Bebop
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Excellent statement to put things in perspective, Jake. It says it all. :cheers1:jake431 said:
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Lil sump'm for the conservatives here.
- Thread starter airfrogusmc
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jake431
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Biltmore Bob said:
Recycling is not a dirty word - it also isn't a panacea. My point is about attitudes - defiantly being unwilling to change them seems childish. All to often it seems like we, as Americans, only seek accountability from other people, not ourselves, and I think that's a shame. I accept reponsibility for my actions (although in this case I suppose lifestyle would be a better word), and as much as I can (time and budget constraints) I try to lead a life that does not thoughlessly impact the world or it's resources just because I live in America and I can.
-Jake
airfrogusmc
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Jake I coudn't have said it better! :cheers1:
photobyalan
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I hate to have to be the one to saw off the limb you're on, but...Biltmore Bob said:
...many recycling plants use waste materials as fuel. Things such as paper waste, shredded tires, plastics, and landfill gases can be used as fuel sources. Waste oil is also popular as a fuel source.
... in the case of steel, it takes approximately 75% less energy to recycle scrap than it takes to manufacture steel from raw materials. (By the way, most steel mills use coke or coal for energy, not oil, others use natural gas)
...in the case of aluminum, it takes 12 to 20 times more energy to produce new aluminum from bauxite than to produce recycled aluminum from scrap. In fact, recycling one aluminum can saves the energy equivalent of six ounces of gasoline.
...recycling paper saves 34 to 60% of the energy required to produce virgin paper from wood.
...recycling plastic saves approximately 88% of the energy required to produce plastic from oil.
Shall I go on?
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Biltmore Bob
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OK...
But I'm still gonna burn tires in my back yard.
Where ya been, Shamus. Radical Islamic Extremeists are selling the US oil and they are enemys of the fee world. And they beat their wives...
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37690
But I'm still gonna burn tires in my back yard.
Where ya been, Shamus. Radical Islamic Extremeists are selling the US oil and they are enemys of the fee world. And they beat their wives...
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=37690
photobyalan
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Bob
I agree with you that our dependence on Middle East oil has caused many problems, not the least of which is the funding of terrorist organizations. The best thing we can do is reduce our demand for foreign oil by using less (sorry, that means giving up the Hummer), maximizing U.S. oil production, and finding a better source of energy. If they run out of money, they're going to have one hell of a time buying guns, or RPG's, or enriched uranium to use against us.
I agree with you that our dependence on Middle East oil has caused many problems, not the least of which is the funding of terrorist organizations. The best thing we can do is reduce our demand for foreign oil by using less (sorry, that means giving up the Hummer), maximizing U.S. oil production, and finding a better source of energy. If they run out of money, they're going to have one hell of a time buying guns, or RPG's, or enriched uranium to use against us.
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photobyalan said:
I suppose we can also suck up all their oil while we save ours and someday they will have none. Then they will still not have money coming in to fund terrorist activities. Remember what that area was before we discovered oil there. It was nothing. They lived like they did in the stone age. Some still do.
Maybe those companies and individuals have that in mind. Deplete that which makes them rich and they return to nothing.
By the way, childishness may be in the eye of the beholder. Stick to the what is right and wrong arguments not the who is right and wrong arguments.
Regards to all,
J
Biltmore Bob
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The Eight Myths of Recycling
By Daniel Benjamin
Garbage is the unavoidable by-product of production and consumption. There are three ways to deal with it, all known and used since antiquity: dumping, burning, and recycling. For thousands of years it was commonplace to dump rubbish on site--on the floor, or out the window. Scavenging domestic animals, chiefly pigs and dogs, consumed the edible parts, and poor people salvaged what they could. The rest was covered and built upon.
Eventually, humans began to use more elaborate methods of dealing with their rubbish. The first modern incinerator (called a "destructor") went into operation in Nottingham, England in 1874. After World War II, landfills became the accepted means of dealing with trash. The modern era of the recycling craze can be traced to 1987, when the garbage barge Mobro 4000 had to spend two months touring the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico before it found a home for its load. The Environmental Defense Fund, the National Solid Waste Management Association (whose members were anxious to line up new customers for their expanding landfill capacity), the press, and finally the Environmental Protection Agency, spun the story of a garbage crisis out of control. By 1995, the majority of Americans thought trash was our number one environmental problem--with 77 percent reporting that increased recycling of household rubbish was the solution. Yet these claims and fears were based on errors and misinformation, which I have compiled into the Eight Great Myths of Recycling.
