Do you feel guilty when you don't recycle

[gsdx]

PS - I compost, too.

 

[wundersteve]

I recycle and compost everything that I can.

Penn is selective in his presentation of facts.

This Popular Mechanics article summarizes some of the benefits of recycling.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/recycling/4291576

 

[James EL]

Just hired a skip to (eventually) throw out all the stuff that should have gone years ago.

A lot of it would easily recycle and I'll feel a bit guilty about chucking those things in the skip but I'll get over it. I just want rid and the car would like her garage back.

Day-to-day though I do recycle what our council lets us (bottles, paper / card, tins) even though it's a pain to do it to their specification (e.g., tearing the plastic out of window envelopes).

 

[Dobson73]

Absolutely!

 

[metta]

It would be impossible to not recycle where I live. The only thing that I have to separate is the garden waste. Everything that can be recycled gets sorted out at a sorting facility after it leaves my home. Most cities in California do this in order to meet the over 50% recycling requirements. They passed laws like this because the landfills were unnecessarily being filled up to quickly. And because asking people to sort stuff, they just had to resort it because many people would do it wrong. Now they just come by twice, once for the greens and once for the other trash and then sort it out when it gets at the sorting facility.

 

[rareboy]

Up here in Canada, it is not bullshit.

It is how my grandparents did it, even after the postwar corporate waste based economy went into full swing.

We get amazing compost for our gardens and we buy a huge amount of post industrial recycled materials.

In our own work, we look for a minimum of 30% post industrial recycled material in anything that is specified for a project.

But I have to say that I'm amazed that so many of the posters here are so fucking lazy, self obsessed and spoiled that they can't be bothered to do it.

It immediately colours my perception of someone's worth when they take this attitude.

We have made students in the office re-sort their garbage cans if we find they are making no effort to sort after being informed of our zero waste target.

 

[Kennylingus]

Up here in Canada, it is not bullshit.

But I have to say that I'm amazed that so many of the posters here are so fucking lazy, self obsessed and spoiled that they can't be bothered to do it.

It immediately colours my perception of someone's worth when they take this attitude.

We have made students in the office re-sort their garbage cans if we find they are making no effort to sort after being informed of our zero waste target.

That's a little much.
Granted, I am lazy, self obsessed, and spoiled doesn't mean everyone who doesn't recycle is Satan.

You sound like one of those Peta vegans going off on someone for eating chicken.

In a lot of places there just aren't recycling services available. Here for instance it doesn't matter what bin I put it in, the guy takes everything to the landfill. I don't know if I would sort it even if they did. When I was working as a chef I got in the habbit of it and did it for quite some time until I found out that we only did all that sorting just so that we could say we recycle to anyone who asked, when in fact it all ended up in the same giant dumpster.

I gave up caring when I saw that even the sanitation department didn't give a crap and it's their job. I'm not the only person who's seen similar stuff. I have a hippie friend about an hour and a half from here who went on a tirade about the same thing a little over a month ago.

So hate on, but unless you're taking the stuff to the centers yourself how exactly do you know all that extra work for your poor students actually helps anything besides your sense of self satisfaction?

 

[rareboy]

I'm sad but not surprised to hear that you live in an area where it doesn't matter. Fortunately we live in an area where it does.

And in my line of work, I have not only toured the centres but can and do require the manufacturers of goods to produce the paperwork on the stream of materials into their goods.

What does it teach the students? It teaches them about waste. About thinking about packaging. And over packaging. About how much of their consumption is based on excessive garbage. About consequences. About the effects of chemical decomposition and toxic concentrations on the environment. About what this means to their water supply, their air and the food they eat.

And that they don't have to be so fucking lazy and brain-dead.

So I'm sorry all of you in Bumfuck, upstate New York missed this education while the rest of the world is taking it seriously, but I can't influence your behaviour or policy in your municipality.

As I've said before, at least you have the quality of being bio-degradable yourself. Unless you get yourself preserved in Formaldehyde.

 

[thermodynamics]

A little bit. But I don't let it get to me.

 

[VICTORIADON]

No,

I see the recycle truck come to my building, big truck with forks, dumps all the bins in the same container in the back..with the regular garbage.

I think they want us to think we are doing something by washing some of our crap.

 

[Kennylingus]

I'm sad but not surprised to hear that you live in an area where it doesn't matter. Fortunately we live in an area where it does.

And in my line of work, I have not only toured the centres but can and do require the manufacturers of goods to produce the paperwork on the stream of materials into their goods.

What does it teach the students? It teaches them about waste. About thinking about packaging. And over packaging. About how much of their consumption is based on excessive garbage. About consequences. About the effects of chemical decomposition and toxic concentrations on the environment. About what this means to their water supply, their air and the food they eat.

And that they don't have to be so fucking lazy and brain-dead.

So I'm sorry all of you in Bumfuck, upstate New York missed this education while the rest of the world is taking it seriously, but I can't influence your behaviour or policy in your municipality.

