Why did you remove all the newsgroups, Jonathan Ball? What are you afraid of?

On 25/03/2012 06:14, George Plimpton wrote:
> On 3/24/2012 7:27 PM, Glen wrote:
>> On 23/03/2012 17:44, George Plimpton wrote:
>>> On 3/23/2012 10:20 AM, Derek wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:56:09 -0700, George >
>>>> wrote:
>>
>>>>> The
>>>>> belief that one is making a meaningful reduction in animal suffering
>>>>> merely by *not* putting animal parts in one's mouth has been
>>>>> demonstrated to be illogical and false.
>>>>
>>>> Then, to paraphrase, "The belief that one is making a meaningful
>>>> reduction in [pollution] merely by *not* putting [garbage] in one's
>>>> [garbage bin] has been demonstrated to be illogical and false."
>>
>> *BUSTED*
>>
>>> I never claimed that recycling necessarily reduces pollution. What it
>>> does, unquestionably, is change the destination of the waste. If you
>>> consider putting waste into a landfill (rubbish tip where you live) a
>>> form of pollution,
>>
>> It is.
>
> It could be, greggeorge.

You don't know anything about the effects of recycling.

More than 230,000 tons of waste sent for recycling by householders is being dumped in landfill sites
every year, it is claimed. Councils say the waste is ' contaminated', and it is cheaper to bury it
than to remove the unwanted elements.

However, the policy risks bringing the entire council recycling regime into disrepute.
http://tinyurl.com/cwe5gk

The Eight Myths of Recycling
By Daniel Benjamin

Garbage is the unavoidable by-product of production and consumption. There are three ways to deal
with it, all known and used since antiquity: dumping, burning, and recycling. For thousands of years
it was commonplace to dump rubbish on site--on the floor, or out the window. Scavenging domestic
animals, chiefly pigs and dogs, consumed the edible parts, and poor people salvaged what they could.
The rest was covered and built upon.

Eventually, humans began to use more elaborate methods of dealing with their rubbish. The first
modern incinerator (called a "destructor") went into operation in Nottingham, England in 1874. After
World War II, landfills became the accepted means of dealing with trash. The modern era of the
recycling craze can be traced to 1987, when the garbage barge Mobro 4000 had to spend two months
touring the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico before it found a home for its load. The Environmental
Defense Fund, the National Solid Waste Management Association (whose members were anxious to line up
new customers for their expanding landfill capacity), the press, and finally the Environmental
Protection Agency, spun the story of a garbage crisis out of control. By 1995, the majority of
Americans thought trash was our number one environmental problem--with 77 percent reporting that
increased recycling of household rubbish was the solution. Yet these claims and fears were based on
errors and misinformation, which I have compiled into the Eight Great Myths of Recycling.

Myth 1: Our Garbage Will Bury Us

Fact: Even though the United States is larger, more affluent, and producing more garbage, it now has
more landfill capacity that ever before. The erroneous opposite impression comes from old studies
that counted the number of landfills (which has declined) rather than landfill capacity (which has
grown). There are a few places, like New Jersey, where capacity has shrunk. But the uneven
distribution of landfill space is no more important than the uneven distribution of automobile
manufacturing. Perhaps the most important fact is this: If we permitted our rubbish to grow to the
height of New York City's famous Fresh Kills landfill (225 feet), a site only about 10 miles on a
side could hold all of America's garbage for the next century.

Myth 2: Our Garbage Will Poison Us

Fact: Almost anything can pose a theoretical threat, but evidence of actual harm from landfills is
almost non-existent, as the Environmental Protection Agency itself acknowledges. The EPA has
concluded that landfills constructed according to agency regulations can be expected to cause a
total of 5.7 cancer-related deaths over the next 300 years. It isn't household waste, but improperly
or illegally dumped industrial wastes that can be harmful. Household recycling programs have no
effect on those wastes, a fact ignored by messianic proponents of recycling.

Myth 3: Our Packaging Is Immoral

Fact: Many people argue that the best way to "save landfill space" is to reduce the amount of
packaging Americans use, via mandatory controls. But packaging can actually reduce total garbage
produced and total resources used. The average American family generates fully one third less trash
than does the average Mexican household. The reason is that our intensive use of packaging yields
less spoilage and breakage, thereby saving resources, and producing, on balance, less total rubbish.
Careful packaging also reduces food poisoning and other health problems.

Over the past 25 years, market incen-tives have already reduced the weights of individual packages
by 30 to 70 percent. An average aluminium can weighed nearly 21 grams in 1972; in 2002, that same
can weighs in at under 14 grams. A plastic grocery sack was 2.3 mils thick in 1976; by 2001, it was
a mere 0.7 mils.

By contrast, the environmentally sensitive New York Times has been growing. A year's worth of the
newspaper now weighs 520 pounds and occupies more than 40 cubic feet in a landfill. This is
equivalent in weight to 17,180 aluminum cans--nearly a century's worth of beer and soft drink
consumption by one person. Clearly, people anxious to heal Mother Earth must forego the Times!

Myth 4: We Must Achieve "Trash Independence"

Fact: Garbage has become an inter-state business, with 47 states exporting the stuff and 45
importing it. Environ-mentalists contend that each state should dispose within its borders all the
trash produced within its borders. But why? Transporting garbage across an arbitrary legal boundary
has no effect on the envi-ronmental impact of the disposal of that material. Moving a ton of trash
is no more hazardous than moving a ton of any other commodity.

