Recycling Thread

[Technocratic_Utilitarian]

I will just use this thread to talk about recycling, given I was asked. I don't want to clutter up the other thread. The following is an informative article from Environmental Health Perspectives, a peer reviewed journal, discussing the benefits and controversies surrounding recycling.

Personally, I like recycling and think it's generally a good idea, but it depends on what you are recycling. It's also a lot more complex, and there can be economic downsides depending on a variety of factors such as the fluctuating market price of recycled materials and the community costs (energy, fuel, money) of shipping and processing.

For example, recycling paper to make newspaper is cost-effective. It takes more energy and money to cut down new trees to make paper (in newspapers) than it does to reprocess old newspapers or paper to turn into it. But the same doesn't follow for office paper recycling into new office paper:

When it comes to recycling office paper, the situation is different. When making office paper from trees, a renewable resource is used; when recycling that paper, a fossil fuel is being depleted. When such paper is made from trees, part of the process is fueled by wood by-products of the pulping process. "When you recycle that paper there is no by-product fuel, so all of the fuel need is purchased fossil fuel,"

Moreover:

lass recycling as another instance in which "devilish details" have to be considered when viewing the costs and benefits of recycling. Generally, she says, recycling glass takes less energy than making virgin glass, meaning reduced emissions of gases such as carbon monoxide. The type of furnace used in glassmaking, however, alters that generality. Scarlett points to the use of cleaner-operating electric furnaces to replace traditional furnaces powered by fossil fuels. Although they use less energy and thus create less emissions than natural gas-powered furnaces, electric furnaces cannot use as much recycled glass, so they are not as efficient. The consequence is a "conundrum," says Scarlett.

And:

Shipping recovered materials extremely long distances to end markets may negate any energy savings realized in the manufacturing process."

Edit: Addition.

The Encyclopedia of Economics also goes into some detail about which types of recycling tend to be resource, energy, and economically efficient. Aluminum is one example. For example:

the economics of each material determines how much of it is recycled. For example, about 55 percent of all aluminum cans are recycled. This relatively high percentage reflects the fact that recycling aluminum is often cheaper than producing new aluminum. Recycling aluminum cans requires less than 10 percent of the energy required to produce aluminum from bauxite.

Moreover:

Paper and cardboard, the largest components of municipal solid waste, are also extensively recycled. Because cardboard can be made from a wide variety of used paper, the costs of separating different kinds of paper are low, and because many places (such as grocery stores) use large quantities of corrugated boxes, collection can be efficient.

However: [quote]In contrast, the high costs of collecting and separating plastics have limited their recycling.[/qute]

Recycling of plastics are often problematic: it's often expensive and costly in terms of energy and pollution because they need to do some very nasty things to it. Moreover, it has high collection maintenance. People have a hard time washing it or separating them, for some reason, which increases the energy used to do it at the facility.

There are other hidden environmental problems with recycling. For example, some of the by-products of the process are dumped and stored in the landfills that recycling was used in the first place to prevent. You also need to factor in what a significant enough decrease in demand for new wood would do. You don't believe they are going to just leave the land and replant with trees, do you? Unlikely. It's more likely they will use it for something else, thus you won't have the trees there via replanting. There's also the problem of increased transportation costs for collection.

newspapers, for example. First, recycled newspapers must be de-inked, often with chemicals, creating a sludge. Even if the sludge is harmless, it too must be disposed of, probably in a landfill. Second, recycling more newspapers will not necessarily preserve trees, because many trees are grown specifically to be made into paper. A study prepared for the environmental think tank Resources for the Future estimates that if paper recycling reaches 40 percent (compared with the present 30 percent), demand for virgin paper will fall by about 7 percent, and "some lands now being used to grow trees will be put to other uses," according to economist A. Clark Wiseman. The impact would not be large, but it is the opposite of what most people expect. Finally, curbside recycling programs usually require more trucks that use more energy and create more pollution.

[Technocratic_Utilitarian]

Edit: the problem is that recycling is complex, and it can cost more in labour and energy to go through the collection and processing in order to recycle it than just to make it new. It also is negated if total production doesn't decline and they make just as many new ones on top of recycling old ones. This happens if not enough people recycle. Then you get the costs of standard production schedules + recycling. I have some more information tomorrow, so if you want, we can save commentary and discussion until I post that tomorrow. It's late now, and I need sleep. I just don't want to start discussing before I bring in the other sources to balance out the potential pros and cons.