Image via Twitter
Over the weekend, New York Times contributor and author John Tierney published a fiery article entitled, “The Reign of Recycling,” arguing that is not only recycling costly and a complete waste of time, but also a threat to the environment.
He writes,
“Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits.
[…]
“But how much difference does it make? Here’s some perspective: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000. Even those statistics might be misleading.
"New York and other cities instruct people to rinse the bottles before putting them in the recycling bin, but the E.P.A.’s life-cycle calculation doesn’t take that water into account. That single omission can make a big difference, according to Chris Goodall, the author of ‘How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.’ Mr. Goodall calculates that if you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere.
“To many public officials, recycling is a question of morality, not cost-benefit analysis.”
Tierney also highlighted how recycling imposes significant costs on businesses and communities.
For instance, in New York City, the net cost of recycling a ton of trash is $300 more than the cost of its disposal, adding up to millions of extra dollars per year placed onto the shoulders of taxpayers to bear.
Do you believe in recycling? Or would you agree with its critics that recycling does more for a person's ego than the common good? Let us know in the comments section below.