Weakly Standard: recylcing KILLS!!!!

Seattle Public Utilities researchers (in collaboration with University of California, Davis) conducted a survey in 2005 that indicated 98 percent of Seattle households participate in the curbside recycling program, and that 16 minutes are spent recycling per household. The city contains 260,000 households, which means each week Seattleites spend almost 8,500 work days recycling.

Holy Shiite! That's 442,000 hours a year, which is the equivalent of 50 people working round-the-clock for an entire year or 0.02% of the population of Seattle entirely devoted to recycling. Seattleites also spend 27 minutes a week going to the toilet rather than dropping trou on the street (trust me, I know this for a fact), and Weekly Standard readers spend about 23 minutes reading idiotic James Thayer articles when they could be surfing porn working. Who the f*ck spends 16 minutes a week exclusively immersed in the act of recycling??? Seriously. Let's take this hypothetical example: I have something in my hand I want to get rid of. I throw it in the appropriate bin. They are located right next to one another [or at least fairly close to one another in our particular situation]. When trash day comes along, I put out the garbage container and the recylcing container. Unless I'm a complete idiot like Thayer believes his readers are, where the hell am I spending 16 minutes a week I would otherwise spend surfing porn working? Oh, I gotta leave work 2 minutes early today because Seattle forces me to recycle. Oh pity me! The rest of the article is filled with more bullshit than a feedlot when the stunner isn't working:

A telling indicator is that cities often try to dump recycling programs when budgets are tight. As Angela Logomasini, director of risk and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out in the Wall Street Journal, every New York City mayor has attempted to stop the city's recycling program since it was begun in 1989. Mayor David Dinkins tried, but changed his mind when met with noisy criticism. Rudy Giuliani tried, but was sued by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which won the case. Mayor Bloomberg has proposed temporarily ending the recycling program because, as Logomasini notes, it costs $240 per ton to recycle and only $130 per ton to send the material to a landfill.

That's simply false. Bloomberg re-started the recylcing program when it started costing him too much not to recycle: he figured out a way to make money from recylcing--like most successful recycling programs do.

Radley Balko at aBetterEarth.Org, a project of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, writes, "extra wear and tear on city streets, double the exhaust emissions into the atmosphere, double the man hours required for someone to drive and man those trucks, and double the costs of maintenance and upkeep of the trucks."

Once again, where is the act of recylcing different from what would normally be done? It's not like if we weren't recycling, all of a sudden no glass, plastic and paper waste would be produced. Sir Oolius, at the Coeruleus Institute, writes, "X number of trucks come by to pick up the trash. After recylcing gets introduced, 50% of those pick up the garbage as usual, the other 50% is devoted to picking up recylcing. If the percentages of recycling to non-recylcing aren't 50-50, the routes are varied or different sized trucks are used." Other than a few extra workers required to sort things--something that was successfully avoided by Bloomberg and other recycling programs by outsourcing that activity to private companies--where does the extra wear-and-tear of the streets come in???

He then goes into the running out of resources argument for not recycling: "hey, we got lots of trees!" But chooses not to address the other advantages of recycling, like energy savings. And though it's true that most landfills these days are doing a better job reducing air and water pollutants, those solutions--eh-hem--cost money too! There's something to be said about mandatory recycling programs leaving a bit of sour taste in some peoples mouths, but unless you absolutely refuse to recylce anything, you're pretty safe from official retribution. If it's that bad, maybe you should start to question the validity of government forcing us to poop in toilets because taxpayers could save a lot of money if they wouldn't have to run wastewater treatment plants and all...