Recycling and you

[Retroboy]

This excellent although somewhat utopian article on a target "zero-garbage society" (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/03/19/8402369/index.htm?postversion=2007031406) got me thinking about recycling in general. Seeing the dozen clear-plastic bags of trash that some of my subdivision neighbours throw out every garbage day and that contain easily separable items like plastics and newspapers added to my desire to discuss the topic.

What are the sources and level of pressure on you to recycle as much as possible, or even a little? Is it something that you care about at all, or do you preserve your environmental concerns for things like global warming as opposed to landfill space and toxic environment impacts?

Is recycling as much as possible is "the right thing to do", and does this opinion actually influence your behaviour?

-- Retro

[TheDeadlyShoe]

People who don't recycle live in some sort of netherregion hell that exists beyond my experience. There is a comprehension gap between us normal folks and the garbage-freaks; without comprehension, there can be no compromise. They look human on the outside but every Thursday morning its made starkly clear who's civilized and who's not.

Realistically, though, universal recycling is necessary and inevitable. We can't continue digging out stuff, using it, and throwing it in heaps forever; we'll run out.

Morally speaking, not recycling the basics is a humongous waste; in the 21st century, it's conspicious consumption for the sake of it. Aluminum in particular, followed by paper.

Once you get into it I view it as kind of like other basic hygiene tasks. You can understand occasional shirking, but "I don't believe in showers?" ... Stay away!

Seattle implemented mandatory recycling a while ago and its gone pretty much without a hitch (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/262968_nsecondary15.html).

For some reason, the only episode of rugrats I remember from child shoedom involved the city's new recycling program and the 'baby garbage trucks'. TMI, I know.

[ionfish]

My family were ardent recyclers before it was as easy as it is now; I well remember the pain of Saturday mornings when we were marched off - loaded down with bags of paper, cardboard, tins and bottles - to the local recycling bank.

These days it's much easier: the council have people who come and collect it every week, so we just leave it (sorted, of course) in a box outside the house. Still, there are a few things they don't take - cardboard, plastic bottles - so we save those up until we're going somewhere that will take them (the recycling bank near our local supermarket in the case of cardboard, the dump in the case of plastics).

Obviously there's a moral and political element to all this, but I think there are other aspects too. It's just habitual, for one thing; for another, there's something quite satisfying about dealing properly with things rather than just chucking them in the bin. All private documents get shredded, then put on the compost heap, as is all vegetable waste (other food waste gets wrapped in newspaper and left in a box for the council blokes; before that facility became available, we had to just put it in the bin). Garden waste - bits of chopped-up tree, for example - get shredded (different shredder) and then spread on the garden. Having a garden is really a great way of getting rid of stuff: carrot tops, autumn leaves, classified military intelligence, tax collectors.

[Crixx]

Here in York, it's been made easier to recycle than it is to not recycle by reducing the number of rubbish (trash or garbage to Americans) pick-ups, but increasing the amount of recyclable material pickups.

Essentially, if you don't recycle, you don't have the capacity to use the government's convenient rubbish-disposal services - I suppose you'd have to drive out to the tip on a regular basis.

[Octopus Rex]

Some places are not so easy: for example here in Manchester they have plenty recycling bins for paper, glass and cans....yet no way of recycling cardboard? eh? What's that all about? The recycling stations don't have a bin for them either. Normally your card will go in the paper bins, but it said not to on the info sticker. So as result, we have nowehere to recycle cardboard, it gets chucked away.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

One question I'd like to ask, since I'm curious. Is there any other place that has compost recycling?

[ionfish]

Here in Richmond (http://richmond.gov.uk/) there are various options (http://richmond.gov.uk/home/environment/rubbish_waste_and_recycling/recycling_in_the_garden.htm) with regard to garden waste.

