When it comes to recycling, I understand the argument of why throwing batteries into the regular trash is bad.
On the other hand nobody made a convincing case to me that there’s a high utility in other standard recycling behavior.
A large portion of the “recycled” garbage simply went for many years to China till China didn’t want our trash anymore. Another portion gets recycled by burning much more energy than it would take to produce the products from scratch (and energy means more burned coal).
I think you’re reading some heavily motivated sources. See my reply above. There are significant environmental gains from recycling aluminum and cardboard, and some gains from glass, paper and some plastics.
And China does do a lot of recycling for US plastics—they weren’t throwing it all away. Some of it was low quality and discarded, but at the very least numbers 1 and 2 (PETE, i.e. water bottles, and HDPE, like milk jugs,) are valuable. (But yes, 3-7 are too expensive to recycle, and get discarded with the garbage—feel free not to recycle them.)
When it comes to recycling, I understand the argument of why throwing batteries into the regular trash is bad.
On the other hand nobody made a convincing case to me that there’s a high utility in other standard recycling behavior.
A large portion of the “recycled” garbage simply went for many years to China till China didn’t want our trash anymore. Another portion gets recycled by burning much more energy than it would take to produce the products from scratch (and energy means more burned coal).
I think you’re reading some heavily motivated sources. See my reply above. There are significant environmental gains from recycling aluminum and cardboard, and some gains from glass, paper and some plastics.
And China does do a lot of recycling for US plastics—they weren’t throwing it all away. Some of it was low quality and discarded, but at the very least numbers 1 and 2 (PETE, i.e. water bottles, and HDPE, like milk jugs,) are valuable. (But yes, 3-7 are too expensive to recycle, and get discarded with the garbage—feel free not to recycle them.)