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Forty years after “The Limits to Growth” imparted momentum to environmentalism, that impulse now is often reduced to children indoctrinated to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Lomborg calls recycling “a feel-good gesture that provides little environmental benefit at a significant cost.” He says that “we pay tribute to the pagan god of token environmentalism by spending countless hours sorting, storing and collecting used paper, which, when combined with government subsidies, yields slightly lower-quality paper in order to secure a resource” — forests — “that was never threatened in the first place.”..
Forests never threatened in the first place?
Obviously this fella hasn’t flown over BC, if it wasn’t for controls in place, the whole range would be denuded.
My daughter did tree planting and while the trees they plant are suppose to replace the ones cut down, they are not as hard in wood density, making lower grade pulp.
I’m not sure that this is such a bad agenda.
I think we’ve gone through a phase of ‘use once and throw away’ that is quite different from the pre and post war days. Back in ‘the old days’, many things were recycled in the home. Jars were used to hold other things, tin cans were used as containers in the workshop, newspapers were used to put your winter boots on and start the fires.
Then we moved into a phase of specialization, where each need had ONE specialty product which we had to purchase for that and only that use.
Then, we moved into the short-term use of that product, whether it was paper towels or fireplace chips or disposable this and that.
I think it’s a good thing to move out of this disposable and once-only use of products.
For many, recycling is their raison d’être, and fooling with that will provoke predictable results. Is it effective? Really debatable.
There’s zero difference in terms of pollution involved in processing new fiber vs old fiber (recycled paper). So it’s better to use new fiber and chuck the old stuff out. Same idea with the plastics and glass etc etc. That’s why I pay slightly extra for an extra garbage can pickup. I dump all my “recyclables” in the extra can.
Metals are generally worth recycling. Most everything else is iffy.
Every generation has some whacko fear mongering fad.
Our is environmentalism.
Can’ t wait for the next Ice Age to start so they can switch horses and start fear mongering about a frozen planet.
Patsplace, “Is it effective? Really debatable.”
james, “There’s zero difference in terms of pollution involved in processing new fiber vs old fiber (recycled paper).”
I have to agree. Using corn, even if livestock feed, for ethanol production is also highly debatable.
Some recycling is good, but much of it has become, like Patsplace says, a raison d’etre, and costs more and can pollute more than producing new.
Our municipal recycling and waste costs have gone up 10 times as compared to burying in a pit. Although using proper clay depth based pits is much better than using porous sandy bases.
One of the main reasons to go to use-and-discard was public health. Metals can be melted back down and recast, purifying them in the process. Some plastics are recycled and cleansed the say way. How many users of reusable shopping bags ever wash them? Using what settings? Are you killing all of the bacteria on the bags, or giving them a rich carbony meal of organic soap?
My grandmother had a funny experience recently. One of the modern youth pioneers came into the group home grandma lives in to explain how to recycle to a generation that grew up in the 30’s and 40’s. Guess who wound up getting educated and deflated at the same time? Before it was trendy it was necessary for life to maintain a standard of living. There are reasons that the same mania for reusing was not maintained when it became a choice.
My first thought was the same as johnbrooks. Where I go moose hunting in NW Ontario looks like pristine forest from the highway. When you get off the highway you have hundreds of square kilometers of land that has been completely raped. Some has started to grow back, and is now populated by birch trees instead of the once valuable pine, and some that was replanted now looks like a Christmas tree farm and is almost completely devoid of wildlife.
I am not against logging but it seems a horrible waste to raze our forests to turn them into Canadian Tire and Wal Mart fliers that no one even looks at.
Recycling has become a substitute for welfare for the homeless.
Not that I’m against metal, electronic, & other things that can be broken down to components.
But this weekly ritual of Blue bagging does little but message egos. Like it says its become a modern religion with its own dogma with purification rituals. As for the Forests if we had let them alone burning naturally, BC would still have a logging industry. It was trying to protect the absurd idea of an “Old Growth ” ( Forests rot just like animals. Best to let them renew) forest that has allowed this beetle so much destructiveness.
I know I work for the Parks department. Its one of the stratagies we used to succesfully fight Duch Elm disease.Burn infested trees. Now we don’t have a bug destroying them anymore.