[Ironwatsas]

Out here in Oregon, we too have a variety of things we do with natural waste. Yard debris (Grass clippings, used compost, rotted vegtables, etc) has it's own special bin that they pick up from time to time, the contents of which are shredded and turned into topsoil. Paper waste too has it's own bin, but (at least in my case) it sees use as puppy bedding and given it's contaminated nature, cannot be put through the same process as regular, unpooped upon newspaper and is presumably burned at high temprature. Wood waste is usually loaded onto a trailer and taken to the nearby paper mill where it is chipped and turned into either paper or mulch.

But there are always things that cannot be Recycled, but these things are generally something you also don't want in a landfill either. Radiological waste is one thing, we just bury it underground and hope for the best, Domestic biological waste is dissolved with acid, head, and UV radiation, and there are other things that by nature can't be recycled easily. But as opposed to dumping this kind of crap into a landfill, there's always the solution of loading it into a rocket or massdriver and firing it into the Sun.

[TheDividedGod]

I'm pretty big on recycling. Rather, I'm big on efficiency and economic use of available resources, thus, recycling is good for me.

I just wish my city had a better program/tighter policies going on.

...I can't wait for the day when I just have a straight-up matter/energy recycler in my living room that I can fill up with joint roaches and V8 bottles, and then have it pump out a new lazyboy, upon which I will then consume more marijuana and ten-vegetable tomato juice.....sweet, sweet V8......

[Noble]

Just make sure you put power gens next to your mass fabs so you can get the efficiency bonus.

[Baja_Fireork]

Here's something I've always wanted to know. I'm a big fan of recycling, but due to the fact that someone actually has to buy the materials which are recycled, are all recyclables really being recycled, or thrown away due to lack of sales?

[CommodoreKitty]

I try to recycle, and do most of the time. The bigger the object, the more likely I am to recycle it. But I do not recycle because "It's the right thing to do." I do it because I want to, no other.

"Here's something I've always wanted to know. I'm a big fan of recycling, but due to the fact that someone actually has to buy the materials which are recycled, are all recyclables really being recycled, or thrown away due to lack of sales?"

Not really, it is a good PR move for companies to use recycled materials because they can claim that they are green, which brings in a bigger customer base.

[Noble]

Did anyone see the episode of "Penn & Teller's: Bullshit!" where they talk about recycling? According to them, it actually wastes more energy and resources to recycle aluminum than it does to make soda cans out of raw materials. Does anyone know how much merit that statement carries? That seemed like a pretty outrageous claim to me.

[Baja_Fireork]

Even if it did (which I am not so sure is true), the pros of recycling outways this. And I always read that recycling saves a signifigant amount of energy...

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Did anyone see the episode of "Penn & Teller's: Bullshit!" where they talk about recycling? According to them, it actually wastes more energy and resources to recycle aluminum than it does to make soda cans out of raw materials. Does anyone know how much merit that statement carries? That seemed like a pretty outrageous claim to me.

Wow. That's amazing, uh, bullshit. I'm pretty sure - I even double checked - but aluminum is like the poster child for efficiency in recycling.

[Eboli]

I'd recycle more if I didn't have to sort it. Honestly, just put a 10 cent charge instead of a five on every pop can etc. and let me dump it all in one bin please (That's my sit at least).

[Gorb]

My family recycled back when it wasn't needed, the whole bottle bank trips I really enjoyed as a child (must have been the violent smashing of bottles). Therefore they inevitably suffered a bit a derision, usually along the lines of "What's the point?".

Now I'm in a neighbourhood which guards its recycling bins jealously and looks at you with pity if you forget to put the bin out for the binmen.

Funny old world, ain't it?

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I'd recycle more if I didn't have to sort it. Honestly, just put a 10 cent charge instead of a five on every pop can etc. and let me dump it all in one bin please (That's my sit at least).

Its 9000% easier if you maintain seperate bins in your house for the different categories of recyclables. Then you can just dump those in the appropriate street bin.

[Beelzebuddy]

I am an avid non-recycler, even more so than I am a non-conserver of energy. What that means is I take steps to make sure my garbage isn't disposed of properly.

