A few days ago, the Red Queen came home from her trip visiting her family in New Jersey and said something to me that still really chaps my ass. She had a conversation with her brother and his wife and somehow she mentioned that I didn’t recycle and that by extension, she didn’t either. According to the Red Queen, this nugget of intelligence brought forth dumbfounded looks from her audience as well as this tidbit: “What? That is so socially irresponsible!”
I have written a few times about why I refuse to recycle. The main reason has to do with the value propostion… essentially it boils down to this: When you recycle, you are wasting energy at both ends of the lifecycle. I won’t even get into the economics of recycling and how the $40 million it costs a small city to run an efficient recycling program could be better used to actually help people live better, healthier lives… no, I am against recycling simply because it is not a very socially responsible thing to do… and here my girlfriend’s misguided, tree-humping family tells her that we are socially irresponsible.
I’ve been down this path before… explaining to people who really don’t understand the world around them what is and isn’t true about life on earth. I admit, that it is a tiresome proposition… who could possibly enjoy the painfully slow process of educating these mental invalids… but I enjoy the process much like a dog who eat its own feces… I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t help myself.
The truth about recycling is really simple… it doesn’t work and it is all based on a lie… that lie being that we are running out of landfill. Think we are in danger of running out of viable landfill?
A noted professor at a relatively well-received institute of higher learning, A. Clark Wiseman of Spokane’s Gonzaga University, calculated that, at the current rate of solid waste generation, the United State’s entire solid waste for the next 1,000 years could be buried in a single landfill 100 yards high and 35 miles square. And before you start to bore me with the whole “landfills are dangerous and pollute our groundwater” panic statement, let me say simply that modern landfills are designed and engineered to prevent the types of doomsday scenarios most often cited by the bleeding edge environmentalists. And once a landfill has been filled to capacity, they are routinely converted into valuable property that is then utilized for housing, recreation, and business (talk about value proposition).
But let’s talk about social responsibility since it was brought up by my lovely GF’s brother (cletus) and his wife (the Vasser educated Prucilla). They are the epitome of the “GREEN FAMILY.” They recycle, drive an eco-friendly suburu station wagon, furnish their home with space-saving Ikea furnishings, and have one child… WAIT! What’s that you say? They have a child?
Yes, they have a child.
If you want to get down to brass tacks… the most socially irresponsible thing you can do as an adult is to have a child. Having a child (or two or three) is about the most selfish thing you can do. You generate more waste, require more food, take up more space, and generally have a more detrimental impact on the environment than a single person. You compound the effect you have on the consumer AND waste stream…Clearly any rational and intelligent human being can see this simple truth… right? A child must rely on the parents to care, feed, house, and generally maintain them and in that process, their is a great deal of inherent waste.
The bottom line is: Having a kid is essentially, bad for the environment. If you want to proselytize about recycling and saving the environment, have the common sense to have your fucking tubes tied or your uterus carved out before you start to badmouth me about my decision to say no to recycling. As a friend of the Earth, the most socially responsible thing you can do is not breed… if you feel you must hear the pitter patter of little feet, why not adopt a child (from the inner city preferably, not from Zimbabwe like madonna who seemingly chose her orphan based on how much more photogenic it was than the other urchins in that particular mud hut). Adoption is the truest, most honest form of recycling a human can possibly undertake. Think about it… why make a new child, when there are so many discarded, at risk kids available to you right now?
And before anyone decides that I am anti-kid, nothing could be further from the truth… i love kids and kids love me (mostly because I don’t lie to them like most adults do). What I am ANTI about is the lies spewing forth from judgemental cocksuckers who seem hellbent on promoting their misguided ideals to the detriment of my quality of life. Want to save the world? Stop procreating and start thinking rationally and responsibly.
since this is your preferred method of “communication” here goes:
1. recycling saves trees.
2. recycling protects wildlife habitat & biodiversity
3. recycling lowers use of toxic chemicals
4. recycling cuts down on energy used in manufacturing process
5. recycling generates less water pollution than manufacturing from virgin materials
i’m surprised that sharon has caved into your ridiculous rationale. I thought she of all people, could stand up for her beliefs better than that. Having to shift your argument to the havoc that having a baby creates on the world, tells me that you don’t have a very strong argument against recycling.
Oh man… to think someone with a walmart education from UM has bought into all the myths about recycling isn’t surprising, but to bash my GF for anything that I believe is downright wrong.
1. Recycling doesn’t save trees. In fact, using trees for consumables assures that MORE trees are produced through reseeding programs.
2. Recycling may protect wildlife, but usuallly at the expense of quality of life for humans… and more importantly, protecting wildlife simply assures that the weakest genes survive. That goes against natural selection and only a fool believes that is a good thing.
3. Recycling actually creates MORE toxic chemicals than normal manufacturing. Take recycling newsprint… you have to bleach ink from the paper and it takes more than a few rounds of that to prepare recycled paper to enter the consumer stream again. Which leads us to…
4. When you recycle, you use energy at BOTH ends of the product lifecycle… first to create it, then to process it for reuse… not to mention the energy it takes to send out a completely SEPARATE truck to collect it! Any who thinks recycling saves energy is clearly a class A moron.
5. You are clearly misinformed about recycling. Recycling generates as much if NOT MORE water pollution than manufacturing from virgin materials if you take the entire product cycle into consideration…
Kelly, you are a relatively irrational human being on a good day, but when you forget to take your meds and think you can argue the mythological merits of a belief system that is built upon a lie, you prove once again that your parents wasted all that money buying your degree from that diploma mill in Ann Arbor. And as for the baby comments… I bring the baby thing into the argument not to support my ideas about recycling, but to refute their idea of SOCIAL RESPONSABILITY… if you can’t follow along with the story, perhaps you should get someone else to read for you… preferably with a real education and understanding of the world.
Ok I think Ed makes a very good point… I’ve been on his side of the recycling bullshit since before I knew him. But I’m not going to sit here and dazzle you with brilliance or baffle you with bullshit. I’m going to take the easier lazy (which is also why I don’t recycle) approach and I’m going to RECYCLE an episode of pen & tellers show called “bullshit” on showtime. Which by the way has just been signed to do 2 more seasons. This entire episode is about the bullshit that is recycling. The URL I’ve given has an episode summery and short clip from the show. The clip shows no real information just a joke they played on people. The rest of the episode is full of useful information on how much of a waste of time it is to recycle. Anyway instead of me rambling on go out and get it on DVD or download it from kazaa. By the way there is nothing illegal about downloading TV shows but thats another argument. http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/prevepisodes.do?episodeid=s2/r
I’ve had this same argument with my brother’s wife a few times. She stands firmly in the “recycle everything” camp. She has a master’s degree in environmental science and is a royal pain in the ass about it all.
I was doing a search for the truth about recycling so I can put forth a good argument as to how it actually requires more resources, therefore doing more harm than good when I came across your site. Well done! I’m bookmarking this site so I can come back and read the rest when I have more time.