Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

….Recycling is Badly Flawed

1. Too much of the stuff that is diligently thrown in recycling boxes isn’t recycled. Many of the plastics (other than yogurt and margarine tubs, juice and laundry detergent containers) are sent to the dump as opposed to be recycled. And most, if not all, the glass isn’t recycled because the different colored-glass is mixed together, which makes it useless other than being used for doing things such as building roads.

2. There’s too much emphasis on recycling as opposed to re-use. Remember when you had to take your pop and milk bottles back to the store for a deposit. Most of those bottles were re-used as opposed to trucked to a sorting facility where an army of pickers has to go through it all.

3. There’s still way too much that isn’t recycled at all or that much. Styrofoam, for example, still goes right into the garbage even though manufacturers continue to pump out mountains of it every day. It should also be easier to recycle plastic. Think of all the plastic bags that could be used again if there they were collected as opposed to thrown into the garbage after a single use.

4. The energy, cost and time involved to recycle often outweighs the benefits. Think, for example, of all the fuel burned as trucks prowl around collecting household recycling. How efficient or environmentally friendly is that?

More: In this video, Penn and Teller talk about how recycling is “just plain bullshit”.

Technorati Tags: Recycling