Like turning the lights off when you leave, recycling is a waste of time that serves mainly to give you the warm fuzzies and to be a talking point for local politics. If you want to save energy, turn your heater down. If you want to conserve material (and money, actually), use 3-liter bottles and refillable containers. Seriously, when you peel the plastic label off them (discarding it haphazardly by the side of the road, of course) and fill them with coke, those little Gekkeikan sake bottles look awesome.

What's important to me, though, is how recycling is perceived as vitally important. Look at this invective:
People who don't recycle live in some sort of netherregion hell that exists beyond my experience.You can't buy outrage like this. Aluminum is the most common metal on Earth, yet to hear people like TDS tell it each wasted can leaves the landfill at night to destroy the ozone layer and kill baby seals.

What that equates to, in the end, is a perceived lack of resources. A perceived lack of resources might lead to increased public support for space exploration and mining, which is vitally important to the ultimate goal of getting us the hell off this godforsaken shitheap of a planet.

If chucking an aluminum can into the paper recycling bin can help with that, even remotely, I don't see how anyone could do otherwise.

[Eboli]

Its 9000% easier if you maintain seperate bins in your house for the different categories of recyclables. Then you can just dump those in the appropriate street bin.

It's like 10,000% easier if somehow we paid some guys in a big plant to sort it for us, it would also save me floor space in my apt.

Peronsally though I think the whole economics of the recycling system need to be looked at. I mean someone somewhere is making money off us. I mean we pay for say a can of coke, that means we paid for the drink and the aluminum and everything else that went into it, we also pay the surcharge. When we're done with the coke, if you recycle, you're essentially giving it back to some guy who will then sell it back to the drink company. To put it a little more clearly

You pay and get

Raw materials + Drink + Surcharge

You return your can/bottle you get

Surcharge

Some company (or whoever) get's free raw materials which they can sell back. How come nobody is paying us to buy back the aluminum? Furthermore if you don't recycle you're essentially giving up your surcharge to pay and make sure that this company still ends up with your can (say bums collecting it to make money).

The least they can do is sort the crap for me so I don't have to. Because I know someone somewhere in the big recylcing chain is saving money, and therefore making more money off our sorting. They've got all of us to do their sorting for them, and that means they don't have to pay somebody a wage to do it.

[snrjefe]

Sometimes, recycling as much as possible simply isn't practical. I could recycle some of the plastic containers that we end up with at home, but our garbage company doesn't take certain types. The others could be recycled, but I'd have to take them elsewhere and driving 20+ miles to recycle 5-10 containers seems counterproductive. For these items we rely on the second R in "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." They make great tub toys for the wee-one.

[skullhunter01]

I tryed it, and they never emptyed the bin, so i phoned them and got no answers, so i said fook it and use normle bins for everything.

[No1lives4ever]

Actualy Eboli, around here they DO pay you for aluminium.
Something like 2 Euro's a kilogram. Don't ask me how many empty soda cans go into a kilogram :(

[Eboli]

I'm glad to hear that. They don't around here. And don't worry I know you'd need a lot of cans and stuff to make it worthwhile but still it's the principle!

[snrjefe]

Or just throw a BYOB party once a month and take the empties to the recycler. We've got machines at the grocery store that take glass, plastic and aluminum and print receipts you redeem at the register. When I was getting my bachelor's degree, this little technique stretched my budget quite a bit. At $0.05 per container, one good party and you've got Taco Bell for a week.

[HunterX]

In NYC recycling is mandatory and some hefty fines can be had if you don't. We have mixed media recycling where certain plastic containers (mostly narrow neck bottles, milk jugs, basically anything that once held liquid), milk/juice cartons, metal, and glass bottles/jars go in one bag, and paper and cardboard go in another (except corrigated cardboard, that has to be tied up). I still take soda/beer bottles back to the store for the deposit (helps pay for more soda and beer :D). Garden waste goes into general garbage, but that's only because there's no yard waste pick up program. The exception to this is during the fall leaf pickup when the department of sanitation picks up the gathered leaves.

