Is recycling working or is it just lining the pockets of someone?

I was once told the cost to create and maintain a recycling depart. with a local county exceeded any revenues brought in by the sale of finished pickings and sellings. The benefits are to the environment and outside vendors.

All commercial ventures are intended to line the pockets of someone, so criticizing a commercial venture because it will do what commerce is intended to do is pretty silly. Do we seriously believe that Exxon Mobil and the Saudi Royal Family’s oil holdings are altruistic ventures? Do we believe the $40 trillion per year fossil fuel industry operates not to line the pockets of its owners and investors; but strictly as a charity?

That said, we do have to look honestly at cost equations before we can definitively say recycling this or that is more environmentally friendly than using the traditional landfill with the old, and replacement with the new. Most recycling, but certainly not all, is an economic won/win.

Unfortunately people use recycling as a way to make money, but personally I believe it’s not at all about the money, it’s about the environment. I don’t think it should cost anything to recycle, no one should get paid for it, you should do it because you want to help preserve the earth, not save/make some extra money.

OMG, yes, it’s working. You can see that yourself because everything that you put into recycling is kept out of landfills. Our garbage has shrunk to next to nothing compared to how it was before.

My college just recently did an experiment to see how much was typically recycled from last year compared to how much we could recycle this year. There was a semester-long contest that all the dorms were competing in to see which one could have the highest ratio of recycling vs trash. The year before the competition, my dorm had 2lbs of recycling for every 1lb of trash (I thought that was pretty good), but the competition revealed that we could actually squeeze out 5lbs of recycling for 1lb of trash.

We ended up throwing away so little trash that the garbage truck that usually came once a week to pick up our trash was told to come biweekly instead because the bins weren’t filling up as much. Now that the competition is over, I think some people are throwing more stuff away, but the garbage trucks at my school still only come biweekly, while recycling is picked up weekly now instead of biweekly.

What does it mean in the context of this question for recycling to be “working”? Sure, we want to make sure that the money isn’t going to some fund for the killing of newborn puppies or something, but otherwise I’m not sure what the economic side of the argument is supposed to be. Water sanitization isn’t profitable at all, as far as I know, but I sure wouldn’t want it to go away.

@SavoirFaire Great point. I would say that water sanitization is “working”/ :-)