Friday
Feb252011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Do you recycle?
Feb 25, 2011 Recycling There is an interview with Bjorn Lomborg here (H/T Chris by email). Anyone who has followed BL in the past will have heard most of it before, but I was struck by his statement that he still recycles.
Just to be clear, you are still green?
Absolutely. Obviously, I still recycle. I don't own a car.
My impression of most recycling is that it is very wasteful of resources, the chief exeption being aluminium. Given that Lomborg's claim to fame is that he checks out the numbers on these issues, I was surprised to see him say what he did.
Am I wrong? Do readers here recycle (if they can help it)?
Reader Comments (71)
Cllr Rose
Has Edinburgh City Council audited its collected municipal waste material for %age recycled and for energy/carbon savings? Does the legislation constrain the council to targets for the amount of sorted material collected or for the amount that ends up being recycled?
Ed
Louis
Aluminium = "congealed electricity"
Or 'electrified dirt' as Arthur C Clarke put it. It's a rather messy process, though, IIRC, involving some pretty nasty chemicals as well, so recycling it maybe worthwhile. Need to drink an awful lot of Coke to get a new set of alloy wheels though...
Robinson
"A lot of that is put in a container and sent to China by ship"
But that's just returning to sender, since we gave up making stuff. :-(
Forcing consumers to sort their trash is a useless exercise, and all the extra bins and transport probably make it more wasteful (in energy terms) than a single trash collection does.
I like the post about The Human Rights act, but I'm sure it wouldn't fly in court if somebody used it to refuse the rubbish-sorting....nice point though :)
Recycling some materials (like metals) and avoiding poisonous materials in our land fills is great, but any recycling effort should be a single-stream system were the different components are sorted at the end-point, not the collection point.
I believe the current recycling schemes have nothing to do with efficiencies and what actually works or saves resources/energy, but rather a sort of flagellant moral perspective where we must atone for our sins (aka. "raising awareness") through meaningless proselytizing…eh…recycling.
Conserving energy is probably a good thing, at least as long as the eco-lobby has it clammy hand around the neck of energy-production initiatives, but there is no need to involve the consumer in this at all.
Here in Norway there are no fines (yet) for not recycling, so I happily shove my paper and my glass into the same bin, earning me scowls from my eco-brainwashed roommate. But batteries, electronics and other '"odd" trash is dutifully driven off to the local collection point. My conscience is clear, particulary since I know that smog chuffing diesel trucks, that have to make extra rounds for paper and glass collection, only dumps all the paper in the same oven as other combustible trash anyway. What a scam!
Viv
"a small home heater which could burn all the waste without the 'forbidden' emissions"
The old 'tortoise' stoves would burn just about anything (and would even glow cherry red if you put enough coke in them) but as long as CO2 is verboten, it's going to difficult to burn anything!
Recycle? Nah!.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/search?q=Recycling
I do recycle; a bit.
We have a nice big wheelie, and there is space enough, so I see no harm in devoting some time to separating things that are really yukky from stuff that can, potentially, be turned around more cost effectively and to a higher enviROI than creating from scratch. Seems credibly 'better' than in a black bin liner in a landfill. Sadly my wife thinks this is all a bit too messy for her and my teenagers are, well, teenagers. I don't think the school programmes are quite sinking in as intended.
I do however, wonder what becomes of it all, and am having some trouble finding out. I keep angling for a visit to the whizzy 3 counties MRF that apparently sorts it all out, and post Tomorrow's World that kind of thing still floats my boat. Nothing yet.
Less encouraging still is any coherent feedback on what happens to all the recyclate.
And this concerns me, for reasons alluded to by the author. Because all this time, effort and money is supposed to be making the planet 'better' for my kids. Yet I hear worrying notions that what ticks a box and hits a target and makes Mr. Van Rumpy richer and happier is classified as recycled, but actually of no use to anyone. So we seem to be expending a lot of resources, and energy, and trust, into turning waste into... more waste. This does not speak of a good enviROI.
Hence, as much as I can, I repair and reuse, and I encourage all to do the same. It is fun, it can save money, can't hurt the planet, and works for quite a few who share in sharing on the website linked above.
What it doesn't do, by being free and enterprisingly private, is crank up bonusses for various pols, LGAs, quangos, etc, which means I don't get much help, so if anyone feels like swinging by... you'd be welcome.
I recycle within reason. I will not spend time washing out bottles. The most useful part is the green bin for the garden waste and saves trips to the local tip. Recycling food waste in biodegradeable bags I do as is easy - but try to economise on the bags, which must be expensive.
Tin cans with sharp edges go in the black bin, as do the occasional foil containers with burnt on food.
The major objection I have is the unsightliness of all the various bins. I have four - and cannot go down to less as the recycling bins are often full.
@ James P, Feb 25, 2011 at 2:44 PM:
That's what I had in mind, sort of - but what with the Clean Air Act and such, we can't even burn garden waste!
Yes recycling is a waste of money. However, as with solutions to global warming, having one person stop recycling doesn't do anything significant. Perhaps if half the people stopped recycling it would make a difference depending on the contract.
For an individual, once the inefficient recycling program is put in place, it is a different calculation. It may just be easier to recycle things then put them in bags.
Richard Tol
When this appalling scandal breaks, I have no doubt that somehow it will all turn out to be your fault.
