The article is from 2 years ago, but it presents a video that I've been seeing tweeted and blogged this week, and I didn't remember seeing it before. That one-inch line visual really stuck with me. If it's correct, the answer is so obviously landfills, and people who think we're running out of space to just pile up our trash have been wildly misled.
December 14, 2024
"If you think of the United States as a football field, all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line."
Said John Tierney, quoted in "No, Recycling Will Not Save the Environment/Despite what you may have heard, many 'recyclables' sent to recycling plants are never recycled at all" (Reason).
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I'll add a wrinkle. You could take every person on Earth, with Covid-era separation, and they would all fit into Massachusetts ... with room to spare.
"and people who think we're running out of space to just pile up our trash have been wildly misled."
Only if they've been believing what "the experts" are telling them. Anybody who's looked into the topic even superficially hasn't been fooled.
You know an argument is bogus when they haul out the "catastrophic weather" justification.
Before blue bins and coding triangles became common, local trash authorities said: "Don't bother sorting your trash, we do it as it comes in off the trucks."
The high-value stuff such as aluminum has long been taken. Glass bottles used to be reused. Burnable stuff can be burned for a bit of energy, despite possible pollution. Iron and plastic are very very very very very very cheap.
Metals are very recyclable and are. All else, not worth the cost, and that includes the energy.
If the worry is the burning of fossil fuels, landfills are still the right answer (it seems) because recycling involves a lot of extra trucks carting things around and processing that doesn't really accomplish much in the way of recycling.
Where I used to work- the midnight sift doing 7 hours one way got the 8 hours of pay anyhow. Going the other way- 1 hour overtime.
Where I work now, to get your 40 hours of pay, one hour vacation time gets used up shifting one way.
you Know what causes The MOST pollution..
Selling "recycled" plastics to Asia.. Who then Throw it into the ocean.
Want to protect the environment? Bury your trash in a landfill, like you're SUPPOSED TO
Plastic should be incinerated at high temperatures, making very few pollutants, to generate steam to make electricity.
I'll add a wrinkle. You could take every person on Earth, with Covid-era separation, and they would all fit into Massachusetts ... with room to spare
I'll wrinkle your wrinkle.
Texas has 172 million acres. If we turned the entire state into single family cluster housing with 12 homes per acre and 5 people per home, we could house 10.32 Billion people. The whole world.
That's just part of it. Ending recycling as it's currently being practiced means saving all the water that's used to wash trash before it gets thrown away.
Why You Need to Wash Your Recycling
https://www.greenmatters.com/p/why-need-to-clean-recycling
Don't tell the Democrats, but that's how to turn Texas red.
Don't laugh -- it worked for California.
Its no different then the constant demands to "save water" addressed to home owners and average people in the Western US. The vast majority of water (80 percent) is used by agriculture. Not watering your lawn or not giving people ice water at their restaurant table accomplishes very little.
Sometimes these things are done to make people feel better. During WW II there used to be "scrap metal" drives. You were supposed to turn in those broken roller skates or those unneeded alumminum cans, so the USA could make more tanks and B-17s. Of course, it accomplished almost nothing, but it made people feel like they were "doing their bit".
Redstate has a John Stossel report out on this, it could be causing all those comments. John Stossel Blows the Lid Off the Scam That Is Recycling.
In our town they don't let us recycle glass, the one that lasts the absolute longest. I wouldn't mind doing it the old way and turning them in for a few pennies as incentive.
This has only been completely obvious for about 50 years.
Funny how the things that are really worth recycling are the things we recycled in 1950.
I guess it's a point-of-view problem ...
Copilot says, "While it's challenging to pinpoint the exact total land area they cover, it's estimated that landfills take up about 1,800 square miles of land in the U.S. This is roughly equivalent to the size of Rhode Island."
And in the next paragraph ... "Interestingly, despite the large number of landfills, the total land area they occupy is relatively small compared to the overall landmass of the United States. This helps put into perspective the scale of waste management and the importance of sustainable practices."