Myth 1: Our Garbage Will Bury Us
Fact: Even though the United States is larger, more affluent, and producing more garbage, it now has more landfill capacity that ever before. The erroneous opposite impression comes from old studies that counted the number of landfills (which has declined) rather than landfill capacity (which has grown). There are a few places, like New Jersey, where capacity has shrunk. But the uneven distribution of landfill space is no more important than the uneven distribution of automobile manufacturing. Perhaps the most important fact is this: If we permitted our rubbish to grow to the height of New York City's famous Fresh Kills landfill (225 feet), a site only about 10 miles on a side could hold all of America's garbage for the next century.
Myth 2: Our Garbage Will Poison Us
Fact: Almost anything can pose a theoretical threat, but evidence of actual harm from landfills is almost non-existent, as the Environmental Protection Agency itself acknowledges. The EPA has concluded that landfills constructed according to agency regulations can be expected to cause a total of 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years. It isn't household waste, but improperly or illegally dumped industrial wastes that can be harmful. Household recycling programs have no effect on those wastes, a fact ignored by messianic proponents of recycling.
Myth 3: Our Packaging Is Immoral
Fact: Many people argue that the best way to "save landfill space" is to reduce the amount of packaging Americans use, via mandatory controls. But packaging can actually reduce total garbage produced and total resources used. The average American family generates fully one third less trash than does the average Mexican household. The reason is that our intensive use of packaging yields less spoilage and breakage, thereby saving resources, and producing, on balance, less total rubbish. Careful packaging also reduces food poisoning and other health problems.
Over the past 25 years, market incen-tives have already reduced the weights of individual packages by 30 to 70 percent. An average aluminum can weighed nearly 21 grams in 1972; in 2002, that same can weighs in at under 14 grams. A plastic grocery sack was 2.3 mils thick in 1976; by 2001, it was a mere 0.7 mils.
By contrast, the environmentally sensitive New York Times has been growing. A year's worth of the newspaper now weighs 520 pounds and occupies more than 40 cubic feet in a landfill. This is equivalent in weight to 17,180 aluminum cans--nearly a century's worth of beer and soft drink consumption by one person. Clearly, people anxious to heal Mother Earth must forego the Times!
Myth 4: We Must Achieve "Trash Independence"
Fact: Garbage has become an inter-state business, with 47 states exporting the stuff and 45 importing it. Environ-mentalists contend that each state should dispose within its borders all the trash produced within its borders. But why? Transporting garbage across an arbitrary legal boundary has no effect on the envi-ronmental impact of the disposal of that material. Moving a ton of trash is no more hazardous than moving a ton of any other commodity.
Myth 5: We're Squandering Irreplaceable Resources
Fact: Thanks to numerous innovations, we now produce about twice as much output per unit of energy as we did 50 years ago, and five times as much as we did 200 years ago. Automobiles use only half as much metal as in 1970, and one optical fiber carries the same number of calls as 625 copper wires did 20 years ago. Bridges are built with less steel, because steel is stronger and engineering is improved. Automobile and truck engines consume less fuel per unit of work performed, and produce fewer emissions.
To address the issue of paper, the most-promoted form of recycling: The amount of new growth that occurs each year in forests is more than 20 times the number of trees consumed by the world each year for wood and paper. Where loss of forest land is taking place, as in tropical rain forests, it can be traced directly to a lack of private property rights. Governments have used forests, especially the valuable tropical ones, as an easy way to raise quick cash. Wherever private property rights to forests are well-defined and enforced, forests are either stable or growing. More recycling of paper or cardboard would not eliminate tropical forest losses.
Myth 6: Recycling Always Protects the Environment
Fact: Recycling is a manufacturing process, and therefore it too has environ-mental impact. The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment says that it is "not clear whether secondary manufacturing [i.e., recycling] produces less pollution per ton of material processed than primary manufacturing." Recycling merely changes the nature of pollution--sometimes decreasing it, and sometimes increasing it.
This effect is particularly apparent in the case of curbside recycling, which is mandated or strongly encouraged by governments in many communities around the country. Curbside recycling requires that more trucks be used to collect the same amount of waste materials. Instead of one truck picking up 40 pounds of garbage, one will pick up four pounds of recyclables and a second will collect 36 pounds of rubbish.
