#102 Is Recycling A Scam?
We've been doing it for years. But are we saving the planet or performing a green cult ritual?
It always seemed easy to ‘save the planet’ with the 3 R’s. Reduce your waste, reuse products where possible, and, of course, recycle. We learned this in elementary school, along with our multiplication tables.
For years, many of us have dutifully organized and cleaned our glass, plastic, and paper so it could be magically transformed into reusable products.
Yet, almost as long as we’ve dropped our Starbucks cups into the appropriate coffee shop receptacle, a skeptic has been behind us in line, declaring, “It all ends up in the landfill anyway.”
So which is it? Has recycling worked wonders for the environment? Or is it a scam? Let’s look at both sides, and you can decide for yourself.
Get your protective gear on because we’re heading to the dump.
Recycling Saves The Planet!
If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever. -William McDonough, Architect and Environmental Consultant
Key Points:
Recycling reduces landfill waste and prevents pollution caused by raw material extraction
Producing goods from recycled materials uses less energy than creating them from virgin resources
Countries with robust recycling programs demonstrate significant environmental benefits
Recycling conserves energy and money
Recycling programs create jobs
By recycling everyday household products, we can effectively reduce the amount of content discarded in landfills, such as:
Aluminum cans
Car bumpers
Carpeting
Cereal boxes
Comic books
Egg cartons
Select electronics
Glass containers
Laundry detergent bottles
Motor oil
Nails
Newspapers
Paper towels
Steel products
Trash bags
Select electronics
Elon Musk innovated a system for Tesla batteries with a 100% recycling rate, leaving zero waste material for the landfills, according to Tesla.com.
Shree Renga Polyester in India found a way to turn used plastic bottles into clothes and shoes.
Circular11 in England has figured out how to turn discarded plastic into bricks, which they claim are stronger than traditional options.
Ever wonder what happens to your partially used hotel soap bars? Companies like Clean The World collect them, sanitize them, and create new soaps. Pretty cool—gross, but cool.
They say recycling is also good for the economy.
According to the EPA, recycling just 10 plastic bottles saves enough energy to power a laptop for more than 25 hours.
In 2020, a study found recycling contributed to:
681,000 jobs
$37.8 billion in wages
$5.5 billion in tax revenues
Sounds pretty sweet! What’s the problem?
Recycling is a Green Cult Ritual!
Plastic recycling is a myth that has been sold to the public for decades. Most plastic is not economically recyclable, and many types of plastic degrade in quality each time they are processed. -Jan Dell, chemical engineer and founder of The Last Beach Cleanup
Key Points:
Most discarded items cannot be recycled
Recycling costs more with labor, more trucks, and more energy spent
Contamination in recycling streams reduces effectiveness, leading to waste being sent to landfills anyway
Emphasis on recycling distracts from other critical environmental solutions like waste reduction and reuse
The plastics industry created recycling as a means of appeasing people
Renewable energy laws and policies are often closer to money and power than saving the Earth
Green policies often generate more waste than they save
While it's fun to think our empty plastic containers may serve us as a toothbrush down the line, it's much more likely to end up in a landfill or, worse, the ocean.
Why? The energy that goes into even attempting to recycle an item often costs more than it saves.
First, large diesel trucks must collect the recycling bins, and processing machines must use energy to sort the items before recycling them. Not to mention the plastic created for the bins themselves.
Even then, due to contamination, only 5% of collected items can be recycled—even Greenpeace admits this. The rest will join your 6-year-old socks and kids’ dirty diapers in the dump.
For what little can be recycled, materials like plastic degrade after each cycle and become more toxic, unlike glass, which we can recycle indefinitely without consequence.
Is that worth the energy?
It was for a while, at least until China ruined everything.
The CCP’s National Sword Ruined Recycling
Before 2018, the US shipped recyclables to China with fewer regulations, which was worth it for both nations, as ships otherwise often left American ports empty.