That's about 36 square miles per state on average.
"The high-value stuff such as aluminum has long been taken."
Just FYI, methods were developed in the 90's to make beer and soda cans out of steel, which would be thinner and lighter than aluminum cans. And, of course, much cheaper. But the State of California banned them, because they would have put the aluminum recyclers out of business. No, I'm not making that up. There was a long and interesting article about it in the Atlantic, back before the Atlantic became garbage.
Coke bottles were marginal at best. I am guessing recycling coke bottles made economic sense because the truck that dropped off the boxes of coke at the gas station where the coke machine was located took the empties back to the factory. Still, marginal. Maybe if they were hand-blown.
Who would have thought that the ferocious advocates of recycling might mislead us? I mean, aren't they on the side of the angels?
Misled?
Let’s hope the NYTimes isn’t culpable.
Incinerators are the real answer. They can be used to generate electricity, and generate very little pollution. However, like nuclear power, the American public has been lead, by the mass media, to believe that incineration is evil and will kill us.
I think that returnable bottles must make economic sense, because they still do it in poor countries.
they DIDN'T "recycle" coke bottles.. They WASHED THEM.
How could an adult NOT know that?
According to my wife, here in California we must recycle our food scraps. I wouldn't bother but I like my marrriage.
"people who think we're running out of space to just pile up our trash have been wildly misled."
Wow. THAT'S never happened before. *snort*
Not Martha's Vineyard, however.
I read Tierney’s article decades ago and realized that, except for aluminum and most glass, recycling is just virtue signaling. And a lot of conservatives participate faithfully.
I have a buddy in the scrap metal business. He explained to me how they buy crushed cars for whatever the going price is per car; then massive machinery pummels the cars and separates it all out using magnets, grids, air flows, chemical baths, etc.
Fascinating.
According to an article in the LA Times:
Recycling in your home
Recycling food waste at home is easy, said Figueiredo and Williams. They recommend starting by separating your vegetable and fruit scraps.
To stave off odors, Villalobos said, you can layer the food [MG: If it's food, why not just eat it?] with sawdust or line it with paper towels. You can also put the container in the fridge or freezer.
“The simplest method is putting [the scraps] in a brown paper bag and putting it in your freezer,” Williams said.
So now, we're past washing your trash and throwing it out. We're on to sorting it and storing it our refrigerators.
And people wonder why extraterrestrials are not visiting the planet.
The recycling program where I live does not accept glass. And they probably don't get a lot of aluminum since people regularly dig through the recycling bins in the alleys and pull it out before trash day.
I remember the big guy from Penn and Teller doing an experiment at a condo complex, where each week they would add another bin for a new category of trash, to see how many people would go along with it, and how many just dumped all of their stuff into one bin. Pretty funny.
Then we went to visit a couple in Sunapee, NH. We took the trash to the "transfer station" on Saturday morning. There were literally 27 different categories of stuff, and there was a parade of wealthy Dartmouth grads (including my friend) dutifully putting everything into the proper bins, with squads of Dartmouth undergrads making sure.
Idiocy.
Meant to put that in the DST thread...
Had an uncle who delivered sugar- well, on a ship that delivered sugar, to the Pepsi bottling plant in Brooklyn. They could drink all the soda they wanted while there- but had to leave the bottles. Currently the bottle deposit on 1/2 gallon milk at our local dairy store is $1.00. Up from 50¢ when we first moved here. Down in VA where my son lives a local grocery carries milk in glass bottles- $5.00 deposit. They get returned.
Some people lose track- or never learned- of the real reason behind putting deposits on non-reusable cans and bottles. And it had nothing, zip diddly squat, to do with recycling.
It was to reduce litter. And lo and behold- it actually worked. If you're my age, 69, and were observant as a youngster, you can recall seeing all kinds of litter alongside the highway. The most visible being cans and bottles. Cans and bottles as far as litter goes virtually disappeared from roadsides after the first deposit laws were passed. A nickel was a lot of money then to many. The "Keep America Beautiful" advertising campaign and the literal shaming of litterers took care of most of the rest.
