{"id":249,"date":"2010-01-22T07:39:47","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T07:39:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/?p=249"},"modified":"2010-01-22T07:41:43","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T07:41:43","slug":"glass-recycling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/2010\/01\/glass-recycling\/","title":{"rendered":"Glass Recycling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read Part 1 of this article here.<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Take an empty beer bottle. We can either throw that glass bottle away or recycle it.<\/p>\n

Assume for a moment that we all want what\u2019s best for the planet. Assume, therefore, that we want to use as few resources as possible.<\/p>\n

Should we recycle our beer bottle, then? Or should we throw it away?<\/p>\n

And how do we know?<\/p>\n

Do we believe the Al Gore\u2019s of the world, who assert what we should do, for no other reason than that they assert it? Or do we look into the actual data ourselves?<\/p>\n

Ask yourself this:<\/p>\n

If recycling is more expensive than using new materials, can it really be more efficient?<\/p>\n

The free market prices its resources by what\u2019s called opportunity cost.<\/p>\n

Opportunity cost is not arbitrary.<\/p>\n

It means that producers won\u2019t choose packaging which costs more if that packaging is identical (or inferior) to other options.<\/p>\n

For years now, many of you have spent thousands upon thousands upon thousands of hours sorting, washing, de-labeling, and resorting bottles so that these bottles could be recycled.<\/p>\n

The horrible truth of the matter is that most of these hours have been a complete waste, the very thing you sought to avoid.<\/p>\n

But more than that: the environment is worse off because of your efforts.<\/p>\n

Most of the glass you\u2019ve worked hard to have recycled is now resting in some landfill \u2013 via a very circuitous, and very costly, route.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a fact.<\/p>\n

Here are a few more:<\/p>\n

Recycled glass is called cullet.<\/p>\n

The process of producing cullet consists of grinding up glass, which in turn requires machines and much electricity.<\/p>\n

Recycling glass is a thoroughly industrial process, make no mistake.<\/p>\n

Cullet glass is full of additives, contaminants, and impurities, most of which are trapped within the cullet, so that they remain harmless. If, however, someone again melts the glass, which is precisely what happens when it is recycled, these contaminants are released into the earth, water, and air.<\/p>\n

Different colored glasses cannot be merged for bottles.<\/p>\n

Mixed cullet is, for the most part, useless.<\/p>\n

Clear glass and green glass are usually landfilled.<\/p>\n

Glass broken beyond a certain point is landfilled.<\/p>\n

Amber glass is the only recyclable glass that\u2019s remotely in demand.<\/p>\n

Silica \u2013 also known as sand, which is what glass is made of \u2013 is exceptionally cheap and exceptionally abundant.<\/p>\n

Silica production is not a danger to the environment, by any standard. Indeed, silica is made into glass without any extra steps or expense, unlike recycled glass, which is much more involved and much more environmentally unfriendly.<\/p>\n

That is why virgin glass is cheaper than cullet glass. It also, incidentally, provides you with a critical clue into something you should know the next time you ponder whether to throw your bottles into the trash, or into the recycling bin.<\/p>\n

If cullet glass is more expensive and also more toxic, and if cullet glass usually ends up in landfills anyway, why, then, do we bother recycling glass?<\/p>\n

A good question, for which, unfortunately, there is no good answer.<\/p>\n

Here, however, are some of the bad ones:<\/p>\n

“Recycling is always cheaper, no matter how much it costs in terms of those Federal Reserve notes you call money,” say a number of my critics.<\/p>\n

And:<\/p>\n

\u201cSilica mining rapes Mother Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can certainly believe this nonsense if you like, and I, for one, will certainly never convince you otherwise, no matter the evidence.<\/p>\n

But you should be aware of how much more waste you\u2019re creating, and how much more you are polluting the environment.<\/p>\n

You can also believe, as many never tire of telling me, that \u201crecycling has a spiritual component,\u201d which in turn gives recycled products \u201cspecial value that price cannot measure.\u201d<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m speaking to those of you who have not yet been blinded by the environmental dogma<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If price is a reliable indicator \u2013 and it is \u2013 then the majority of recycling is incontrovertibly irrational.<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that many American cities, though explicitly \u201cgreen,\u201d have nevertheless come to see what for many of us has been blindingly obvious for years: glass recycling is an utter waste. It\u2019s a waste of time, and it\u2019s a waste of resources and money. Furthermore, it\u2019s bad for the environment.<\/p>\n