The city also has a new electronics recycling program, though most of that is still thrown out in the general garbage. I try to go trashing every once in a while looking for salvageable electronics (mostly computers and mostly for my own collecting, but some to sell after repairing if repairable), but with the likes of eBay the pickings are slim these days (in fact I haven't found anything in about five years).

[Hunterxl]

Did anyone see the episode of "Penn & Teller's: Bullshit!" where they talk about recycling? According to them, it actually wastes more energy and resources to recycle aluminum than it does to make soda cans out of raw materials. Does anyone know how much merit that statement carries? That seemed like a pretty outrageous claim to me.

Wow. That's amazing, uh, bullshit. I'm pretty sure - I even double checked - but aluminum is like the poster child for efficiency in recycling.
Get you shit right first, Penn & Teller said Aluminum and glass is the easiest (Only Lol) to recycle.
Recycling is mostly bullshit with a few exceptions, but for the most part recycling is a waste on to it's own. If your recycling anything other then Aluminum and Glass your are Polluting!!! sounds crazy right.
Well look at it from this, Paper is an example of wasteful recycling.

Before the paper can be recycled it needs to be shipped to the location often to 3 different warehouses before it reaches the plant itself, all of that requires fuel and energy that could have been spared if placed in a landfill but that's not all. To process the paper into pulp it has to be shredded, pulverized and homogenized an intensively manual process. After that’s all done the paper is placed in vats filled with chemicals and is boiled into a pulp but it doesn’t end there, now the pulp needs to be cleaned (Ink, Bleach, Dirt, Ect) after that’s all done your left with a toxic sludge laced with methyl-mercury (Fun Fact: The largest source of Organic mercury yes you guessed it the paper industry. What the fuck do you do with that shit you can’t just dump because it quite toxic and no one has no use for it!???! So now instead of having a trash issue you have a toxic waste issue. That’s not even mentioning the rest of the paper manufacturing process, which adds to pollution and energy drain. All that instead of letting it decompose in a landfill, good job environmentalists.

Now for the exceptions,
Think about it people actually go through your trash for Aluminum because it’s actually worth something, it takes MORE energy to get raw Aluminum then it is to use what we already have! The same cannot be said for paper, plastic, ect. I know this information because my dad is in the metal recycling business especially when comes to mercury or tin.

[Octopus Rex]

In some places they have a policy of taking the beer bottles back and you get a cheaper crate. That's pretty cool, isn't much hassle and has a direct incentive to it. Godd job! to those guys.

[snrjefe]

@HunterX: It's my understanding that electronic recycling can be quite profitable due to the precious metals that can be recovered. "There's gold in them there chips!"

Any word on the success of the program? I'd imagine many electronics find their ways off the curbs and into basement and garages before the trucks ever get to them. In my previous county, they had a week where you could put just about anything you wanted on the curb and they'd come with backhoes and hauler trucks and take it all away. I put out a couple of old computers/monitors/printers and they were gone in less than an hour.

[No1lives4ever]

Well yes, young kids love old computers/machines as long as they look complex/ have lots of parts.

I know I did.. must have given my parents a headache back then. Bringing in old crap whenever I found it on the curb.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

HunterXL: um... how much else is there thats typically recycled other than paper,glass, cans, plastic, and compost? Plastic is easy to make a case for; it's made of oil. Inefficient now will start to look pretty efficient soon. Glass and cans are efficient on their own. Compost... I have no idea what they do with the yard waste and compost and greasy pizza boxes, actually. So if these penn & teller guys are just dumping on paper recycling, that's pretty weak. They might have a point if forests were in better shape.

Eboli: Umm... its very easy to sort. When you throw away item a, put it in bin a. It doesn't require any extra effort on your part. If entire urban areas of people manage to do this, so can you.

Beelze: Re: The majority of your post. You gotta be kidding me.
Re: the rest of it.

The 3 Rs

Reduce
Recycle
Reuse

Of course you should keep your consumption down as much as possible. But there's nothing mutually exclusive here.