Los Angeles has estimated that due to curbside recycling, its fleet of trucks is twice as large as it otherwise would be--800 vs. 400 trucks. This means more iron ore and coal mining, more steel and rub-ber manufacturing, more petroleum extracted and refined for fuel--and of course all that extra air pollution in the Los Angeles basin as the 400 added trucks cruise the streets.
Myth 7: Recycling Saves Resources
Fact: Using less of one resource usually means using more of another. Curbside recycling is substantially more costly and uses far more resources than a program in which disposal is combined with a voluntary drop-off/buy-back option. The reason: Curbside recycling of household rubbish uses huge amounts of capital and labor per pound of material recycled. Overall, curbside recycling costs between 35 and 55 percent more than simply disposing of the item. It typically wastes resources.
In the ordinary course of daily living, we already reuse most higher value items. The only things that intentionally end up in the trash are both low in value and costly to reuse or recycle. Yet these are the items that municipal recycling programs are targeting--the very things that consumers have already decided are too worthless or costly to deal with further. All of the profitable, socially productive opportunities for recycling were long ago co-opted by the private sector, because they pay back. The bulk of all curbside recycling programs simply waste resources.
Myth 8: Without Forced Mandates, There Wouldn't Be Any Recycling
Fact: Long before state or local governments had even contemplated the word recycling, the makers of steel, aluminum, and thousands of other products were recycling manufacturing scraps. Some operated post-consumer drop-off centers. As for the claim that the private sector promotes premature or excessive disposal, this ignores an enormous body of evidence to the contrary. Firms only survive in the marketplace if they take into account all costs. Fifty years ago, when labor was cheap compared to materials, goods were built to be repaired, so that the expensive materials could be used for a longer period of time. As the price of labor has risen and the cost of materials has fallen, manufacturers have responded by building items to be used until they break, and then discarded. There is no bias against recycling; there is merely a market-driven effort to conserve the most valuable resources.
Informed, voluntary recycling con-serves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. Mandatory programs, however, in which people are directly or indirectly compelled to do what they know is not sensible, routinely make society worse off. Such programs force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard.
Except in a few rare cases, the free market is eminently capable of providing both disposal and recycling in an amount and mix that creates the greatest wealth for society. This makes possible the widest and most satisfying range of human endeavors. Simply put, market prices are sufficient to induce the trash-man to come, and to make his burden bearable, and neither he nor we can hope for any better than that.
Daniel Benjamin is a professor at Clemson University and a senior associate at PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center.
By Daniel Benjamin
Garbage is the unavoidable by-product of production and consumption. There are three ways to deal with it, all known and used since antiquity: dumping, burning, and recycling. For thousands of years it was commonplace to dump rubbish on site--on the floor, or out the window. Scavenging domestic animals, chiefly pigs and dogs, consumed the edible parts, and poor people salvaged what they could. The rest was covered and built upon.
Eventually, humans began to use more elaborate methods of dealing with their rubbish. The first modern incinerator (called a "destructor") went into operation in Nottingham, England in 1874. After World War II, landfills became the accepted means of dealing with trash. The modern era of the recycling craze can be traced to 1987, when the garbage barge Mobro 4000 had to spend two months touring the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico before it found a home for its load. The Environmental Defense Fund, the National Solid Waste Management Association (whose members were anxious to line up new customers for their expanding landfill capacity), the press, and finally the Environmental Protection Agency, spun the story of a garbage crisis out of control. By 1995, the majority of Americans thought trash was our number one environmental problem--with 77 percent reporting that increased recycling of household rubbish was the solution. Yet these claims and fears were based on errors and misinformation, which I have compiled into the Eight Great Myths of Recycling.
Myth 1: Our Garbage Will Bury Us
Fact: Even though the United States is larger, more affluent, and producing more garbage, it now has more landfill capacity that ever before. The erroneous opposite impression comes from old studies that counted the number of landfills (which has declined) rather than landfill capacity (which has grown). There are a few places, like New Jersey, where capacity has shrunk. But the uneven distribution of landfill space is no more important than the uneven distribution of automobile manufacturing. Perhaps the most important fact is this: If we permitted our rubbish to grow to the height of New York City's famous Fresh Kills landfill (225 feet), a site only about 10 miles on a side could hold all of America's garbage for the next century.
