John Stossel: The Recycling Religion
We have been being told for decades to recycle!
“If we’re not using recycled paper, we’re cutting down more trees!” Lynn Hoffman, coprésident of Eureka Recycling.
Reusing paper or cardboard can help save trees. Recycling aluminum can save energy. This is all.
The sad truth is that there are many “recyclables” Don’t send plastic to recycling facilities. Plastic is the worst.
Greenpeace is now saying, “Plastic recycling is a dead-end street.”
Hoffman often hauls it to the landfill.
John Tierney, a science writer, wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine years ago.Recycling Is Garbage.” It broke a Times record in hate mail.
However, he was correct in his words.
“It’s even more true today,” Tierney says so in my new video. “Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less.”
It would be more efficient to dump all of our garbage in landfills.
Many people think that landfills pollute the environment. They are not. They are not.
Endurance is what happens when landfills are transformed into something good: ski hills, parks, and golf courses.
But, aren’t landfills running out? The alarmist media claimed we were for many years. This is false.
1987 saw a lot of media coverage about a garbage barge, which traveled thousands of miles to try and find a dump site.
However, the barge was not turned away because of a lack in space. After hysterical media reports that it contained a lot of sewage, the states turned the barge around. “infectious waste.” Later, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that it was normal garbage.
Landfills are big enough to accommodate this. America actually has more space than it will ever use. Sometimes, states and businesses compete for our trash.
“If you think of the United States as a football field,” says Tierney, “all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line.”
It is often cheaper to dump garbage in landfills than recycle. If my town did nothing else, it would save $340 millions per year. Stop recycling.
But they won’t. “because people demand it,” says Tierney. “It’s a sacrament of the green religion.”
The commandments of the religion are complicated. New York City orders Please send me: “Place recyclables at the curb between 4 PM and midnight … Rinse plastic containers … Separate paper from plastic, metal, and glass.” Tie paper “with twine into bundles no taller than 18 inches,” And so on.
“That’s one reason recycling fails,” says Tierney. “It’s so complicated; people never learn the rules.”
Worse still, some recycling can prove to be dangerous or irreversible.
“If you rinse a plastic bottle in hot water,” Tierney points out: “the net result is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than if you threw it in the garbage.”
What can the environmentists do now, since most plastic cannot be recycled?
“Stop producing it,” John Hocevar from Greenpeace.
Many environmental groups are now calling for the ban on plastic.
It’s silly. Plastic is useful. It is more environmentally friendly than many other materials. Plastic bags produce less pollution than paper bags. To create less pollution, a metal straw must be used 150 times.
It is not often that environmental groups mention this, or how they deceive us year after year regarding recycling.
“It’s appalling that after telling people for three decades to recycle, they don’t even apologize for all the time and money that they wasted,” complains Tierney. “Instead, they have a proposal (banning plastic) that will make life even worse.”
Plastic isn’t evil. Recycling is not the climate savior. Los Angeles imposed it and added 400 noisy garbage trucks.
This creates a lot of pollution.
However, environmentalists demand that we sort through our garbage and use paper bags instead of plastic. California even outlawed small plastic shampoo bottles
“Some of these rules are just so arbitrary and silly,” complains Tierney. “It’s simply a way for greens and for some politicians to pretend that they’re saving the planet.”
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