As I've said before, at least you have the quality of being bio-degradable yourself. Unless you get yourself preserved in Formaldehyde.

How cost effective is recycling by the way? Since everyone who does the unforgivable and throws their cardboard away is practically the same as Hitler, I'm assuming you'd like everyone to recycle. How would all that work out fiscally?

 

[Kennylingus]

No,

I see the recycle truck come to my building, big truck with forks, dumps all the bins in the same container in the back..with the regular garbage.

I think they want us to think we are doing something by washing some of our crap.

See? I'm sure it happens all over. As Rawrboy said I live in Bumfuck NY now and they don't, when I worked in culinary I lived in GA. And there was another place in AZ that would recycle the cans for money, but threw the rest away.
I wonder how many of these hyper self rightious people are actually doing the good that they shreak at others to do.

 

[gsdx]

How cost effective is recycling by the way? Since everyone who does the unforgivable and throws their cardboard away is practically the same as Hitler, I'm assuming you'd like everyone to recycle. How would all that work out fiscally?

Does it always have to be about the money? Couldn't it be about the resources and saving the environment for a change?

 

[Kennylingus]

Does it always have to be about the money? Couldn't it be about the resources and saving the environment for a change?

Uh if you haven't noticed we're on the verge of an economic collasp that we have absolutely no actual solution for so yeah, it kinda does have to be about money right now.
We keep spending ridiculous amounts of it because we're America and we can and when it comes down to things like these a million star-eyed romantics say the same thing, "Does it have to be about money?" while we spend millions to save some endangered mole rat.

 

[gsdx]

Uh if you haven't noticed we're on the verge of an economic collasp that we have absolutely no actual solution for so yeah, it kinda does have to be about money right now.

You are. We're not.

Our recycling programme (in Peterborough) is city-subsidised and has created a lot of jobs for the city. There is very little packaging which can't be recycled here as long as it doesn't have food stuck to it. Even styrofoam packaging is recyclable now. We don't even have to peel the glassine windows out of envelopes anymore.

With mandatory recycling and limited trash allotments per week, the amount of trash heading for the landfill has been seriously reduced.

It's a way of life up here.

 

[gsdx]

Well, I watched the first segment and the smaller guy didn't even say anything! Perhaps, he knew no one would take him seriously wearing tennis shoes with a suit.

The little guy never says anything, no matter what he's wearing, maybe because Penn won't shut his mouth long enough to let his buddy make a sound.

 

[MoltenRock III]

I recycle most of my men. Those I don't, go into the compost bin. Heh heh.

 

[Nomenclature]

According to the episode of Penn And Teller: Bullshit! on recycling, the process of recycling something hurts the environment and costs a lot more money than disposing of it does.

Of course, they're always kind of biased and dumb when it comes to things, so would anyone have any sources on this?

 

[Sam Blum]

Well, as is common with P & Teller, they have produced more "Bullshit" that is entirely biased and underinformed. For instance, the suggestion that forestry deals primarily with farmed timber: I suggest that anybody interested in this gem check just how much natural wood in cut out of lands like Russia, Borneo, Indonesia, South America generally and Australia. Farmed, my arse.

Secondly, the portion where they addressed recycling plastic brushed neatly over the enormous floating mass of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It ignores the petro chemicals used in manufacturing plastics, and a whole bunch of other shit.

I could go on, except that I'm finally falling asleep, and suffice to say that ommission of information is no different to misinformation in the end. Penn and Teller under-inform and also use little irrellevant distractions as a magician does to keep your eye from the ball. What the fuck has testing a person's willingness to seperate items for their rubbish bins got to do with the value of recycling? And does it really only come down to financial gain, or has it as much to do with aesthetics, ripping great holes into the earth ( which certainly has many associated costs, including health costs for miners often working in poorly regulated countries, and environmental costs, such as BHP a few years ago dropping huge amounts of cyanide into the Papua New Guinean water system, or Shell and other dumping oil throughout Africa across what was once farming lands).

Okay, I did go on... Illgetbi, please consider that you could be underinformed on this topic and that by simply recycling, you could be opting for a better and cleaner world that won't actually cost you the billions that P & T and cohorts suggest. There are X number of dollars moving through the economies at any given moment, and we decide where the money will go and for what reasons. We can support mining and tree felling ( I missed whether they addressed clean air and deforestation of poorer countries) and such like, and we can also consider developing our recycling industries to become more efficient and effective.

Ps Olmecs, Easter Island, and what the fuck is the name of that rather importatn island in South America with one country completely deforested right up to the border so that the inhabitants are trying desperately to infiltrate the neighbouring county in order to survive..? It'll come to me... The sat images are almost as horrifying as the videos taken of the starving people desperate to cut down their neigbours' forests!

 

[Kennylingus]

You are. We're not.


It's a way of life up here.

Well ok then, keep on keeping on.
Your not really in a position to argue our fiscal situation then.