I followed up a bit on aluminum. As a point of curiousity, theoretically accessible Bauxite (the principle source of aluminum) will run out in about 250 years at current usage, and it will probably become nonviable long before that. FAr in the future but not an eternity. It would be prudent to stretch it out.

[CommodoreKitty]

I do not know about how much money can be made fron recycling chips. I destroyed three old computers in as many days to rip out as much gould as I could, and I got most of it, but after three computers, all I got was something like 2 grams. Not to mention, I think it was plated.

[FUBAR624]

Remember recycling is not only about energy and raw materials, but it is also about space.

Specifically landfill space. Which is becoming more and more scarce. Especially when materials that dont decompose are not recycled (such as Styrofoam).

[mailpup]

In California AB 939 makes it mandatory for cities and counties to reduce their landfill waste by recycling. Recycling isn't just a matter of energy savings or lack of same nor is it just a matter of reducing the use of raw materials but it is also to reduce the volume of waste. Landfills are finite, at least those close to large population areas. Each city or county has different strategies.It's like 10,000% easier if somehow we paid some guys in a big plant to sort it for us, it would also save me floor space in my apt.Some cities actually do this. Recyclables are mixed with ordinary trash and it is picked up and sorted elsewhere. However, I think most have some kind of separation at the curbside. In the City of Los Angeles we have yard waste separate from paper, metal, plastic, glass, etc. We have a third bin for regular trash.

On a personal side, I've been recycling even before the there were formal government programs, although not as diligently. For example, I recycled aluminum cans and newspapers at a local recycling yard. They also paid for corrugated cardboard which is not the same "cardboard" as in cereal boxes. For years I have also recycled my used motor oil and oil filters (I'm a shadetree mechanic) and these days I recycle electronic waste and other "hazardous" waste at city centers set up for it. Did I mention I am the recycling coordinator for my department at work? Despite that, I'm not obsessed with it, just fairly conscientious.

Some municipalities try to close the recycling loop by encouraging the use of materials made from recycled material. Recycled paper and re-refined motor oil are a couple examples that the city tries to use more of in it's own consumption. On the West Coast countries like China use a lot of our recyclables which they return to us in the form of new products and packaging.

[Beelzebuddy]

The majority of your post. You gotta be kidding me.I'm super serial.

I followed up a bit on your research. As a point of curiosity, your dire quote should have been phrased "Bauxite [...] will run out in about 250 years at current usage in India. (http://www.indiainfoline.com/sect/alum/ch07.html)"

[HunterX]

As far as electronics are concerned: the ICs are actually worth quite a bit more whole than the gold they contain or even the gold in the rest of the device. There's a huge market for those ICs since they can be reused (especially things like power regulators, logic gates, and semiconductors (mostly transistors)). Even the resistors and capacitors are reusable (the former more so than the latter). They actually find their way back into the low cost (read: cheap) electronics that are on the market and proprietary, one off devices that serve a company's purpose that are then usually broken down and parted out for other things. Other things like the platters in HDDs (as long as they're not cracked), motors (as long as they aren't burnt out/are fixable), and LED laser emitters in optical drives (as long as they aren't burnt out) are also highly recyclable.

[The Collector]

Aluminum requires a crapload of power for the process of turning the ore into aluminum. I think it's either high voltage or high current...

We get a trash can, a recycle can and a green can. I used to recycle cans when young, but my time grew scarce, but I can still throw them in the recycle can. Grocery bags I use for small trash bags, cuts the need for buying a category of trash bags from market.

But sometimes it's rather preposterous when you run into people who *think* that simply using recycled paper means they're doing heroic things for the enviroment: we aren't. Paper is at most 30% recycled, and the other 70% is from a live tree. More would get done by being efficient on the input end rather than putting outputs back into input.

[SquidDNA]

"Paper is at most 30% recycled, and the other 70% is from a live tree."
You mean.. they don't even kill the tree first?!?

[Trizzdog]

I recycle most of the recyclables, simply because it's almost no hassle for me (and I want my deposit back goddamnit!). But when it comes to paper and cardboard, I never recycle it. Depending what's in it, it either ends up in my compost, or in my campfire.

