Recycling is bullshit even if you do try to reduce waste as much as possible. (In fact, there's a TV show called Bullshit that did an episode on recycling.) N

Recycling is bullshit even if you do try to reduce waste as much as possible. (In fact, there's a TV show called Bullshit that did an episode on recycling.) Not all of it, but enough of it to be pretty heartbreaking. Recycling metals makes a lot of sense, because mining is energetically costly. Recycling glass does too, because there's a lot of refining that goes into getting glass into a usable form. And both of these are easily separated from the junk they come in with. Plastics, on the other hand, are a total nightmare. There are so many different types of plastics, some of them are completely unrecyclable, and people are usually too lazy or ignorant to sort correctly. What it means is that a ton of energy and pollutants are devoted to separating them from each other. Some calculations say that more energy is involved in recycling plastics (incl. transport, etc.) than to make them from scratch from crude oil. Paper I'm still up in the air on. The end product isn't great, which reduces its viability. Plus, the vast majority of trees used in paper production are from tree farms. I don't know much about the rest of it.