Enviromentalism has become a Religion of an anti-Western hate humans hue.
Groups who use fear to stop all scientific progress.
When actually we are saving species that would have gone extinct on thier own.
We to will outlast this mental disorder.
Happy fishing in the Thames until the 70s no one could for over 2000 years.
It wasen’t the envoromentalist that did it either.
I have no inherent objection to recycling. If a company can make a profit from paper or anything else I’ve thrown away, may they prosper and grow rich.
Having the government compel me to do the sorting for them, for free, that I’ve got a problem with.
Being made to do the sorting while knowing that the “recycling” gets dumped in the same pile with the “garbage” back at the land fill, now I’m getting mad.
Thee pine tree is a noxious weed choking out biodiversity.
Wait for it. 3,2,1.
Being made to do the sorting while knowing that the “recycling” gets dumped in the same pile with the “garbage” back at the land fill, now I’m getting mad.
Perhaps that’s what happens where you are, but not here. Besides you’ve given ample proof that you’ve been mad for some time now.
I have never pawed through garbage sorting to so called recycle bins because:
1)no corporation who demnds this is paying me for my time and effort (My time is billable)
2) recycling most of this stuff is a myth – very little makes it to buyers the rest goes into the land fill anyway
3) I refuse to support pointless feel good placebos where responsible environmental stewardship is concerned (It is well known fact that high temp incineration is the best answer to landfil toxic leeching)
I only had one run in with the little bureucratic wigglers who try to lord it over us where these feel good recycle programs are in effect – because I put all my trash in garbage bags they threatened to fine me and stop collecting my garbage if I didn’t start using the curb-side recycle bins as directed. To make a long story short, through a series of public notices and court filings I established that A) I was not a city employee or in any contract with the city waste control dept and that if these demands continued, I would send them a fee schedule and bill them for the time I spent sorting trash for them – my going rate was $40000/hr enforcable by judgement B)- any willful witholding of trash collection service would be a breach of contract by the city as I had payed a year in advance for the service though my tax payment – if service is discontinued I will send a claim for the cost of the retracted service and my time and suffering, to court of queen’s bench ($5oo,ooo. sounded reasonable)
Since those filings, I still pitch out black garbage bags to the curb and I have have no trouble with trash collection or surly recycle quislings.
My recycling stuff still gets recycled, because I have no choice, but knowing that it all goes into the same hole anyway, I don’t bother to sort it and no one cares. It still gets picked up minus the empty deposit bottles (that aren’t worth the hassle for me to take back) that get picked up by scroungers.
I have nothing against the scroungers because I did it when I was a kid. We could walk down the highway in the middle of nowhere and get a 24 worth of empty beer bottles per mile of ditch. Pretty scary if you think about it.
Phantom and Occam: Yup.
minuteman “Where I go moose hunting in NW Ontario looks like pristine forest from the highway…. is almost completely devoid of wildlife.”
You kill it all and blame the loggers.
Minuteman: have you ever considered what is prime large ungulate habitat. The East Kootenay region of B C was known for many years for its excellent hunting. Then, graduately, the large animals became fewer and fewer, despite the best efforts of conservationists.
Turns out the animals had been so plentiful because of an abundance of habitat; said habitat having been created by the many fires that swept through the forests in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, just as miners and loggers were heading into the back country. Thanks to fire suppression, the open pasturage reverted to forests, with no new habitat being created. So logging may, in fact, be opening up new habitat.
Encroachment by trees is the leading cause of farmland loss on the prairies.
Occam @ 3:11, especially #2 happens much more than people think.
WalterF, that is funny, as well as true.
When the RCMP Fort Walsh was built in the Cyprus Hills in the 1800s not far from Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, there were no trees in those hills other than some scrub brush. Now the whole area including that in Alberta is covered with trees. You ask were they planted, the answer is no. The wild fires were stopped by settlement.
Here where I live, we now pay more municipal taxes because of recycling
but it has been recently revealed that they sell our used paper to California
in other words I pay more taxes – here in Canada – so that California can save its trees while my municipality makes a profit.
if that is not a scam then I do not know what is
shouldn’t they pay me – buy from me – my used paper???
