In 1996, New York Times writer John Tierney wrote a long, meticulously researched article about the state of recycling in America that didn’t win him any friends in environmental circles. In it, he concluded that recycling may be “the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”
Almost 20 years later, Tierney has revisited the recycling issue in a followup piece and come to a similarly gloomy conclusion. “Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill,” he writes. “When it comes to the bottom line, both economically and environmentally, not much has changed at all.”
That rebuttal doesn’t appear to be very extensive at all. All of the claimed benefits are extremely vague other than job creation, and if creating jobs is the only concretely measurable benefit of recycling, there seems to be no strong reason to believe it wouldn’t be more economically and environmentally efficient to pay those people to do other things, or even just to twiddle their thumbs.
Sorry, I should have linked to the index of the 4-chapter + preface + conclusion + 4 appendices long report, instead of the 1-page long preface: (I’m fixing the link above to change that.)
(From https://www.alternet.org/environment/if-recycling-doesnt-actually-help-planet-then-what-should-we-do)
If you want to save the planet, don’t recycle. (See also https://listverse.com/2013/01/27/10-ways-recycling-hurts-the-environment/)
Don’t quote Tierney, he’s a hack—https://archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_problem_with_john_tierney.php
For an extensive rebuttal of this particular piece, try here: https://web.archive.org/web/20061204065042/http://www.nrdc.org///cities/recycling/recyc/recyinx.asp
That rebuttal doesn’t appear to be very extensive at all. All of the claimed benefits are extremely vague other than job creation, and if creating jobs is the only concretely measurable benefit of recycling, there seems to be no strong reason to believe it wouldn’t be more economically and environmentally efficient to pay those people to do other things, or even just to twiddle their thumbs.
Sorry, I should have linked to the index of the 4-chapter + preface + conclusion + 4 appendices long report, instead of the 1-page long preface: (I’m fixing the link above to change that.)