Ahhh

It's been supremely busy at school, and I haven't have much time for anything outside of studying, homeworking, setting-fire-accidentally-to-things-that-aren't-supposed-to-be-flammable-ing.

I originally thought that the answer to the goodness/badness of recycling is a simple cost analysis. See how much energy is used to cut a tree, truck it over, and then make paper with it, and then compare the energy use when old paper is collected, sorted and then made into paper products. Simple, right?

Then I took statistics class with my high school track coach. Statistics cannot be trusted. One problem is taking samples. A random sample has to be truly random, not count off every other house/tree. The logistics of doing this to account for EVERYTHING in a state is formidable; think of what the EPA goes through in a study -- it ends up being a mix of stratified random sampling and all that jazz. Maybe I do take a sample, but is it then representative?

Maybe after I do all the proper safeguards and then find out that each year recycling puts out 500000000 tons of sulfides into the air, draws one bajillion watts of energy and that making stuff from scratch kills 30000 acres of trees and draws one bajillion watts of energy while pumping out 40 pounds of dioxins. How are we going to quantify which is worse? The units don't match! Maybe some people would consider sulfides acceptable, while others think the dioxins don't matter... Then we get into the debate about sulfides v. dioxins. And then maybe recycling will have social effects on certain groups; maybe the 43-year-old accountant for a vitamin firm will discover recycling and then join an environmentalist group... and then set fire to Humvees. The idea of saying if recycling is 'good' or 'bad' is simply too complex to be treated as an on/off switch. Oh, what to do?

Paper is biodegradable, so if you give it enough time, it'll turn to dirt. I checked on the dirty magazine I hid under some bushes when I was maybe 12, and it's still there, although unreadable. Imagine how slowly paper would turn to dirt when it's packed in a landfill. Probably the cheapest method of recycling paper is to throw it away in your backyard pile. Or use it as insulation for the next building project.

Plastics are different, although scientists are developing bacteria to eat it away. Right now, there are all those numbers on the plastics that dictate whether or not it can be recycled, but once at the plant, they need to be further sorted before recycling. And what about those rings on water bottles that might be made of different material? And the labels and the gunk? Maybe recycling isn't cheaper than trashing, but you'll then be exposed to photos of poor cute animals choking on plastics. Would you let Mr. Pelican die?

On that note, people generally say that recycling metals saves energy since after all people collected and sold scrap metal before the entire environmentalist movement started. Ah, I still remember the neighborhood peddler who would scream on his megaphone that we will "repair windows, buy metals."