Monday, April 25, 2005

Celebrate Earth Day by Ending Mandatory Recycling!

It is one of the great secrets that must never be uttered in polite company (meaning liberal company). Mandatory recycling wastes resources - it does not save resources. The belief that it does is one of our great superstitions.

Anyone who has ever bothered to learn the facts knows this. Recycling has become a sort of messianic PC cult religion, in which practitioners make pilgrimages to the local recycling bin centers, place their recycling containers on their lawns as PC creches to let the world know they are (effortlessly) saving the planet, and recite the silly PC recycling R-trinity ('Re-use, Recycle, Reduce'). The recycling pagan evangelists violate the separation of church and state and attack school children everywhere, with never so much as a symbolic bow to the view of dissidents. Recycling may be the greatest form of self-indulgent ego-stroking in the United States. It is the great cop-out by those too lazy to study and understand real social problems.

In fact, recycling wastes resources and actually contributes to pollution. On June 30, 1996 the New York Times blew the cover of the recycling cult and revealed to lib'ruhs everywhere the truth.

Recycling is energy intensive (driving the trash around) and - even more so - it is labor-intensive. Sorting out all that trash into nice piles costs the economy huge amounts in terms of wasted manpower. And labor resources are part of nature's unrenewable resources (once an hour is wasted, it is gone forever), where as trees and many other "natural resources" are entirely renewable in most cases.

And all for what? Where are the "resources" being "saved" in recycled glass? The glass is made of sand! New bottles can be produced for far less than the cost of collecting, transporting, cleaning, sorting and refilling old bottles. Ditto for paper.

The proof? If the "resources" in glass and paper were worth more than the resources being used up to recyle them, then there would be bottle and paper merchants knocking on your door each week, asking to buy your trash for cash, and no one would need any coercion. When one could save money by recycling printer cartridges, people sold them in the market to recyclers without any coercion. The fact that the same people do NOT sell other sorts of trash proves the point that recycling wastes resources.

Some processing of "recycled" materials involves chemical treatment that releases pollutants into the environment. And in any case, more often than not those nice piles of "recyclables" collected at the nice recycling center are never even reused; they are simply dumped or burned when no one is watching. Most of that "recyclable paper" that supposedly could be recycled ("in theory" - which is what recyclable means) just never is.