Everyone was sending their materials to China because their contamination standard was low and their pricing was very competitive -Johnny Duong, Acting Chief Operating Officer of California Waste Solutions
However, China’s National Sword Act of 2018 prohibited the US from sending many recyclables to the communist state, causing concerns about trash surplus in many parts of the world.
As a result, we now divert our crap to places like Vietnam and Malaysia, where it is often burned, dumped, or left in rivers or oceans.
It’s had a tremendous impact. Costs associated with recycling are up, revenue associated with recycling is down. And that’s not turning around in the next few weeks. -Anne Germain, Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Affairs for the U.S. Trade Group National Waste and Recycling Association
The Flying Recycling Monster
Some say they don’t need to believe in a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” to get through life.
But many have no qualms with worshiping the Flying Recycling Monster. Let me explain.
The Society of Plastics Industry was established in 1937 to represent industry professionals, such as processors, equipment manufacturers, and brand owners.
The organization began just before the manufacturing explosion, when, between 1950 and 1970 alone, we produced over 25 million metric tons of plastic globally.
That was about when the hippie movement rolled onto the scene. In addition to people over 30 and soap, the counterculture of the time had a major problem with plastic.
Environmental issues became mainstream with the emergence of activist groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club and public efforts like Earth Day and the Keep America Beautiful ad campaign.
But the industry had a “solution”: promote recycling despite the skepticism of both insiders and outsiders about its effectiveness.
Recycling was not going to work in a significant way-Lewis Freeman Society of the Plastics Industry VP
Yes, he said that, and his buddy said this:
If people think recycling is working, they wont be as concerned with the environment-Larry Thomas Society of Plastics Industry President
To further quell environmental concerns, the plastics industry lobbied to require a resin symbol on all plastic products, along with a number to denote their composition.
The trick? Wrap the number in the widely recognized recycling symbol, even if we can’t recycle that particular material.
In 1970, Gary Anderson created the recycling symbol we recognize today. However, the design is public domain, so anyone can use it.
Is it legal to mislead the public into believing their discarded plastics will be recycled? Yes. Ethical? No.
Green Policies Hurt The Environment
Some laws and regulations designed to save the planet may do more harm than good.
For example, many states and municipalities have banned plastic bags, which seems like a good idea after finding 5,000 of them stuck to the Home Depot parking lot fence.
However, alternatives, such as paper bags, while biodegradable, require more energy and resources to produce and recycle. Similarly, lightweight plastic bag bans have led to stores replacing them with thicker bags, which people still discard after minimal use.
A couple of side notes: While requiring minimal packaging for food products may save plastic, they often involve a tradeoff of food spoiling more quickly.
Green energy efforts such as wind turbines not only kill avian creatures by the thousands but are also made of hazardous materials that are difficult to dispose of.
Similarly, solar panel components have recyclable components but are not widely adopted due to cost-effectiveness.
The Conflicted
While many are critical of recycling and green policies overall, few people want to see our oceans littered with garbage.
But recycling hasn’t lived up to its name at best. At worst, it’s an outright lie, especially regarding plastic.
Over the past few years, many of us have been red-pilled into reality.
For example, they lied about the masks and social distancing. Not only did these measures not work, they also added insurmountable amounts of non-recyclable garbage to landfills. In 2020 alone, more than 2.24 billion tons of solid waste were generated globally from masks, protective equipment, and restaurant to-go containers.
Recycling is possible on a larger scale but requires an entrepreneurial effort, as we have seen with Tesla batteries, polyester manufacturing, and repurposing old soap.
In the coming years, I hope we gain some transparency about which methods actually leave a better place for our kids and which untruths we’ve been told to appease the masses.
The Earth is what we all have in common. -Wendell Berry
Resources for Further Reading
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New release this week of an old Conflicted post:
I was excited to read this when I saw the title. Just another agenda the American people are scammed on, and most wouldn't believe it. I was surprised to learn China took our trash at one time, and now we are polluting other countries land and water. I also watched the climate change video again, everyone needs to see that! Thanks for your work and time to keep us informed and thinking.