Myth 2: Our Garbage Will Poison Us
Fact: Almost anything can pose a theoretical threat, but evidence of actual harm from landfills is almost non-existent, as the Environmental Protection Agency itself acknowledges. The EPA has concluded that landfills constructed according to agency regulations can be expected to cause a total of 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years. It isn't household waste, but improperly or illegally dumped industrial wastes that can be harmful. Household recycling programs have no effect on those wastes, a fact ignored by messianic proponents of recycling.
Myth 3: Our Packaging Is Immoral
Fact: Many people argue that the best way to "save landfill space" is to reduce the amount of packaging Americans use, via mandatory controls. But packaging can actually reduce total garbage produced and total resources used. The average American family generates fully one third less trash than does the average Mexican household. The reason is that our intensive use of packaging yields less spoilage and breakage, thereby saving resources, and producing, on balance, less total rubbish. Careful packaging also reduces food poisoning and other health problems.
Over the past 25 years, market incen-tives have already reduced the weights of individual packages by 30 to 70 percent. An average aluminum can weighed nearly 21 grams in 1972; in 2002, that same can weighs in at under 14 grams. A plastic grocery sack was 2.3 mils thick in 1976; by 2001, it was a mere 0.7 mils.
By contrast, the environmentally sensitive New York Times has been growing. A year's worth of the newspaper now weighs 520 pounds and occupies more than 40 cubic feet in a landfill. This is equivalent in weight to 17,180 aluminum cans--nearly a century's worth of beer and soft drink consumption by one person. Clearly, people anxious to heal Mother Earth must forego the Times!
Myth 4: We Must Achieve "Trash Independence"
Fact: Garbage has become an inter-state business, with 47 states exporting the stuff and 45 importing it. Environ-mentalists contend that each state should dispose within its borders all the trash produced within its borders. But why? Transporting garbage across an arbitrary legal boundary has no effect on the envi-ronmental impact of the disposal of that material. Moving a ton of trash is no more hazardous than moving a ton of any other commodity.
Myth 5: We're Squandering Irreplaceable Resources
Fact: Thanks to numerous innovations, we now produce about twice as much output per unit of energy as we did 50 years ago, and five times as much as we did 200 years ago. Automobiles use only half as much metal as in 1970, and one optical fiber carries the same number of calls as 625 copper wires did 20 years ago. Bridges are built with less steel, because steel is stronger and engineering is improved. Automobile and truck engines consume less fuel per unit of work performed, and produce fewer emissions.
To address the issue of paper, the most-promoted form of recycling: The amount of new growth that occurs each year in forests is more than 20 times the number of trees consumed by the world each year for wood and paper. Where loss of forest land is taking place, as in tropical rain forests, it can be traced directly to a lack of private property rights. Governments have used forests, especially the valuable tropical ones, as an easy way to raise quick cash. Wherever private property rights to forests are well-defined and enforced, forests are either stable or growing. More recycling of paper or cardboard would not eliminate tropical forest losses.
Myth 6: Recycling Always Protects the Environment
Fact: Recycling is a manufacturing process, and therefore it too has environ-mental impact. The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment says that it is "not clear whether secondary manufacturing [i.e., recycling] produces less pollution per ton of material processed than primary manufacturing." Recycling merely changes the nature of pollution--sometimes decreasing it, and sometimes increasing it.
This effect is particularly apparent in the case of curbside recycling, which is mandated or strongly encouraged by governments in many communities around the country. Curbside recycling requires that more trucks be used to collect the same amount of waste materials. Instead of one truck picking up 40 pounds of garbage, one will pick up four pounds of recyclables and a second will collect 36 pounds of rubbish.
Los Angeles has estimated that due to curbside recycling, its fleet of trucks is twice as large as it otherwise would be--800 vs. 400 trucks. This means more iron ore and coal mining, more steel and rub-ber manufacturing, more petroleum extracted and refined for fuel--and of course all that extra air pollution in the Los Angeles basin as the 400 added trucks cruise the streets.
Myth 7: Recycling Saves Resources
Fact: Using less of one resource usually means using more of another. Curbside recycling is substantially more costly and uses far more resources than a program in which disposal is combined with a voluntary drop-off/buy-back option. The reason: Curbside recycling of household rubbish uses huge amounts of capital and labor per pound of material recycled. Overall, curbside recycling costs between 35 and 55 percent more than simply disposing of the item. It typically wastes resources.
