January 25, 2007 Issue

I am crushed. I feel cheated and misled about an issue I once embraced and I’m mad as hell I’m only finding out the truth now.

Allow me to explain. As I indicated in my last column, my plan for our one issue break was rest and relaxation around the house. Watching videos, reading books — you know — slothful types of things. Netflix had delivered season three of Penn & Teller’s Showtime series Bullsh*t wherein the duo expose the fakery behind bottled water, hypnosis, new age spirituality, alien abductions, second hand smoke, television psychics and the like. Never did I expect to see recycling as one of the topics, but there, on disc two of season three, the real truth about recycling was exposed.

It was explained that the public has bought the recycling idea hook, line and two sinkers. More people recycle than vote based on misinformation brought to us by the recycling industry. Recycling makes us feel good because we think we are saving energy and the planet and all manner of good things, but we’re not doing any of those things.

Recycling uses more energy because an additional truck comes around to pick it up. Cleaning and sorting the plastic bottles uses more energy and while there are good uses for the recycled material, it is cheaper and more energy efficient to make items from new materials.

Newspapers are reduced to pulp in a process that not only uses energy but also emits a gas into the air during the conversion process. More energy is used turning the pulp back into paper and it is totally unnecessary as there are literally thousands of tree farms growing trees for paper. In fact, the more paper we waste, the more trees are grown. Paper comes from a renewable energy source.

I groaned at these facts and they were not finished discouraging me. It costs between $50 and $60 a ton to take trash to a landfill. Recycling costs $150 a ton. Further, the recycling industry is subsidized to the tune of $8 billion dollars a year from government coffers. Eight billion could be more wisely spent on health care or other social programs.

There is also apparently no shortage of landfills and the landfills currently in use are heavily regulated to keep nasty stuff out of the ground water and make lovely parks and/or golf courses when they are full. One landfill in California even takes organic waste, which becomes methane gas and uses it to heat 60,000 homes.

The only commodity it is prudent to recycle is aluminum cans. If I had just thought about it, I might have figured this out. Nobody goes through trashcans seeking newspapers and plastic bottles, but they will sort through them and remove aluminum cans. Apparently it is cheaper and uses less energy to recycle the cans into more cans than to mine for the bauxite needed to make new cans.

It was with tears in my eyes that I approached my recycling bin and removed the newspapers and plastic bottles and tossed them in with the rest of the trash. On the plus side, it will take longer to fill up the bin with aluminum cans. It would also appear the city of Fort Walton Beach is headed in the right direction with its plans to discontinue recycling next year. I’ve moved to a progressive city, sadder but wiser.

ERRATA:
In the Dec. 14, 2006 issue of The Beachcomber, we published what we clearly thought of as a cartoon concerning U.S. Airways. We apologize to anyone who thought this was an advertisement and apologize to U.S. Airways for any confusion or discomfort this may have caused.

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