Where do you see the most trash strewn about on streets today? In communities with a crapload of South American migrants. And in places and parks where they hang out. Something almost everyone knows. But are too polite to mention.
Does anyone know if glass still needs to be separated by color to be recycled? I was involved in waste management in the 1990s and glass had to be separated to be recycled; green, brown, clear. That was when we used to collect all of the materials separated at the homes - source separated we called it - and the trucks had different compartments for each material. Today I see nothing but commingled collection with everything going into a compacting truck. All the glass is broken and there is no chance anyone is sorting it at the mrf. Not to mention what crushed glass does to all of the wear parts in the trucks and conveyors at the mrf. Unless there is some application/market for mixed, crushed glass, there is no recycling of glass taking place today.
That's what I understand; still the same. Unfortunate, really. I'm convinced that any recycling of general mixed materials simply ends up in the land fill along with everything else.
Working in an aluminum plant which generates a significant amount of material for cans, aluminum is very recyclable. Cans are only made of of 3 chemistries, so easy to process. The lack of corrosion also increases recovery.
Please recycle your beer and coke cans!
I recall by Boy Scout Troop gathering newspapers for recycling. What a joke. Recycling relies on "free" labor and still is a waste. If you chafe at self-checkout at the store but dutifully sort recycling you are deluded. Want to cut down on CO2 (feh) put all paper and wood products in landfills. Some methane escapes, of course, but most will not.
My son lives in Sunapee New Hampshire and I've been to that transfer station probably a dozen times. If I'm going there by myself I just throw everything in the trash. If I'm going with my grandsons I make them do all the psychotic separation of the trash. It's the best way to teach them about the futility of complying with bureaucratic regulations.
Easy in rural MT. Almost everything plant based goes off the porch. Mysteriously gone in a couple days. Except, weirdly, white bread. Meat scraps go a couple blocks away. It’s the bears - we really don’t want them on our front porch. It’s for their own good - if they acclimate too much to humans, they get transported a time or two, then, put down. I play on my partner’s Catholic guilt to get her to put meat scraps to the side (so I can dump them far enough away), asking her if she wants to be responsible for their deaths. It’s even worse with her ex on his ranch 5 miles west. He has a burn pit for anything organic. We can burn, but living in town, burn pits are limited in size, and must be attended.
It’s sometimes weird moving from MT to PHX in the fall. When she puts the vegetable refuse off the front porch, the HOA complains. And meat? Coyotes. They are fast. PHX PD has told me that I can shoot them, if they get too close, but I have no doubt that some of the EV owning neighbors would object. Already object if they see me carrying a gun.
Why would I want to cut down on CO2? It’s necessary for plant respiration - it’s a critical part of the Circle of Life. That means that the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more plants will grow, which means more food. We are coming out of the Little Ice Age, where the CO2 level was dangerously low. Repeat after me: “There’s nothing wrong with more CO2 in the atmosphere. It’s a good thing!”
If recycling was anything more than a stream for a ver few select reusable materials and a virtue signalling enterprise for most other stuff, we'd be paid for the contents of our garbage bins by competitive private recyclers. I don't see that happening, do you?
I used to bicycle 2 miles from home to the nearest convenience store, collecting bottles on the way, and buy myself treats. Good times.
If they don't pay you for something or at a minimum take if for free it is not worth recycling. Aluminum, steel, lead batteries, they buy. Almost everything else they charge you to take it away. Other things that should be reclaimed are various electronics and batteries that have heavy metals or other contaminants.
Reading comments and it is amazing that Sunapee NH , a small town with a High School graduating class of ~50 kids, has a small lakefront “village” that essentially closes in winter, is mentioned 2 times ( now 3) in this blog.
But .. the transfer station comments are dead on !
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