Doing your part is hard
Me and the Mrs. are social-minded folks. We try to do our part. This post is about the difficulties in doing your part. One important element of doing your part is recycling. They™ say it’s good for the environment. They™ say it will ensure that future generations will have parks, clean air, blah blah blah.
Then why is it so hard? In our garage, we have several bins. The bins are labeled: paper, cardboard, aluminum, plastic, plastic bags, glass, newspapers, and magazines. Every couple of weeks, we take the stuff to the recycling center (why the city of Maryville won’t pick up recycling with trash pick-up is beyond me, since They™ say it’s so profitable). But the recycling center doesn’t take all this stuff. They only take milk jugs, not all plastic bottles. They don’t take cardboard, paper, or plastic bags. We have to make a separate stop for those items at the friendly neighborhood Food Lion. We drop off plastic bags in their recycling bin out front and take a buggy of paper and card board to the front office. It’s always someone new. We explain (as we’ve done for 9 months now) that we always bring in our cardboard and stuff and they put it in the crusher in the back for recycling. Food Lion may even make a tiny profit off of it. I also take the aluminum cans to the office and put them in a bin here. So, recycling takes up too much time. But we do it anyway, since we’re so social-minded.
Obviously others are upset about the center’s lack of recyclables too because at the recycling center (where they don’t take cardboard) there is a huge stack of cardboard on the ground beside one of the bins. I guess other recyclers haven’t discovered the grocery store yet.
If this is so beneficial, socially helpful, and profitable, why is it such a pain in the ass?
July 28th, 2003 at 1:53 pm
I cannot find a definitive source on this, but it is my understanding that only aluminum and paper recycling are economically advantageous (and I have my doubts about paper). Everything else costs more money that it would take to find another landfill and make the product new. Waste of resources. I stopped recycling when I stopped drinking anything out of a can.
July 28th, 2003 at 2:02 pm
I have an amazing can in my backyard that accepts everything.
July 28th, 2003 at 2:39 pm
I vaguely remember reading something similar to Alphapatriot, but you also have to consider that the more that we put into landfills, the greater the demand for landfill space and since nobody wants a landfill in their backyard, ultimately the cost of landfill space will increase in the future. As such, there probably is an economic argument for recycling when looked at from a longer term perspective.
July 28th, 2003 at 2:39 pm
Alpha is right. Aluminum is the only recyclable that’s guaranteed to be profitable. The others depend on the market. With oil as cheap as it is, it’s just as economical to make plastic and glass from raw material. Lots of municipalities are still collecting recyclables, but they’re often dumping everything but the aluminum in landfills to avoid separation, storage, and transportation costs.
Once I found out about that, I quit recycling everything but aluminum.
We quit trying to recycle plastic grocery bags, too. They mostly get thrown away, which is why grocery stores stopped putting collection points at the front of the stores.
July 28th, 2003 at 4:42 pm
There’s lots of space in Montana for landfills! Just kidding. When I was going to UT, for all of one year, I had to do a persuasive speech, so I chose to do it on why recycling paper is bad for the environment. It was a lot of fun seeing the looks on people’s faces, but there were a lot of valid points. One was what do you do with the barrels of toxic ink sludge produced as a byproduct of paper recycling?
July 29th, 2003 at 10:14 am
Having lived in a place with limited space for trash (Toronto area) and in one with unlimited space (here on the prairies), I find that ease and degree of recycling is directly tied to need. In Ontario, it was picked up at my door, and we had a limit on how many bags of regular garbage we could put out per week….easy. Here…it’s like where you live, a pain in the butt. So I don’t do it.
July 29th, 2003 at 11:42 pm
I’ve never really seen the logic of ‘not enough space for landfills’. Outside of Dallas is a business community called Las Colinas. Companies such as Bank of American, Computer Associates, IBM, and Xerox own buildings there (some over 10 stories) and there is a thriving housing market all around. The entire place was built on top of an old garbage dump.
Cover it up, put up a parking lot. That’s progress!