Really, for the effort it takes to recycle paper and cardboard here, it's probably much more efficient for me to just burn it or let it rot back into the ground (and let our logging industry prosper!).

[Retroboy]

What that equates to, in the end, is a perceived lack of resources. A perceived lack of resources might lead to increased public support for space exploration and mining, which is vitally important to the ultimate goal of getting us the hell off this godforsaken shitheap of a planet.

If chucking an aluminum can into the paper recycling bin can help with that, even remotely, I don't see how anyone could do otherwise. Sounds like more of a feeble excuse for selfish short-term laziness than it does a deliberate strategy to improve humanity's future, although your point about overhype of the actual value of recycling is well taken.

I strongly disagree with your assessment that this is a "godforsaken shitheap of a planet", given it's the only place we know of within a light year that we can able around outside for at least some of the year without special protective gear. Perhaps that was just hyperbole to assist in stressing your point?

-- Retro

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I used a table from the wiki (i checked it against the usgs and it seemed alright) regarding world bauxite mining rates and theoretical reserves.

[Beelzebuddy]

Perhaps that was just hyperbole to assist in stressing your point?It was.

"The earth is the cradle of humankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever." -- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

As for laziness, my not-recycling accomplishes the same thing as everyone else's recycling, i.e. virtually nothing. It does serve, however, as a talking point to expose the over-hyped nature of certain issues and the fact that there are far more important things to concern ourselves with.

Also, environmental issues in general are too often used for nothing more than ego stroking. You'll never find a more smug blowhard than someone who thinks he's got the entire world's best interests at heart. I must admit to a smidgen of sadistic pleasure when I can take him down a peg.

[Harmanoff]

What are these far more important things then in your clearly unsmug non-blowhard opinion? :rolleyes:

[Noble]

Unfortunately beelze, everything you type on the subject makes you come off as just as ignorant and smug as the people you argue against. Recycling has it's benefits, and just because someone wants to actively try to help the planet along doesn't make them a smug ego stroking ass hole. Maybe they actually care about the world and arent just doing it to look cool. Ever think of that?

Could you please come up with some actuall arguments against recycling instead of just padding your posts with ranting about how people who recycle are living human trash?

[Starfisher]

Recycling has it's benefits, and just because someone wants to actively try to help the planet along doesn't make them a smug ego stroking ass hole. Maybe they actually care about the world and arent just doing it to look cool. Ever think of that?What benefits? Recycling, at the moment, is equivalent to going to church on Sunday and then having a six day hooker coke murder fest.

Really.

The only common consumer material that actually works to recycle at the moment is aluminum, due to the ease it can be refined back into something usable, and the relative difficulty in mining and refining it. Other metals obviously work out - Bangladesh gets all its steel and iron out of it's ridiculously horrifying ship scrapping program - but they're not commonly recycled in the every week sense.

Recycling paper is purposeless - it's far more efficient and clean to simply grow more trees, and let the used stuff decompose naturally. Glass has similar issues. I can melt sand and make glass, or I can collect, sort, decontaminate and melt used glass containers. When we start to run out of sand, let me know. Plastic is entirely uneconomincal to recycle due to the nature of the molecule and the dyes used in its manufacture - that thermal depolymerization plant doesn't seem to have taken off, though I never could find out what the reason was. You can boil it down and get your oil back, but it costs so much that we'll probably be making plastic from oil in the ground up until that hits a few hundred a barrel.

The irking part is that after you've diligently sorted out your garbage, you turn on your computer and post about it on the internet. That simple act, the infrastructure required to support it and the technology needed to allow it, blows all your ineffectual mucking about with containers out of the water. Right now you're reading off of a chunk of high technology that required tons and tons of pollution to create and distribute, requires tons of pollution to power, and further damage to the environment to maintain everything.