I live in BC and work in forestry. It is stupidity to suggest that trees were endangered, and ignorant to suggest that recycling is needed to protect the wild forests. The problem with environmentalists and the many internet experts is that they have very superficial knowledge (if any) about the subjects on which they comment. If anyone needs schooling on timber supply management in British Columbia, there is plenty of info out there, or just ask and i will do my best to keep you from looking a fool in the comments section.
I stopped recycling when they told us we had to clean/wash out our cans and plastics. WTHell? They want me to clean my garbage before I throw it out? Are they frik’in batsh_it crazy?
I already have enough “work” thank you very much.
I have to wonder why anyone would go moose hunting year after year in an area “totally devoid” of wildlife.I assume that “totally devoid”includes moose so whynot just stay home or find a place that actually has some moose.Or perhaps this is the new enviro-nazi hunting method where you find a place that is “devoid of wildlife” and hunt there so you can feel so much better about yourself and also tell all your friends what a great non-hunter you are.It must feel so good to do your part to save the rest of us from our own selfish pleasures.
I have to wonder why anyone would go moose hunting year after year in an area “totally devoid” of wildlife.I assume that “totally devoid”includes moose so whynot just stay home or find a place that actually has some moose.Or perhaps this is the new enviro-nazi hunting method where you find a place that is “devoid of wildlife” and hunt there so you can feel so much better about yourself and also tell all your friends what a great non-hunter you are.It must feel so good to do your part to save the rest of us from our own selfish pleasures.
Recycling? Just ask Cohen & Cohen Scrap Metal! Recycling existed for centuries; scrap metal dealers, used car dealers, auto wreakers, rag & bone dealers, buildings (did you throw out your last house? No, you sold it for someone else to use). The difference between this and modern “recycling” is there was and is real economic value in the old recycling. With the exception of beverage containers and cardboard most modern recycling is a value subtracting activity.
Regarding beveage containers, when I was a lad (and this was all farmland!) a bottle of Coca Cola was 10 cents with a 2 cent deposit or 20% of the price. That encouraged lads like me to spend summer afternoons looking for bottles and the local Boy Scouts to fund their packs with bottle drives. Today the refundable can deposit is a nickel or 5% of the price with a non-refundable eco fee of about 1.35% of the purchase price to subsidize the bottle/can return depots. The low refundable deposit reduces the scavengers to the dumpster divers.
when I was a lad (and this was all farmland!) a bottle of Coca Cola was 10 cents with a 2 cent deposit or 20% of the price.
~Norm at August 18, 2012 11:11 PM
Same here me too, I even remember when there was no bottle recycling before(I think it was)’66.
The kicker was that even though I thought they were recycling them, those bottles were going to the landfill.
I remember Winnipeg late 1970s, early 1980s. I think 5 dozen empties bought a dozen beer and the beer stores had to take empties. It was damned civilized. Everyone, that is, but the government stores.
The ‘eco’ trademark is laughable, to anyone raised by WWII era parents, who wrote the book on frugality, recycling, re-purposing and building or growing what you need. Waste not, want not. That said, I think the campaign against plastic bags for packaging is a test to see how easy it will be to manipulate the world’s lemmings for global governance. The Earth Initiative is linked to the UN’s Agenda 21.
I don’t much care what people do about recycling as long as they don’t litter.
It matters little what you do with your garbage. Your great grandchildren will be mining the landfills for the metals and other raw materials ‘stored’ there.
Plastic, not gas is the number 1 money maker for petroleum.So there is a huge industry incentive to keep it that way. Recycling is pointless when each time you recycle the product, it downgrades and eventually winds up in the dump.I found it funny one day shopping at my outdoor store supper enviro friendly place. They wont even buy anything without checking their working conditions. Asked me if I wanted a plastic bag, I said I thought they are banning them, and besides you guys are all about being green. Was told they were made with 100 percent vegetable oil, and even the ink used to print it.They could be thrown in your garden and will biodegrade feed your plants so we want you to throw them away.
We could shrink rap, the planet every year and those water bottles OMG and there’s something better out there we will never see.
shame.
sorry to break this to you, but just read in my farming magazine that researchers are looking towards trees for a renewable energy source.
yes. they will no longer be grown for O2 transfer, habitat, beauty, shade, or fruit, but for making fuel.
so there.
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