In the ordinary course of daily living, we already reuse most higher value items. The only things that intentionally end up in the trash are both low in value and costly to reuse or recycle. Yet these are the items that municipal recycling programs are targeting--the very things that consumers have already decided are too worthless or costly to deal with further. All of the profitable, socially productive opportunities for recycling were long ago co-opted by the private sector, because they pay back. The bulk of all curbside recycling programs simply waste resources.
Myth 8: Without Forced Mandates, There Wouldn't Be Any Recycling
Fact: Long before state or local governments had even contemplated the word recycling, the makers of steel, aluminum, and thousands of other products were recycling manufacturing scraps. Some operated post-consumer drop-off centers. As for the claim that the private sector promotes premature or excessive disposal, this ignores an enormous body of evidence to the contrary. Firms only survive in the marketplace if they take into account all costs. Fifty years ago, when labor was cheap compared to materials, goods were built to be repaired, so that the expensive materials could be used for a longer period of time. As the price of labor has risen and the cost of materials has fallen, manufacturers have responded by building items to be used until they break, and then discarded. There is no bias against recycling; there is merely a market-driven effort to conserve the most valuable resources.
Informed, voluntary recycling con-serves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. Mandatory programs, however, in which people are directly or indirectly compelled to do what they know is not sensible, routinely make society worse off. Such programs force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they would sensibly discard.
Except in a few rare cases, the free market is eminently capable of providing both disposal and recycling in an amount and mix that creates the greatest wealth for society. This makes possible the widest and most satisfying range of human endeavors. Simply put, market prices are sufficient to induce the trash-man to come, and to make his burden bearable, and neither he nor we can hope for any better than that.
Daniel Benjamin is a professor at Clemson University and a senior associate at PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center.
photobyalan
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I went and read that manifesto in its entirety. What a load of garbage. I'll cite only one contradiction that will prove my point. The author argues against curbside recycling by virtue of the fact that it requires more trucks on the road which therefore uses more fuel and emits more pollution into the air, while at the same time arguing that it makes more sense to truck garbage across state lines, sometimes long distances, than to make states responsible for disposing of their own garbage. I guess those interstate garbage trucks don't use fuel or emit pollution.
airfrogusmc
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It seems that allot of people in our country are not willing to sacrifice. We are in a war that directly or indirectly revolves around oil and we're not willing to get rid of our SUVs. We all talk of patriotism till it comes down to giving up something we want. According to some previous posts here our enemies are gaining strength by our oil consumption. One easy way to make an immediate impact is cut back our consumption. Corporations are just as guilty maybe more so than individuals. Profits above all. If this attitude would have been as prevalent during WWII we'd be speaking German right now. The greatest generation (WWII) made incredible sacrifices.
Biltmore Bob
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We can win any war we become involved in. Period. And we don't have to make those same sacrifices nowadays.
I got rid of my SUVs, they got too expensive to feed.
I got rid of my SUVs, they got too expensive to feed.
airfrogusmc
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Bob I have all the confidence in the world in our military. Its the politicians that I have little faith in. We also shouldn't get over confident and underestimate the enemy. Didn't we do that a few decades ago in Southeast Asia? Theres a very good book you should read if you haven't already. A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo. He was a Marine Lieutenant and gives a very vivid account of the early part of the war.
Bebop
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I too have all the confidence in our military. I know they can do what is asked of them at a moments notice. The only problem is that as airfrogusms states, politicians are the ones that tell them what to do, or in some cases what not to do, so that is where the problem starts (Viet Nam). It is difficult to deny that the politicians screwed Viet Nam up for the soldiers.
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I am also sure we can win any war we get into but I don't appreciate the extra lives that will be lost while we get up to speed. We need to be ever vigilant.
In regard to the Benjamin article, I cannot so easily dismiss it. If you think it is rubbish then please provide an alternative article that adresses the points in the article as lucidly. To dismiss something out of hand without any refutation of the "facts" stated therein suggests a closed mind that has already been made up. For instance, in the "Garbage will Bury Us" section, you can easily find sources that either prove or disprove the claims about the amount of garbage we produce and the capacity of our landfills.
Regards to all,
J
In regard to the Benjamin article, I cannot so easily dismiss it. If you think it is rubbish then please provide an alternative article that adresses the points in the article as lucidly. To dismiss something out of hand without any refutation of the "facts" stated therein suggests a closed mind that has already been made up. For instance, in the "Garbage will Bury Us" section, you can easily find sources that either prove or disprove the claims about the amount of garbage we produce and the capacity of our landfills.
Regards to all,
J