Yes, I recycle enthusiastically. I have three compost bins in my garden, where coffee grounds and veg peelings go. I put tins and cardboard and paper in the green bin and take bottles to the bottle-bank.
And I think that man-made global warming is a load of nonsense!
The two issues are completely unrelated, as someone else said previously.
While this book was first published some years ago, Rubbish: The Archeology of Garbarge by Rathje and Cullen, documents the work of two classical archeologists who decided to use standard archeological techniques to dig their way through several modern garbage dumps in the U.S. I can't find my copy but as I recall, they rebutted many of the modern "green" myths about the quantity and content of our waste stream. They also looked at the economics of recycling which, in their study, was shown to consume significantly more resources than the value of the recycled materials with the exception of aluminum (sorry re spelling, I'm a Yank) and a few other metals. Their calculations of value did not assign any value to the labor that we householders spend handling the stuff.
It was written for a general audience and is easy to read.
Sad though it is, I do recycle; it makes me feel better and although the council swears blind it doesn't go to landfill, I sometimes have my doubts. One bin for household rubbish, one bin for plastic and cardboard and a black box for paper and bottles (so many bottles that I have to have two black boxes). Bloody stupid idea those black boxes - when full of newspapers they weigh a ton(ne?). I can't imagine how little old ladies manage to lug them to the kerb. Our council doesn't collect tetrapaks but I take bagfuls of them over the border to the next county to their collection bins in a car park (only because I'm going there shopping anyway. I'm not that daft.)
We can buy a green waste service but living in the country and having a large garden I have plenty of compost bins. My next acquisition will be a green johanna for cooked food waste, bones etc. that can't go on the compost. The dog gets large bones and other scraps and does magnificent service as the pre-wash cycle in the dishwasher.
I prefer to grow my own veg - deeply satisfying, apart from fighting a losing battle with birds, rabbits, deer and very small insects, slugs and snails. That gives me far more satisfaction than recycling.
I love recycling. I get bags with my shopping which I then use as bin bags, so those might get recycled into the proper bin bags made from recycled plastic the stores want to sell back to me. Selling my rubbish back to me is one of the great moden business innovations. Even better if you have to buy officially sanctioned recycled bags in the first place.
But if people didn't recycle plastics, then councils might have to pay more for the ever growing collection of plastic wheelie bins, then pay more for those bins to be collected and the contents shipped all over the place for disposal. So it creates green jobs, and more than may be created by sorting centrally. Especially if that centralised sorting could be largely automated, more effective, cheaper and reduce the dreaded greenhouse emissions caused by fleets of trucks collecting assorted bins, bags and boxes.
Otherwise, I tend to limit my recycling to putting Post Office delivered junk mail in their red collection boxes. Most other stuff tends to end up in my general waste bin because I know most of our rubbish ends up in landfill anyway.
Recycling is good, provided that it is economic after all factors, including externalities, have been taken into account. Where I live, the local council strictly limits the amount of rubbish it will collect from each household, the better to encourage recycling I suppose. However, given the choice of dumping the excess in the local park or eating it, most people drive down the municipal dump on Saturday mornings to get rid of the excess, which is obviously vastly more energy intensive than having a municipal truck pick up everything in its bimonthly door-to-door collection (which, of course, would cost the city more leaving less cash for payment of inflated salaries to municipal employees).
To facilitate efficient recycling, it would be a good idea if every item produced was bar-coded or chipped in such a way that automatic machines could read the composition and best mode of recycling for everything that can go into the rubbish stream. We could then dump nearly everything into one waste bin and have it efficiently sorted by robot at a central processing centre.
RE: Martin Brumby
"Metals have always been recycled...(b) There is an endemic problem of metal theft which the Government is too stupid to mitigate by making it illegal for scrap yards to pay out in cash rather than by bank transfer into a registered account."
My spouse is a Special Constable and recently nicked a pikey stealing scrap and selling it through a scrap yard. What you say is true, but the scrap yards have to record (a) the weight of scrap metal and (b) the registration of the vehicle. She couldn't prove the theft but she could nick the pikeys for selling scrap without a licence (Fine = £5,000.00) and then for earning an undeclared income while receiving £2,000 per month in cash for the ("allegedly" stolen) scrap.
For our American cousins, for definition of "pikey" see Snatch.
In our town (Ohio) recycling is voluntary but it costs about 15% extra to recycle.
I think that tells you how profitable it is.
We just try to avoid producing trash and don't worry about recycling.
I've got no problem with general consumables recycling, bottles tins and plastic and junk mail. In fact I have always got a kick out of giving a second life to old material, and hoard anything that could come in handy. In fact I've just built my wife a proper airing cupboard using timber I cut planed and jointed from my wood pile for the frame, the OK top bit above the rotten base of an old georgian plank door from an old garden shed complete with restored hinges and latches, all for free. The oldest stuff still doing sterling service I've ever recycled are servicable sections of some old oak condemned medieval roof timbers, now swinging happily as my garden gate, with the latch welded up from one handle of a pair of pincers and a piece of halfshaft from a Morris Minor.
I recycle a lot of my waste into heat. Just chuck it on the fire or in the multifuel stove. If it can burn, it burns. Not a smokeless zone so makes sense.
The Thought Police Have spies in our wheelie bins.
Viv
"we can't even burn garden waste!"
Sorry to hear that. We live in the country and still have bonfires, which are very cathartic. No doubt they'll be outlawed eventually, although I expect composting produces just as many GHG's...