How many of you recycle?

[JDrake]

occasionally, have told people, dont bring sh!t home

 

[BMdoobieW]

I recycle some stuff. But your poll can't reflect that.

 

[TBone48]

My community requires recycling. We have metal, plastic, and glass on Tuesday and paper on Thursday.

 

[astrocase]

Originally posted by: kogase

Originally posted by: astrocase
I work in the recycling industry so I do a couple thousand tons a month. Brownie points?

It's a good thing and what my Dad did for me as a kid was let me collect all the aluminum cans and then keep the cash. That was a ton of money when my allowance was only $4 or $5 a week. Today you'll get $1.25/lb for cans (at least in CA). That's still good pocket money. Ripping the copper wiring out of your garage or something? $3/lb at least.

As far as the environment and the economy, recycling is very very beneficial. Unless you want them drilling for new ore and petroleum all the time and cutting down more trees you should recycle.

They are constantly drilling for new petroleum whether plastic is recycled or not. Plastic also takes energy to recycle, perhaps more energy than it takes to simply make new plastic from petroleum. That energy has to come from somewhere. I already gave a differing theory on paper and trees, read it and consider it.

Are you guessing here?

I'm actually only specialized in metals and I can tell you for sure that it is cheaper and more environmentally friendly to use recycled metal whenever you can. Granted the world still has to use some ore but blending scrap metal into a melt is a good thing. I can't imagine a modern world where we didn't recycle and just created everything from raw goods each time. Cutting down a tree, drilling for oil, mining ore, and then leaving all the used goods in a dump somewhere is not a good idea.

If a guy needs titanium to build a fighter jet he needs it to meet certain chemical specifications. If you're buying your metal from a guy who is only mining ore then you're going to pay a premium since with scrap metal you can blend a whole bunch of different metals (some cheaper than others) and come up with the correct chemistry. Some types of Titanium Alloys for example have Aluminum and Vanadium in there making up 10% of the chemistry. If you don't recycle you're going to have to add raw Vanadium, Aluminum, and Titanium to each melt. That's expensive.

 

[kogase]

Originally posted by: astrocase

If you had read my other posts you would have known that I already agree with the fact that recycling metals is beneficial. I'm not guessing, so much as proposing an alternate theory held up by others that I have yet to research fully myself.

 

[astrocase]

Let me look for your other posts....

 

[Baked]

San Francisco Recycling FTW!

Ps. Old people steal cans and bottles before the garbage men collect them.

 

[nageov3t]

recycling glass, metal, and plastic is mandtory in my town.

newspaper recycling is also mandatory, but I never have enough to recycle.

 

[astrocase]

Plastic - there are different types of plastic so I would assume that it's the same as with metals where it is more economical and hopefully more environmental to recycle the same type of plastic rather than create it from scratch. We already import 12 million barrels a day. How much of that is for plastic? What are the addititives?

Paper - No expert on chemical processes but it seems to me that cutting down a new tree that might be hundreds of years old is not a good idea. Even if it's a 20 year or 40 year old tree grown on a farm it still supports part of the ecological environment that shouldn't be taken for granted. The impact is much larger than just cutting down a tree. You have errosion and habitat loss. When they cut down a tree they plant a new one but for all intensive purposes that land is barren for many years to come.

Glass - No clue.

 

[OFFascist]

In my house we recycle our aluminum cans. However we do that ourselves so that we keep the money. Screw the city why should we give them our cans so they can pocket it.

We only give the city paper to recycle.

 

[mchammer]

Aluminum & glass ftw

 

[neutralizer]

I reuse paper, recycle bottles, cans, and cardboard boxes.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I don't, because unlike were we lived before there's no places (near by, at least) to recycle anything.

 

[DaWhim]

I don't recycle and I hate my sister for doing that. I always throw everything my sister's piled up in the house for recycle to the dumpster. recycle doesn't really make economics sense.

I feel sorry for those who got indoctrinated by the Greens.

this article is a bit dated, but how many people question recycling at what cost of the taxpayers?

How to get rid of rubbish
Oct 16th 1997
From The Economist print edition


A modest proposal, making use of the price mechanism

IT IS hard to object to recycling. Putting all that waste to good use seems as virtuous as thrift and hard work. The past decade has seen dozens of laws that exhort, encourage and?inevitably?command people to recycle their rubbish. A dozen American states are considering laws that would require products such as paper to contain a fixed proportion of recycled material, or decree how much garbage must be recycled. The federal government wants Americans to be recycling 35% of their rubbish by 2000 (see article). Several European countries are toying with similar requirements.

Governments would do well to restrain their puritanical urges. Ever since Samson recycled the jawbone of an ass, rubbish has been put to bad ends as well as good. Without compulsion, America now recycles two out of every three tonnes of the steel it consumes. By contrast, laws that require recycling are not only a wrongheaded way of helping the environment, they could even end up harming it.

By their very nature, national or state-wide quotas are arbitrary, because they ignore the particular local conditions that determine how much recycling costs. In lightly populated areas where recycling centres are few and landfill is cheap, recycling can cost three or four times as much as the alternatives. Where landfill is dear and there is a demand for recycled materials, recycling can make sense. There is no reason why both places should recycle the same proportion.

For Americans there is a political question too. High levels of recycling tend to cost more than dumping or burning. When state politicians require recycling, they are therefore placing a burden on municipal finances. This imposition is more than an argument about political power. If a town?s politicians are told to spend more on recycling, that leaves less for things they may have been elected to invest in, such as parks, teachers, or even other environmental efforts.

