Rosio Pavoris a blog

So, Penn & Teller did a Bullshit episode about recycling. Go watch it.
It’s half an hour long, but fairly interesting.

They’re right about a lot of things, of course, but it isn’t nearly as clean a win as they make it out to be. Did you spot their mistakes?

For example, when they talked about how recycling plastics isn’t worth it because it requires more energy than it does to make the equivalent stuff from scratch.
The problem with this, of course, is that with recycling, much more of that energy can be “clean”, and, of course, making plastic requires oil, which is pretty finite, as resources go.
At this point, it’s still more economically viable in the US to not recycle plastics, though heavy taxation on the petrochemical industry in Europe (environmental taxes, mostly, because that’s one of the most polluting industries we have) make that part far less clear-cut over here. And of course, economic concerns aren’t the main reason for recycling.

They also talked about how recycling paper isn’t worth it, because of “chemical sludge” and the fact that tree farms exist.
They’re right when they say the paper industry isn’t really a threat to natural forests anymore, because of those tree farms. This is because it did a pretty good job of getting rid of any conveniently-placed forests and the main threat to the remaining ones is now agriculture, but whatever. It’s true now, is the point. I’m not sure why they brought up the chemical sludge, though. Do they think “new” paper doesn’t need bleaching? I guess it does require less of it, though.

Update: These people have more data. Recycling paper seems to be worth it.

They also completely ignored recycling of glass, and barely touched on metal, which is interesting.

The bit on landfills was interesting.
Interesting, because both sides had points. The environmental guy was right when he said the federal rules allow for some really shitty landfills, but in practice, individual states determine guidelines for it, and most are pretty safe. The Whittier one is better than most, but it’s not incredibly exceptional.
This doesn’t mean that landfills don’t seriously disrupt local ecosystems, of course, but hey, can’t expect people to care about that, right? As long as the groundwater isn’t affected, humans won’t experience a lot of discomfort, and that’s all that matters!

Which essentially tells you where they’re coming from. Penn and Teller are very libertarian. For the most part, they focused on the economic side of things, which really isn’t what this is all about.
The bit where they “explained” subsidies is particularly interesting, and shows how childish libertarian thinking can be. There are a lot of cases where subsidies are reasonably absurd (corn subsidies come to mind), but no, Libertarian, you cannot trust people to do what’s right on their own as far as that goes. There are a number of things that aren’t directly economically viable that are nonetheless worth having, such as public education and doing something about global warming, for example.

But this post isn’t about libertarianism. Back to landfills.
The bit about methane was interesting, but it didn’t produce all that much energy. One of the reasons for this is that the trash in landfills is unsorted. Separating biological waste (which decays and produces methane) from the rest is a pretty good idea that apparently didn’t occur to them.
It’s pretty common practice in Europe, though, and makes producing energy from it that much more efficient.

As a side note, the Native American commercials weren’t about recycling, they were about littering, which is actually a pretty serious problem, and for which you’d be hard-pressed to find justifications.

But yeah. Other than that, they had a few points worth considering, though the fact that they started from economic benefits seriously hurt their entire argument.
Recycling, and indeed environmentalism, aren’t about economics. They’re about long-term sustainability and not dragging the rest of the world down with you.

(I’m actually watching their episode about environmental hysteria right now; maybe they’ll answer a few things there.

Edit: Nope. Global warming denialism and the Cato Institute. Clevar.)