Beelze overstates the smug asshole part of his argument, sure. People who recycle generally are doing it out of a simple desire to do the right thing, not eco-assholery. But it's the same desire that drives them to go to church on Sunday, then ignore most of what they hear, while wearing a cross and voting Republican. People make a token gesture that feels good and takes enough effort to look important, identify with it, and then don't feel bad when they turn around and render it irrelevant in their daily lives.

Hell, I think all this and still recycle diligently. I figure that putting all this crap in the same place will make it easier for future generations to deal with, whenever they have to deal with it. But I try to be realistic in my outlook, and recycling is one of those things that doesn't come close to living up to the hype you hear all the time.

[Beelzebuddy]

What are these far more important things then in your clearly unsmug non-blowhard opinion?Space exploration. Human rights abuses. Shoddy education systems. Crocheting.

I'd place pushing for recycling as the environmental equivalent of demanding protection from terrorists. Both are highly charged political issues that come up nearly every time the subject is approached. Both are hugely supported by the populace at large, to the extent that any response but "I am absolutely in favor of it" is political suicide. Legislation for neither accomplishes anything, even in the long run. They're both political red herrings, generally rising to the forefront when there's nothing better to talk about.

Could you please come up with some actuall arguments against recycling instead of just padding your posts with ranting about how people who recycle are living human trash?Here you go. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_criticism)

Could you please come up with some actuall arguments for recycling instead of just padding your post with ranting about helping the planet in some unspecified way? The only one I've found so far that stands up to any degree of scrutiny is "landfill space," which for some reason usually fails to make it on the pamphlets.


Starfisher:
It's not your average Joe recycler I was talking about, it's the kind of vindictive, foaming at the mouth greenie who staunchly defends his position despite lacking any good reason why. The average guy, presented with my argument, would more than likely think "Yeah, it might be pointless. But it makes me feel good to do it anyway." That guy I have no problem with; to each his own and at least he listened. The guy who comes up behind me, takes my can from the trash and puts it in recycling? Him.

You might also find it interesting to note that aluminum cans constitute only 1% of the aluminum mined annually. Even if every single can were recycled or none were, the total lifespan of our reserves would not be significantly impacted.

[HunterX]

Fisher, I recycle because I have to. If I didn't the depratment of sanitation would hit me with hefty fines. And I have a feeling that that's the reason most people participate in curb side recycling programs.

[Starfisher]

Hunter: In the cities, that's probably true. I imagine most law and order is like that ;P

But everywhere else, where it's not mandatory, people tend to do it because they feel they should. Which is fine, really, it is. I don't care if someone goes to church on Sunday to feel better about their drinking and womaninzing. I think it's kind of stupid, but it's an hour a week. I waste way more than an hour on equally worthless pursuits, so I don't get all bent out of shape. But if that Christian starts peddling Jesus to me, or takes religious stances on political issues, I get a little pissed at the hypocrisy.

Recycling, to me, is the same way. I recycle because that's how I was raised, and because I figure sorting shit out now doesn't really hurt all that much. If I started getting in other people's faces about not putting their cans in the right spot, tossing off environmental justifications, I should fully expect a Beelze-style beatdown unless I live in the wilderness subsisting on roots, berries and the occasional small game. The rest of my life so far outweighs my recycling on the environmental impact-o-meter that getting righteous about it is bullshit.

[HunterX]

I totally agree with you with your stance on recyling. It's just that if you go to an area where it's not required by law or the enforcement of those laws are lax, I bet you'll find very few people actually recycle due to the lazyness of the population or due to that fact that it's well known that, despite best efforts, most of the recyleables end up in the landfill anyway.

[archaon376]

I always recycle whenever possible, though I'm not an environmental nut, or even that concerned. I guess it's just the right thing to do. I'm usually a clean person, I always clean after myself and it does pain me to see people leaving garbage behind in the caf. I suppose that's why I recycle.

[Paladin]

The only reliable method of recycling is to put a small tax on everyone, and have a professional sorting center that all the area's refuse goes through before being sent on to it's final destinations. Many people are simply too lazy to separate their own.