Recycling levels begin to droop AND Beware the Life Cycle of 'Recycled'

[GreenPartyVoter]

Betsy Kulick recycles. So do her adult sons. And so do her siblings, in-laws and 78-year-old mother.

"It's just become routine," says Kulick, 52, a government contract worker. "It's not difficult. It doesn't take any intelligence."

Recycling is so routine in America that many people don't think about it - or even do it at all. After recycling numbers soared for the past two decades, several states are cutting back, spending less money on programs and seeing participation level off for the first time.

Many communities have less incentive to push recycling, because landfill space is more plentiful than cities expected in the 1980s. The result is that fewer people in the USA are joining Betsy Kulick in the ranks of reliable recyclers. Some of the evidence:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=676&ncid=676&e=4&u=/usatoday/20040707/ts_usatoday/recyclinglevelsbegintodroop


Beware the Life Cycle of 'Recycled'
by Kumar Venkat

I have recycled my trash with an almost religious fervor for many years. Every scrap of paper and every used container go into recycling bins. And to close the loop, I look for products made with recycled materials. But when my recycled toilet paper is made in Canada (using wastepaper from who knows where) and transported a long way to my California supermarket, I'm not sure if I've done any good. At what point are the benefits of recycling offset by the environmental costs of long-distance transport?

This situation recurs in some form with almost every purchase that I make. I try to buy organically produced food as a form of economic pressure to remove pesticides and other drugs from the food system. But I recently noticed that my organic kiwi fruit comes all the way from New Zealand, flown in on jets that burn fossil fuel and contribute to global warming. My favorite brand of laundry detergent is made without petroleum-based cleaners, but it is packaged in a petroleum-based plastic bottle and shipped more than 3,000 miles to a store near me.

As consumers, we're overwhelmed by far too many brands, but we rarely have sufficient information to make the right environmental choices.

We might think it would be better for the environment if we switched to more energy-efficient refrigerators, light bulbs, or cars. But this, too, poses a problem. From extraction of raw materials to manufacturing, packaging, and shipping, existing appliances and cars represent energy already spent - carbon dioxide and other pollutants already discharged into the air and water. These environmental costs must be "amortized" over the life of a product. When does it make sense to discard older machines and buy newer, more efficient ones?

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0714-02.htm

[U2Shark]

1. It is frustrating...

When a city's recycling facilities only accept 2 or 3 of the many types of plastic.

When they take corrugated cardboard but not regular carboard.

When NO ONE takes plastic bags anymore.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Yep, I can't get rid of my cereal boxes here. But on the other hand

I think the second article is right. We need to recycle, but we need to be efficient about it and not use more fossil fuels hauling materials around.

[graham67]

3. My city's recycling was totally FUBAR..

They had no one set up to accept the sorted materials when it was implemented, so the garbage just piled up in mountains right next to a major water source. The city finally just gave up and took all of it to the landfill and now there is no more recycling. :(

[oneighty]

4. The word in our village

is that all recycled materials go to the same dump and that recycling is a dream, an empty gesture and nothing more. As a result we see less and less of it.

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