Analysis
Everyone likes recycling! High schoolers complaining about their school's false recycling program, organizations that regularly publish works about the environment, and bureaucrats laud recycling for its benefits to the environment and economy by conserving resources and cost, and through the cheaper path of production using recycled material instead of virgin resources, recycling creates a win-win situation for both humans and the Earth. If this is the case…
Who Hates Recycling?
It turns out a variety of individuals as diverse as those in favor of recycling, from college economics professors to Las Vegas comedians, share a common stance against recycling, which is also formed around economic and environmental issues. Through their mode of analysis, recycling uses more resources from the earth and from our pockets than extracting raw material from the ground does, in addition to creating inferior products. So let's nail those idiots!
Debunking _Everything_ You Know
recycling is inefficientA common argument is that recycling uses more energy to form the same product that could be made from raw materials, and as an inefficient process it does not accomplish its intended goal of saving the limited resources of the Earth. If recycling a computer takes more energy than it does to create one from raw materials, then recycling's goal of conserving resources is not met when it is applied to computers. While not everyone has had the privilege of recycling a computer, a good proportion of dwellers in the suburbs of the United States and Canada have experienced cubside recycling; following the sweep of garbage trucks, recycling ones roll down a street while workers collect the contents of blue bins put out on the curb and then violently fling the bins back, which usually causes some amount of damage. The collection and transport portion of recycling is often under attack for both economical and environmental reasons due to its inefficiency, which would be the first stumble recycling makes. The extra truck following the garbage truck makes a visual clue that additional measures are needed to implement recycling just as any program; instead of one truck driving down your street once a week, there may be twice as many trucks rumbling around. However, just as there are specialized trucks, workers, and equipment to collect, transport and process curbside recyclables, there are equivalents in mining, transporting, and preparing raw materials for manufacture. The provisions for waste and mining have already been in place until an extra player, the recycling one, comes in. A relay race of two runners has turned into one with three; is this extra fellow going to hurt the elapsed time or not?
Let's investigate whether or not recycling slows down the race by comparing it with the mining process, another method through which the materials for products can be acquired. In the race, the recycling truck usually must make sequential stops down down a street due to the nature of curbside pickup, which allows households to conveniently place their waste in front of their yard. When compared to the point source of material like a mine, at which trucks drive in, get loaded, and leave, the method that a recycling truck takes to fill itself up is inefficient; as opposed to speeding to a point, stopping, and then speeding away, it must slowly creep down the street at a speed proportional to how late the poor driver stuck behind it is late for work. The one slight problem with the mine is its temporal nature; there will not be a constant amount of effort required to continue to extract material from the mine, and a strip mine provides an excellent visual. As the top layers of dirt are stripped away, machinery needs to devised to reach the resources located deeper in the ground, something that does not come without a price tag. Extraction of other resources such as oil have engineered methods to best reach the oil wells deep in the ground. Eventually the resource source will become depleted, forcing extraction to leave the now-barren area in search of another site, while the sources for the recycling truck will not be changing significantly. By extending the timeframe, the potential problems with mining are brought out, making it a less effective competitor to recycling.
Start digging around almost anywhere, and you'll find that the pieces of dirt and rock you uncover isn't homogeneous; one rock might not look like a solid hunk of material X. Mines aren't wells in the ground filled with little cubes of pure minerals, and another example can be geodes, little nuggets of rock that have crystal formations embedded into the surface. The scoops of earth from the mines have to be processed in some manner or else paperclips would have tiny chips of rock embedded in them if the truck directly dumped its cargo on the production belt. There is a method for filtering and purifying the ingredients to produce pure products, like glass that is actually clear, similar to the requisite processing recycled goods must go through that critics label as "wasteful" due to the additional effort that is required to make products from recycled material. Both processes are inefficient, and any numerical proof over which method is more inefficient is trivial (see "About Numbers").
recycling saves trees/energy/resources/___
The process of collecting recycleables is not a decent alternative either. Despite multiple sites' declarations that recycling saves energy, most of the support is given by figures that are often left uncited, a method of proof that simply does not work. Without the compelling percentage reduction, a sample passage would read like,
"Recycling aluminum requires less energy than producing aluminum from bauxite ore. Making paper from recycled stock requires less energy than using wood pulp. Containers made from recycled plastic save energy required to make the same product from virgin material. [...] Virtually every material recycled uses less energy than using virgin materials."
The "argument" presented in favor of recycling is a string of facts without any context, and it could easily work as on a page against recycling if the order were reversed to "Producing aluminum from bauxite ore requires less energy than recycling aluminum." While adding support, such as including the chemical reaction for Al(OH)_3 + AlOOH --> Al(s) and explaining how this equation's rate constant dictates how much energy needs to be inputted, for each statement may work well on paper, calculated empirical data often deviates from actuality. Even if on paper goods produced from recycled materials required less energy, in practice a minor detail like the method the material is introduced into the reaction chamber; perhaps since the recycled good slowly enters through a conveyor belt the reaction isn't optimal at the instant new pieces enter the chamber. The raw materials could just be inserted in such a way that it had a higher yield of useable material er energy unit inputted, and research is often commissioned to account for any possible combination of occurences not documented on paper. As a result of unscrupulous groups commissioning the research or different environments, the outcome for a statistic such as one comparing the cost of curbside recycling to disposal ranges from 55 percent more to not that much. An argument based purely on research is not sufficient.
So What?
Recall the era of Homo erectus, Homo sapiens sapiens, and all of our forebearers when they were competing for survival with vicious beasts of might at most times of their waking and sleeping hours, in a game where the losers don't go home at all. Instead of just making the curve to survival, much like many students do with their grades, our descendants excelled to the point where they made tools, harnessed fires, and developed sedentary lifestyles based on agriculture; Homo sapiens were the "A+" students, perching comfortably at the top watching the chaos beneath them that couldn't possibly reach them. Instead of maintaining their grades, Homo sapiens continued to innovate through civilization to the present level of performance, and there seems to be no cap on our progress.
Except resources. We still haven't been able to change the way the world works, and there still is a limited amount of energy flowing about that is available for our use at an instant, and more worryingly, we are increasing our energy usage with each step we take on the stairs of progress, as witnessed by Power consumption charts for the Central Processing Unit, a piece of hardware almost everywhere in modern Western society. Once we take enough steps up that our energy usage exceeds the maximum available energy, measures such as the rolling blackouts in California would have to be implemented to prevent a big crash.
Although it seems like an absurd possibility that residents in the high-tech society could be without electricity, it became a reality in California in 2001. Let's use the natural drive toward the "A+" to find a solution before we hit the resource ceiling.