Remember that recycling discussion we were having a while back?
According to The Guardian, recycling is mostly a figment of our imaginations. Says The Guardian:
A waste executive from Republic Services, one of the country’s largest garbage haulers, which serves more than 2,800 communities and has 91 recycling centers, said that one-third of everything collected by recycling trucks went to disposal because it was either contaminated, too small to be sorted or not actually recyclable.
“We’re right now landfilling it [plastic],” adds one Arizona operator. And Sierra Vista gets a shout-out, too.
Mad Blog Media 
Recycling has always been environmental theater.
Took the words right out of my mouth! I was going to compare it to airline security.
“Airline security.” Bwah ha ha ha ha. If you wanted to kill a bunch of Americans, would you hijack an airliner or just turn up outside an Apple Store on New iPhone Day with an AK-47 and a shitload of magazines?
I have a whole box of Adventure Cycling and another stack in my office if anyone wants a shitload of magazines.
Wife’s sister was visiting so we did the New Belgium tour. They’re doing their best for green pursuits, but capitalism and the environment are kind of like rich people getting into heaven. But they’re trying, really damn hard. Every drop of water is accounted for, packaging is analyzed to minimize resources and maximize reuse or recycling. But the subject of cans vs bottles came up, and on (100% post-consumer recycled) paper, cans win … except for that little issue of the plastic liner that ever can gets. No one can tell me where it goes. 12 ounce Fat Tire or 16 ounce Bush Beans, doesn’t matter, ever eco-friendly aluminium can has a layer of plastic in it. Does it get removed? Burn up in the process so we’re breathing the fumes? Smelted into the raw aluminum so the next generation is more likely to fail? No one seems to know.
Which reminds me of the 30% contamination problem. Even if you lick the last dollop of peanut butter out of the jar, there’s still a plasticized label glued to the outside. And how much hot water should we waste cleaning these things out?
All goes back to the lesson from War Games. The only way to win … is not to play.
Bury the shit and let the grandkids worry about it. That’s what I told our city council. Landfills are time bombs we bury so we can fuck up the planet some more after we are dead. I told my nephew that every time I meet someone of his generation, the first thing I do is apologize for what we did to the planet and our republic. Sierra Vista’s excuse is we can’t make any money off recycling so it has to go. Typical Arizona.
I always joked to Herself, “You know they’re trucking all that shit up to Española and dumping it in an arroyo somewhere, right?”
Turns out, well, yeah, pretty much.
Back in the Denver suburbs, we’d see the recycling WM trucks follow the normal garbage trucks right into the landfill. Didn’t even try to hide it.
I recall reading a story in the Long Island Newsday that the cooking oil recycling trucks from NYC would drive out east to isolated roads on Long Island and dump their stuff in ditches.
Hey, at least that’s sort of organic vs petroleum, unless they’re serving something in NYC fried in motor oil? Want that critter fried in straight 50 weight or 10W40? Maybe that’s the cause of Don the Con’s problems with his IQ?
Nah, he uses 50 weight, probably Castrol, to keep his weave on top of his head.
I am old enough to remember the milkman who came daily to our house early in the morning with 2 quarts of milk (in glass), and picked up 2 empty glass bottles that we left on the steps. Soft drinks were all in returnable bottles, but the customer had to return them to get the deposit credit, and they complied. A few years later the milkman was gone, but the grocery stores still sold milk in returnable glass containers. Most beer was in non-returnable glass or steel cans, but some bottles were returnable. My friends and I made our pre-teen living upon collecting discarded bottles along US-113 and large state highways nearby.
Before long the soft drink companies began phasing out bottles for cans and the very thing that got me into riding a bike over distance dried up.