Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
I'll have to dig out the info
But in general we have unlimited space for landfills. It won't use up a meaningful amount of space in the world. All that changes is the cost to build landfills and the transportation costs associate with landfills that are farther away.
Currently there isn't a market for the goods we are recycling so if you go to the Calgary landfill there are stock piles of sorted glass and plastics that have no value and aren't being repurposed. We just have too much of it.
With paper the most CO2 efficient option is methane recovery landfills where we burn the methane from the anarobic decomposition of the waste. That becomes a fairly rewable source of energy as long as you are replanting forests. And we just have too much it to be used effectively as a paper replacement
Aluminum cans and all metals are really cheap to recycle and make a lot of sense to do it.
Basically people's desire to recycle outstrips demand for recycled product and the halo affect of recycling encourages people to forget about the other more important ways to reduce impact. Reuse and Reduce.
EDIT: found what I think I had read previously: There are some issues with the study but it covers some of the concerns with recycling. One problem is tha lack of wholistic research around recycling. Most focuses on very discreet chunks of the problem
https://www.google.ca/amp/s/gizmodo....1738223096/amp |
So if we are creating too much of it, wouldn’t the price decline so significantly to encourage packagers to reuse these forms of packaging materials like cardboard? Why couldn’t the government also just incentivize the reuse of these materials rather than implement recycling and then let it pile up everywhere? Example, manufacturing that reuses crap from recycling gets corporate taxation relief or subsidies in some manner.
Why would there still be logging and deforestation but then “too much” cardboard lying around? It really doesn’t make much sense to me and something the government could try to encourage in a more efficient / green way?
Seems like the recycling efforts are only half the problem really. A bunch of glass jars lying around that aren’t being reused? Makes no sense, because people still buy and use crap in glass jars. One would think that economics would drive costs down on reused glass jars for manufacturers who need glass jars for their product.