Is the third R rubbish?

My parents were small g greenies.

Waste not, want not was their mantra, the result of Presbyterian upbringings in both senses of the word and living through the depression.

They didn’t buy it if they didn’t need it.

If they bought it they used it until it could be used no longer or they found another use or another home for it.

Reducing and reusing were second nature to them. Mum even washed and reused plastic wrap. Dad took what his family regarded as unfortunate pride in wearing clothes until they were well and truly worn out and only then allowed to be put in the rag bag to be used as a duster.

Their example has shaped my behaviour.

I can’t claim to be quite as good at reducing and reusing as they were but I do follow their good example.

It’s the third R of the environmental cause – recycling, with which I struggle because I wonder if recycling is garbage?

If you follow the link you’ll read the story of school children collecting rubbish for recycling.

. . .  Miss Aponte finished emptying the last bag. “We’ve been learning about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle,” she said, and pointed at the pile. “How does all this make you feel?”

“Baaaad,” the students moaned.

Miss Aponte separated out two bottles, the only items in the pile that could be recycled. She asked what lesson the students had learned. The class sentiment was summarized by Lily Finn, the student who had been so determined to save the half folder: “People shouldn’t throw away paper or anything. They should recycle it. And they shouldn’t eat candy in school.”

Lily’s judgment about candy sounded reasonable, but the conclusion about recycling seemed to be contradicted by the data on the floor. The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceeded the value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a landfill than the two bottles.

Without realizing it, the third graders had beautifully reproduced the results of a grand national experiment begun in 1987 — the year they were born, back when the Three R’s had nothing to do with garbage. That year a barge named the Mobro 4000 wandered thousands of miles trying to unload its cargo of Long Islanders’ trash, and its journey had a strange effect on America. The citizens of the richest society in the history of the planet suddenly became obsessed with personally handling their own waste.

Believing that there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense — for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. And since there’s no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there’s no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren’t good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups — politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations — while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources. . .

Good intentions have paved the way to the view that recycling is good and dumping rubbish is bad.

Sometimes that is right.

Sometimes it’s not and another example is one covered by the ODT  (to which I can’t find a link) which recounted the awful water and air pollution from plastic recycling in China and the lung disease the workers who processed it suffered.

The story was written several years ago.

It’s possible recycling has improved since then and that the total net impact on the environment of collecting, transporting and recycling plastic is now positive.

It’s possible that it’s not yet but could be.

But how do we know that it is and that recycling is better than careful disposal in sealed landfills?

If, as in the cases above, recycling is wasting time, money, human and natural resources, and causing pollution, the third r is not recycling but rubbish.

Hat tip: AEIdeas