Myth 5: We're Squandering Irreplaceable Resources

Fact: Thanks to numerous innovations, we now produce about twice as much output per unit of energy
as we did 50 years ago, and five times as much as we did 200 years ago. Automobiles use only half as
much metal as in 1970, and one optical fiber carries the same number of calls as 625 copper wires
did 20 years ago. Bridges are built with less steel, because steel is stronger and engineering is
improved. Automobile and truck engines consume less fuel per unit of work performed, and produce
fewer emissions.

To address the issue of paper, the most-promoted form of recycling: The amount of new growth that
occurs each year in forests is more than 20 times the number of trees consumed by the world each
year for wood and paper. Where loss of forest land is taking place, as in tropical rain forests, it
can be traced directly to a lack of private property rights. Governments have used forests,
especially the valuable tropical ones, as an easy way to raise quick cash. Wherever private property
rights to forests are well-defined and enforced, forests are either stable or growing. More
recycling of paper or cardboard would not eliminate tropical forest losses.

Myth 6: Recycling Always Protects the Environment

Fact: Recycling is a manufacturing process, and therefore it too has environ-mental impact. The U.S.
Office of Technology Assessment says that it is "not clear whether secondary manufacturing [i.e.,
recycling] produces less pollution per ton of material processed than primary manufacturing."
Recycling merely changes the nature of pollution--sometimes decreasing it, and sometimes increasing it.

This effect is particularly apparent in the case of curbside recycling, which is mandated or
strongly encouraged by governments in many communities around the country. Curbside recycling
requires that more trucks be used to collect the same amount of waste materials. Instead of one
truck picking up 40 pounds of garbage, one will pick up four pounds of recyclables and a second will
collect 36 pounds of rubbish.

Los Angeles has estimated that due to curbside recycling, its fleet of trucks is twice as large as
it otherwise would be--800 vs. 400 trucks. This means more iron ore and coal mining, more steel and
rub-ber manufacturing, more petroleum extracted and refined for fuel--and of course all that extra
air pollution in the Los Angeles basin as the 400 added trucks cruise the streets.

Myth 7: Recycling Saves Resources

Fact: Using less of one resource usually means using more of another. Curbside recycling is
substantially more costly and uses far more resources than a program in which disposal is combined
with a voluntary drop-off/buy-back option. The reason: Curbside recycling of household rubbish uses
huge amounts of capital and labor per pound of material recycled. Overall, curbside recycling costs
between 35 and 55 percent more than simply disposing of the item. It typically wastes resources.

In the ordinary course of daily living, we already reuse most higher value items. The only things
that intentionally end up in the trash are both low in value and costly to reuse or recycle. Yet
these are the items that municipal recycling programs are targeting--the very things that consumers
have already decided are too worthless or costly to deal with further. All of the profitable,
socially productive opportunities for recycling were long ago co-opted by the private sector,
because they pay back. The bulk of all curbside recycling programs simply waste resources.

Myth 8: Without Forced Mandates, There Wouldn't Be Any Recycling

Fact: Long before state or local governments had even contemplated the word recycling, the makers of
steel, aluminum, and thousands of other products were recycling manufacturing scraps. Some operated
post-consumer drop-off centers. As for the claim that the private sector promotes premature or
excessive disposal, this ignores an enormous body of evidence to the contrary. Firms only survive in
the marketplace if they take into account all costs. Fifty years ago, when labor was cheap compared
to materials, goods were built to be repaired, so that the expensive materials could be used for a
longer period of time. As the price of labor has risen and the cost of materials has fallen,
manufacturers have responded by building items to be used until they break, and then discarded.
There is no bias against recycling; there is merely a market-driven effort to conserve the most
valuable resources.

Informed, voluntary recycling con-serves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve
valued ends that would otherwise be impossible. Mandatory programs, however, in which people are
directly or indirectly compelled to do what they know is not sensible, routinely make society worse
off. Such programs force people to squander valuable resources in a quixotic quest to save what they
would sensibly discard.

Except in a few rare cases, the free market is eminently capable of providing both disposal and
recycling in an amount and mix that creates the greatest wealth for society. This makes possible the
widest and most satisfying range of human endeavors. Simply put, market prices are sufficient to
induce the trash-man to come, and to make his burden bearable, and neither he nor we can hope for
any better than that.

Daniel Benjamin is a professor at Clemson University and a senior associate at PERC, the Property
and Environment Research Center
http://tinyurl.com/pxbpj7

>>> then necessarily recycling reduces that kind of
>>> pollution. Now, I can't say with assurance that it reduces total
>>> pollution, because when the materials are reprocessed, that certainly
>>> creates more industrial pollution. Whether or not the pollution caused
>>> by reprocessing the recyclables is less than, the same as or greater
>>> than the pollution caused by processing virgin raw materials to make
>>> stuff, I can't say. Intuitively, I think it's probably less, but I
>>> don't know.
>>
>> Vegans intuitively hold the belief that one is making a meaningful
>> reduction in animal suffering merely by *not* putting animal parts in
>> one's mouth.
>
> They're wrong, greggeorge.

You've never been able to show it, Jonathan Ball (no Ph.D)

>>>> I know you're a keen on recycling what you can. Are you going to stop
>>>> recycling now? Do you think that maybe your neighbours believe you
>>>> think you're better than them because you recycle?
>>>
>>> In terms of my own beliefs, I believe I *am* better for keeping material
>>> out of landfills.
>>
>> Better than who, the unethical scumbags who don't recycle?
>
> Better than I would be if I didn't recycle, nutless.

And *better* than those who don't recycle. You admitted it.