw my hangers in a box in the bottom of my closet & when it's full take it to the cleaners w my clothes because coat hangers are a pain to deal with any other way.

On occasion, I'll buy some glass items that are recycled, but that doesn't factor into my decision. I don't buy recycled paper towels, tissue, or tp because of the poor quality and price, and I also just ran across a study that raises concerns about the safely of thises products becuase they are holding more chemical residue from their previous lives & the recycling process than previously throught.

IMO, recycled products should be bought & used in mfg because they are cheaper & don't effect the quality of the product they are going into such as in carpet fiber & aluminum cans. If recycled is a selling point, the item usually isn't priced, designed, or manufactured to sell on it's own merits.




Edited 12/31/2003 6:13:46 PM ET by wrhen

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Wed, 12-31-2003 - 3:35pm

McChord AFB is south of Tacoma, near Fort Lewis, I think???


iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Wed, 12-31-2003 - 4:04pm

I totally agree.


iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2003
Fri, 01-02-2004 - 4:02pm
Momentous. :)

>>I have grass clippings left on the lawn because it doesn't harm it and my be beneficial, it saves human time & effort, & it is less stuff that has to be collected & transported. <<

Supposedly good for the grass, though not so pleasant-smelling.

>>When I had real X-mas trees, the city receycled them w/o us having to chop it up & bag it, so that made sense, too. <<

Christmas trees are cruel. :)

>>No one is cutting old growth forests to make post-it notes. Trees used to make paper are simply a crop to grow, harvest, & replant like any other, and the transportation costs and chemical processes that are necessary to recycle paper are more wasteful and damaging to the environment than making virgin paper. <<

>>contrary to popular opinion, outside of the northeast, there is plenty of space in existing landfills and plenty of land to build new ones. <<

One issue I have with trees and landfills is that some of those landfills are built on what used to be forests that were cut down for processing, lumber, development, etc.

But the cutting down of natural forests is less an issue of recycling and more an issue of urban sprawl and development.

one more random thought: i think styrofoam (in its present incarnation) is better than paper or plastic.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2003
Fri, 01-02-2004 - 4:12pm
So I realized (after reading this thread) that our recycling bin goes out every week filled to the brim (it's not a large bin to begin with) and I have no idea what's in it... :)

I really think that there needs to be a bigger push to buy goods that are made from recycled products.

And I think stores should put all their coupons online instead of sticking all those inserts in the paper...

And I double side everything. :)

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Fri, 01-02-2004 - 4:21pm

But the cutting down of natural forests is less an issue of recycling and more an issue of urban sprawl and development.


Not around here.


iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Fri, 01-02-2004 - 4:57pm
<>

You are such a tease, but no matter how tempting:

I...WILL...NOT...GO THERE TODAY.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2003
Fri, 01-02-2004 - 5:42pm
hmmm, i was including lumber under 'development'.

but it was a deliberately vague statement. :)

and maybe that should just be 'sprawl' to include rural *and* urban (at least, cutting down forests for farmland is an issue east of the mississippi).

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2003
Fri, 01-02-2004 - 5:43pm
no, please do. it was an intentionally vague (and loaded) statement. i would be dismayed if it didn't generate comment. :)
iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Fri, 01-02-2004 - 7:34pm
The mind is churning, the fingers are itching, but the spirit has enough to contend with today.

Maybe tomorrow.

Renee