Quote:
Originally Posted by interesting
Fact: Reducing, reusing and recycling are all great ways to help the planet.
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Yes, yes, and no.
Sorry, but recycling is good in "some" instances, but not all... in fact, not most for that matter.
Without going into ridiculous detail (If people wish, I'll dig up the episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit that goes waaaay into this whole dealio, which is where I'm getting this from), a lot of recycling actually causes more issue than just chucking the stuff out, and people recycle purely because they're told to.
Take paper for instance, why recycle it? Why not just throw it away when it will do more good? I'm assuming most think I'm talking out of my ass here, so here's the details.
When we recycle paper it needs to be bleached to get it back to being a nice white colour. This of course means the bleach now needs to go somewhere (right into our water supplies, that's where). While this is all going on it's having to go through processing plants, and be transported all over the place too, thus causing more pollution.
When we want to take the now soggy piece of mush with bleach pouring out of it and turn it into paper we need to re-process the thing... yup, more pollution right back into the enviornment, just to get back some normal paper.
"Ah, but you forget about the trees being cut down to make paper" I hear you cry... but those trees we cut down to MAKE the paper were planted for that entire sole purpose. We've done nothing but cut down trees we planted in the first place.
Now what happens if we throw it out? It essentially becomes compost and degrades nice and quickly, fertilizing the ground... what the hell was wrong with that system?
As for anyone worrying about us running out of space for dumps... it's not happening, we have tons of the space, and when we fill it, it's not just left as it is, it's smoothed over, pipes are laid over it to collect any gases it pumps out which in turn are used to help power the local area, and once it's all grassed over it's turned into golf clubs or parks.
Apparently this is a bad thing, but nobody can explain why other than chanting the "we must recycle to save the planet" mantra that's going about.
I agree that using LESS of the stuff (like not having tons of plastic packaging, nor tons of plastic bags) would be a good thing, and perhaps less use of sprays (Such as my sister when she was using about half a can of hairspray per day and gassing everyone in the house). But please drop this recycling stuff... Recycle aluminium by all means, we DO save by recycling that, but the rest is pointless, we cause more damage to our enviornment from it, and the only reason we really do so is because governments force everyone to do so because it looks good. Screw whether it actually is a good idea as long as they "appear" to be doing good.