Recycling Is Garbage
...ame an icon of all that was wrong with the environment and the way we treat it. People naturally, and understandably, reacted to this but saying that if there isn’t room for a single load of garbage in New York City than we must be running our of places to put of garbage. People were afraid that our garbage was eventually going to burry us alive, and thus the recycling movement was born. Fueling the recycling movement was the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In a widely read paper put out but the EPA called the “The Solid Waste Dilemma: Agenda for Action” was said that,” recycling is absolutely vital,” and people bought it all, hook, line, and sinker. The man who wrote this book is Jay Winston Porter, a bureaucrat for the EPA, his job, an accountant. Almost none of the claims made in this paper were based any facts. They were all made up, based on rumors and personal opinions. The man who helped to start the recycling revolution was not even very educated in the matter; he sought to give a solution to a problem that didn’t even really exist. One of the major problems with the paper was that it focused on the number of landfills created and being filled, but didn’t take into account the new larger capacity landfills being built to hold the new trash. Porter said on his paper, with the seal of the American Government that “we are running out of places to dispose of our trash”, “one third of the nations landfills will be full within the next few years” and “if we wait the problem will get worse.” Porter failed to do his homework, but instead tried to figure out ways to spend our hard earned money to do something about it. In a rebuttal not well heard, the New York Times said that “Recycling may be one of the most wasteful activities in modern America, a waste of time, money, and a waste of natural and human resources.” In most communities it is more expensive to recycle than it is to just landfill. There are a lot of subsidies on the recycling side that hide the true cost of it. Subsidies are when the government takes money from taxpayers by force and spends it on something that you otherwise wouldn’t be willing to pay for on the free market. Subsidies support questionable or obsolete businesses in the name of public interest because the government doesn’t trust us to do it ourselves. Recycling is supposed to save money and resources. If it really saved money and resources that we would be paid to do it, or it would at least be free. It cost taxpayers eight billion dollars a year to subsidize recycling. It cost fifty to sixty dollars a ton to throw away garbage in a landfill. It cost one hundred and fifty dollars to have men come, pick up you recycling and have it recycled. It cost three times more for the local government to have your trash recycled that thrown away. The idea behind recycling is that there is a net profit to the local government. But for the past fifteen years New York City has had a loss of thirty three million dollars a year, enough money to rebuild the Time Square. In the one instance of recycling aluminum cans it is a good thing to do. It cost less to take an old aluminum can and make a new one than it cost to make a new one from virgin aluminum. It works because there is real money in aluminum. There are people who get paid to go through regular trash and collect aluminum cans. Recycled plastic can be made into several different new items including shoelaces, shopping bags, clothing items like t-shirts, and carpet and tile. But you could also make better quality and less expensive versions of those same things if you made them from virgin materials. The corner stone of the recycling movement is saving the trees. Environmentalists love to talk about how we are running out of trees. It is believed that when you recycle more you are saving more trees from endangered forests. Today paper is made from trees specifically grown for the production of paper. Paper is made from trees, so we grow trees to make paper. Much the same way we grow potatoes to make French fries, and tomatoes to make ketchup. Neither is going extinct, despite the fact that so many are harvested a year. Research and evidence goes to show that recycling does not save trees. In fact we have 3 times as many trees than we did in 1920. Trees are an easily renewable resource. Recycling is actually worse for the environment than it would be to just simply landfill. Recycling is a manufacturing process. It takes additional trucks to the normal trash trucks to come and pick up the recycling from your home, creating smog and pollution, as well as wasting gas. Then it is put onto another truck where it is driven, often hundreds of miles, to a paper mill. There it has to be deinked and bleached, which creates a toxic chemical sludge, which has to be disposed of. If we used less paper then they would grow fewer trees to make it. So it would be logical to say that if we want more trees we should use more paper. An environmentalist would also argue that recycling created decent jobs, wit...