In extreme cases, targets can even damage the environment, because they do not guarantee that sorted waste will actually be reused. Germany, which requires manufacturers to recycle their packaging, has more of the stuff than it could ever sell to the firms whose alchemy might turn it into something useful. The country created an uproar last year when it tried to send almost 60,000 tonnes of unwanted (but scrupulously sorted) rubbish to North Korea. American hauliers have exported trash to China. This may have made sense, if landfill in China is plentiful and cheap, but the suspicion remains that a proper calculation was never made, encompassing time, transport, energy and environmental costs.

In the dumps

Rather than setting arbitrary targets, governments should instead ask themselves what is the best way to dispose of rubbish. To decide, they have a useful, old-fashioned mechanism to hand: price. It is possible?though not easy?to estimate the total costs of incinerating, dumping and recycling rubbish for each municipality, taking account of the environmental costs of each. Companies could bid for garbage contracts on that basis, although they would also be required to offer recycling. Municipal taxes would pay for the cheapest option. If recycling was more expensive, householders who wanted to do so could pay any additional costs out of their own pockets. If it was the least expensive option, those who didn?t want the bother could also pay the price for that choice.

Besides giving householders an idea of how much damage their rubbish causes, such a scheme has several attractions. Voluntary recyclers tend to be tidier, sifting their trash with care, thus making recycling more efficient. Hauliers will have an incentive to keep their costs down and find markets for the materials?a discipline tax-funded mandatory programmes lack when their homeowners have no choice but to recycle. As recycling became cheaper, more people would join in, but because the price of recycling reflects the value of recycled materials, gluts would not last.

No doubt, some people who now dutifully sort their garbage would give up. But this is an economic issue, not a moral one; and the purpose of public policy should be to make the true, social costs of disposal become part of everybody?s economic calculation. Central planning is not the answer.

 

[astrocase]

Originally posted by: DaWhim
I don't recycle and I hate my sister for doing that. I always throw everything my sister's piled up in the house for recycle to the dumpster. recycle doesn't really make economics sense.

I feel sorry for those who got indoctrinated by the Greens.

this article is a bit dated, but how many people question recycling at what cost of the taxpayers?

How to get rid of rubbish
Oct 16th 1997
From The Economist print edition


A modest proposal, making use of the price mechanism

IT IS hard to object to recycling. Putting all that waste to good use seems as virtuous as thrift and hard work. The past decade has seen dozens of laws that exhort, encourage and?inevitably?command people to recycle their rubbish. A dozen American states are considering laws that would require products such as paper to contain a fixed proportion of recycled material, or decree how much garbage must be recycled. The federal government wants Americans to be recycling 35% of their rubbish by 2000 (see article). Several European countries are toying with similar requirements.

Governments would do well to restrain their puritanical urges. Ever since Samson recycled the jawbone of an ass, rubbish has been put to bad ends as well as good. Without compulsion, America now recycles two out of every three tonnes of the steel it consumes. By contrast, laws that require recycling are not only a wrongheaded way of helping the environment, they could even end up harming it.

By their very nature, national or state-wide quotas are arbitrary, because they ignore the particular local conditions that determine how much recycling costs. In lightly populated areas where recycling centres are few and landfill is cheap, recycling can cost three or four times as much as the alternatives. Where landfill is dear and there is a demand for recycled materials, recycling can make sense. There is no reason why both places should recycle the same proportion.

For Americans there is a political question too. High levels of recycling tend to cost more than dumping or burning. When state politicians require recycling, they are therefore placing a burden on municipal finances. This imposition is more than an argument about political power. If a town?s politicians are told to spend more on recycling, that leaves less for things they may have been elected to invest in, such as parks, teachers, or even other environmental efforts.

In extreme cases, targets can even damage the environment, because they do not guarantee that sorted waste will actually be reused. Germany, which requires manufacturers to recycle their packaging, has more of the stuff than it could ever sell to the firms whose alchemy might turn it into something useful. The country created an uproar last year when it tried to send almost 60,000 tonnes of unwanted (but scrupulously sorted) rubbish to North Korea. American hauliers have exported trash to China. This may have made sense, if landfill in China is plentiful and cheap, but the suspicion remains that a proper calculation was never made, encompassing time, transport, energy and environmental costs.

In the dumps

Rather than setting arbitrary targets, governments should instead ask themselves what is the best way to dispose of rubbish. To decide, they have a useful, old-fashioned mechanism to hand: price. It is possible?though not easy?to estimate the total costs of incinerating, dumping and recycling rubbish for each municipality, taking account of the environmental costs of each. Companies could bid for garbage contracts on that basis, although they would also be required to offer recycling. Municipal taxes would pay for the cheapest option. If recycling was more expensive, householders who wanted to do so could pay any additional costs out of their own pockets. If it was the least expensive option, those who didn?t want the bother could also pay the price for that choice.

Besides giving householders an idea of how much damage their rubbish causes, such a scheme has several attractions. Voluntary recyclers tend to be tidier, sifting their trash with care, thus making recycling more efficient. Hauliers will have an incentive to keep their costs down and find markets for the materials?a discipline tax-funded mandatory programmes lack when their homeowners have no choice but to recycle. As recycling became cheaper, more people would join in, but because the price of recycling reflects the value of recycled materials, gluts would not last.

No doubt, some people who now dutifully sort their garbage would give up. But this is an economic issue, not a moral one; and the purpose of public policy should be to make the true, social costs of disposal become part of everybody?s economic calculation. Central planning is not the answer.

That article doesn't provide a single "fact" which makes it a little difficult to draw a conclusion from it. It also doesn't distinguish between the different types of recyling and we've already shown that at least some recycling is very beneficial.