Recycling is a business. If recycling was performed at a net loss, these people sure wouldn't be taking our crap any longer. noble or not. While grossly hazardous materials such as those found in CRT monitors and televisions are one thing that I staunchly believe should be properly disposed of at any cost (even if borne by the consumer), most recycling is pointless, maybe other than aluminum and tin which take more energy to create than to recycle. Everything else, especially paper, should just be tossed into the trash along with everything else. It's cheaper to produce new paper from wood pulp than to break down recycled paper back into something usable and the wood material mostly comes from renewable tree farms these days or forest thinning. The cost of going back to dumping everything is a boon to consumers and a load off of municipalities. We've got room for hundreds of thousands of years of trash . . . there was this Bullshit episode a while back that said something like 1000 years of U.S. trash and recyclables would fit in a 35 square mile area, piled up 200 feet high. That's a large space, but spread out across the U.S. that's minuscule. Actually, I'll stop talking, watch this episode of Bullshit. Entertaining and informative:
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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Recycling is a business. If recycling was performed at a net loss, these people sure wouldn't be taking our crap any longer. noble or not. While grossly hazardous materials such as those found in CRT monitors and televisions are one thing that I staunchly believe should be properly disposed of at any cost (even if borne by the consumer), most recycling is pointless, maybe other than aluminum and tin which take more energy to create than to recycle. Everything else, especially paper, should just be tossed into the trash along with everything else. It's cheaper to produce new paper from wood pulp than to break down recycled paper back into something usable and the wood material mostly comes from renewable tree farms these days or forest thinning. The cost of going back to dumping everything is a boon to consumers and a load off of municipalities. We've got room for hundreds of thousands of years of trash . . . there was this Bullshit episode a while back that said something like 1000 years of U.S. trash and recyclables would fit in a 35 square mile area, piled up 200 feet high. That's a large space, but spread out across the U.S. that's minuscule. Actually, I'll stop talking, watch this episode of Bullshit. Entertaining and informative:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1444391672891013193