That is why many American cities have wisely done away with glass recycling \u2013 green glass in particular, which is so plentiful that it\u2019s ridiculous to recycle it, and the cullet market for which is so overwhelmed by an excess supply that recycling it costs big time, in every way, because so much of it is ultimately landfilled.<\/p>\n

There are, of course, a number of other cities that \u201chave tried to delete green glass from the list of recyclable materials, but face a political veto from recycling enthusiasts. And, interestingly, the political opposition comes precisely from those people who will end up paying more for the inefficiency of the recycling they insist they want. Taxpayers, citizens, the folks who take their garbage out to the street, want to ask the city to put green glass back on the recyclable list, regardless of the cost\u201d (Michael Munger, \u201cThink Globally, Act Irrationally: Recycling<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n

The Coors Recycling Plant is where all recyclable glass in the entire Colorado region goes. An employee there, who requested anonymity, told me this:<\/p>\n

\u201cA great deal of what has been sorted for recycling does end up being landfilled, despite what you hear, because of contamination or lack of market for the recycled material.\u201d<\/p>\n

How much?<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t ask.\u201d<\/p>\n

One estimate: less than half.<\/p>\n

Another estimate: less than a third.<\/p>\n

Another: less than a quarter.<\/p>\n

Conservatively, this means that if 80,000 tons are hauled for recycling, about 40,000 tons ends up in a landfill.<\/p>\n

To put that into perspective:<\/p>\n

Rather than throw your bottles into the trash and then pay one of our fine local haulers to take that trash to the dump, as we used to do in the good old days before the religion of environmentalism swept across the country like a plague, we are now paying our local government, in the form of subsidies, so that we can now spend thousands upon thousands of hours cleaning, de-labeling, sorting, and resorting glass, so that we can then pay for more trucks to pump more pollution into the air and use more fossil fuels in the process, so that finally our bottles can be hauled a couple of hundred miles (roundtrip), so that they can then, at last, be landfilled.<\/p>\n

That is the beauty of green politics and all their profligate governmental bureaucracies.<\/p>\n

That is our earth-friendly greens at their finest.<\/p>\n

It is also sheer madness.<\/p>\n

Ask yourself another question:<\/p>\n

How has such a fraud been perpetrated?<\/p>\n

Answer: the neo-Marxist philosophy<\/a> of environmentalism and your tacit sanction of that philosophy.<\/p>\n

Recycling \u201cfeels good,” for instance.<\/p>\n

It has a \u201cspiritual component.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recycling \u201csimply must be better for the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Humans are a blight upon the earth.<\/p>\n

Reader, you\u2019re being lied to.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been brainwashed into believing that throwing away your Heinenken bottles will destroy the planet.<\/p>\n

If you only hear a single thing that I\u2019m saying, let it be this: if something is viable, it will never need to be subsidized.<\/p>\n

If subsidies are called for, that thing is wrong.<\/p>\n

Recycling must by necessity be subsidized because it is inherently wasteful. When recycling is not wasteful, it\u2019s done voluntarily, as it\u2019s been done since the dawn of humankind.<\/p>\n

If you doubt this, read Rubbish, by one of our foremost rubbish experts, Doctor William Rathje.<\/p>\n

And remember this also:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a simple test for determining whether something is a resource (something valuable) or just garbage (something you want to dispose of at the lowest possible cost, including costs to the environment). If someone will pay you for the item, it’s a resource. Or, if you can use the item to make something else people want, and do it at lower price or higher quality than you could without that item, then the item is also a resource. But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, or if other things made with that item cost more or have lower quality, then the item is garbage\u201d (Michael Munger, “Think Globally, Act Irrationally: Recycling”).
\n<\/p>\n

Read Part One of this article here.<\/a><\/i>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read Part 1 of this article here. Take an empty beer bottle. We can either throw that glass bottle away or recycle it. Assume for a moment that we all want what\u2019s best for the planet. Assume, therefore, that we want to use as few resources as possible. Should we recycle our beer bottle, then? … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Glass Recycling”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[116,228],"tags":[251,248,252,246,232,245,247,249,229,2601,250],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6294,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions\/6294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rayharvey.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}