Do You Recycle?

Before the afternoon lull kicks in, I’ll share my tale with all of you.

Personally, I hate recycling.

I recall recycling came about in my hometown around 1992, around the time most of you were born. The airwaves (not internet) were flooded with the slogan, “Recycle, reduce, and reuse! And close the loop” which left the viewer with the triangle of arrows in a continuous process.

Anyways, schools demanded that we recycle and I was young and bought into it. I separated my moms garbage into aluminum, tin, and plastic so the recycling truck could take them.

At this time, all of this made sense. A for profit company took waste and recycled selling the old raw materials to refiners whom could reuse it.

Sometime later, I was a young pup in the rustiest hacksaw college and our economics professor shared an article with us about recycling. Apparently, it became too successful that the refiners could not use all that was available. Think about it, there are only a select few things you put this secondary raw material into. This was around Y2K. At this time, recycling was booming with nearly a dozen bins for materials next to the trash. In some cases, people disposing trash would be penalized against and made to go to a siloed location.

I now live in NYC and pay for my own utilities, trash, water, and recycling!? I personally called the city personnel responsible for the recycling bill and was told it’s a mandatory fee so that items left for recycling can be picked up. The trucks use a lot of gas ya know.

Me - “Whoa whoa whoa, back the truck up, doesn’t recycling make money since the raw materials are sold to refiners?”

Them - “Yes, but that is not the point, you must pay the recycling fee.”

Me – “Cool story brah, guess what, I no longer wish to recycle, I’ll toss all my empty 40 bottles in the trash, please do not send another bill.”

Them – “It’s a mandated fee. If you do not pay it, it will be an assessment on your property tax statement.”

Me – “…(WTF)…”

There ya have it folks. This whole notion of ‘recycling’ is just another propaganda program by the government to keep people employed when it’s a dying overdone process. Certain raw materials (copper, gold, etc) can be recycled easily and still carry real value. Does anywhere accept a bag of cans anymore like the good ol days for money?

I’d be interested to learn more about recycling and what the outputs of those secondary resources are. I really doubt that it’s all that efficient where everything put in a recycling bin can be used. I’m thinking ~40% of it is usable with the rest going to the trash.

To top it off, I was hard at work yesterday and tossed my soda can in the trash by my desk. Some marketing bimbo walked by and was aghast, interrupted my modeling to Biggie, to tell me to take my can to the recycling bin in the break room. She got mean mugged and then walked away.

Recycling needs to be done. Today, it's inefficient and kinda lousy, but the same could be said about solar 20yrs ago.

Of course, I never have to recycle myself, we pay immigrants and the Poor to do it for us. I'll pay for welfare if it supports my conscious and sloth.

Recycling is priority for me. I'm just trained that way.

I only recycle aluminum.

Recycling is GAY!

I'm sorry but in my basic engineering chemistry classes the importance of recycling were already overwhelming.

You're confusing politics with real issues.

The locality where I live has a pretty expansive list of things that can be recycled, so it isn't any more effort, but then again I don't have to pay for my garbage service directly.

The only recycling I do is keeping my own grocery bags because Aldi doesn't provide them for me.

I only recycle if it's convenient. I'm pretty confident that bottle I just tossed into the trash isn't going to be the spark of the immediate decay of earth.

The more the focus is placed on consumers recycling, the less incentives the packaging industry has to switch to more sustainable materials, which is the real issue. Until then, it isn't my job to clean up their mess.

I recycle, but mostly out of concern about how it would look if I didn't. One of the funds I support is ESG focused.

I don't recycle nuffin!  Straight trash homie!

Maybe by accident

Straight trash homie

At home? No. 

Nope, it's a scam. Now I do compost, but I feel like that's different. The mainstream idea of recycling is not realistic at all at scale.

The world is my ashtray.

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Got a story to share. But first, wondering what the consensus is regarding recycling in the year 2018.

Yes

recycling is a scam. 99% of the time both bins go to the same place when thrown out

Almost all my slides across almost all clients for almost all M&A pitches. For some fucking reason it still takes until 4am.
 

#Recycling

No. I don’t recycle. I take pride in the notion that the eco-Karens in my neighborhood probably notice that I rarely have my recycle bin out on trash day. I only leave it out if my regular trash is full.

WOWWWWW±!

COol!

I didn't think about it at all before when I was 20 or 25 years old. Still, now I look at waste recycling and try to use ordinary plastic as little as possible. Even when I wash things, I use water-soluble laundry bags because they contain a special plastic that dissolves when in contact with water. I urge all people to use plastic as little as possible. Then the oceans, beaches, and nature, in general, will be in better condition than now. However, this problem is not so discussed nowadays for some reason... I hope my ideas and thoughts are interesting to someone here.