 - Last login: 2 weeks agoLuthercymru
- luthercymru is a 30 year old guy from Swansea, Wales, UK.
- Likes 1,540 pages, 4 videos, 9 photos • 9 fans
- Member since Aug 15, 2005
I'm a father of one, a computer programmer and graphic artist from Wales.
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Our Widespread Faith In Recycling Is Misplaced
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Nov 29, 2005 2:25am
1 review
•http://www.cato.org/dailys/8-27-97.html
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It shocks me that someone can have the mental agility to write an article spanning several paragraphs and yet fill it will dangerous and misleading half truths.
The author makes the common assumption favoured by most modern capitalists: that only the internal costs, the bottom line, matter. This is a fallacy. Landfills and not simply places where we dump our carelessly generated waste, they are toxic time-bombs that degrade our environment and will continue to do so for generations to come. Our grandchildren will curse
us for our idiotic indulgence.
Recycling does take energy and care must be taken to do things as locally as possible: shipping goods half-way across the world in order for them to be pulled apart in regions that have cheaper labour or more lax environmental laws is just plain wrong and, in terms of true cost (i.e. factoring in those 'externalities' so often conveniently ignored by business), very inefficient.
So, does recycling paper use more water than growing a making fresh paper? That's quite a difficult one to calculate and although I've found sources that claim that recycling uses less water, I cannot verify their veracity so will not include them in my critique of this article.
Note that the article itself presents unverified statements as fact.
The amount of bleaching, washing and dying of recycled paper depends of its final use. These processes are also needed with paper derived from fresh growth. I also doubt the article takes into account the amount of water needed to grow a tree to maturity in the first place.
The article also suggests that the fact that there is work to be done in recycling is a bad thing. Hang on a minute, isn't work (particularly unskilled, minimum wage work) the fundamental basis of the Laizes-Fare free market capitalist system so beloved of right wing think tanks like the Cato institute? I'm sorry, maybe I've missed something but it's been my experience that industrialists just love activities from which they can make money by using the labour of underpaid voiceless masses who can be easily replaced with machinery or even cheaper labour. Now, it's my opinion that all workers deserve far more protection from the ravages of unethical corporations but I certainly don't believe that useful work is a bad thing.
The author should worry more about the huge numbers of workers higher up the societal food chain who perform truly useless (or even detrimental) work for far greater financial reward. The people who spend all day shuffling pieces of paper around for no good reason. The people who print off every email. The people who create all the waste in the first place.
The simple fact is that people in overdeveloped nations waste huge amounts unnecessarily. Environmentalists have a simple mantra: 'reduce, reuse, recycle'. The idea is that you do it in that order. The idea of reduction
is an anathema to industrialists as successful implementation would mean that their economy wouldn't grow. Perpetual growth is like perpetual motion: it only exists in the minds of deluded fools. Entropy is real and the economy feeds off the natural resources of the world and the labour of its people and animals. When these things run out or become degraded,
the economy will crash. It would be better to find a more sustainable steady state where we waste far less. This is a great deal simpler than many people think. The best way to reduce dependence on packaging and wasted transport is to buy locally produced food.
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