The Garbage Series - Part 2

Recycling

The Crying Indian

Recycling has nothing to do with the environment, it has everything to do with profit and marketing.   Those working to reuse waste are the unspoken heroes of humanity but they are not trying to save the planet.  They are looking to make a profit off of trash not solve problems, especially environmental ones. They are making the best of a bad situation and should be commended for their ingenuity and hard work.

Recycling if filthy work, especially recycling plastic.   

The main takeaway from recycling research is that recycling anything other than metal is bullshit.  It's an unsustainable solution. Paper can only be recycled once and plastic only a few times. Metal recycling is different because it can be done infinitely.  This means it might be possible to stop mining for new ore and just use the metal we already have.

Plastic recycling is trying to piggyback on metal like it's the same thing.  It's not, not by a long shot, and we need to invent something better than plastic or have a plan for making this whole planet disposable.  Putting ourselves before the planet is the humanist approach, but it has to last long enough for us to figure out a way off of it. The marketing behind recycling is making people forget that the planet is going to eventually wipe us out anyway.  The marketing is so over the top it's making people fanatical. Recycling fanatics are like "well we should use old dish towels as roofs." That being said, we are still a ways off from migrating to another planet so we should take a hard look at plastic.

A perfect example of the marketing behind recycling is the crying Indian commercial from back in the day. Several decades ago when people started feeling guilty about all the trash (aka plastic) they were tossing out the plastics industry launched a campaign to leverage our guilt.  Just like the recent straw ban nonsense. They put a sad Native American on our screens and they said "Don't litter you filthy heathen!" So we stopped littering and then we felt better.  But the plastic kept coming and kept showing up in Oceans and shit so an upgraded marketing ploy was needed, enter "recycling". Except this time it doesn't increase our guilt instead it makes us actually feel better about throwing things away.  Like smoking "light" cigarettes. Recycling is "Light Garbage".

Recycling is a marketing tool.  Stop to think about the shit they are pushing, it becomes clear:  They don't push you to recycle your car (aka metal). They want you to recycle some bullshit (aka plastic). Anyway it's it's high time they stop blaming the consumer and figure out a different product.  Figure it out you fuckheads. Maybe put milk into something that will degrade at room temperature just like milk does. Maybe also stop making bullshit that is almost impossible to recycle. Like notebooks made out of metal, plastic and paper.  Like milk cartons made from plastic and cardboard, the list goes on and on. Don't come at the consumer with some crying actor and say some shit like don't litter or use straws, and don't say "please recycle" like somehow you figured it out what the solution to all this plastic everywhere.

One Ton of Cell Phones contains 10 ounces of gold.

The Backhaul

The realities of the recycling symbol.  Round and round it goes, running on the diesel engines that power massive ships.  The foundation of the US China relationship is the scrap trade. It's cheaper to ship a container to China than it is to haul it over the Rockies. Make no mistake recycling is a filthy business that is typically can only be made economical through cheap labor and lack of regulations. China receives the bulk of it because it's so cheap to ship there.  That is the backhaul. The ships are going back there anyway. Innumerable ships sail for our coast full of cheap goods and electronics and then go back with our trash that can be recycled into something else to sell again.  Christmas tree lights are shredded for the metal and the rubber is made into slipper souls. The United States is the Saudi Arabia of scrap. See why it's so important for us consumers to have a therapeutic tool like "Recycling"?  It does two things: it nets free labor, we separate and give away our valuable trash and, more importantly, it allows us to make peace with our consumerism. The American consumer is a valuable commodity in the global economy and needs mental tools like "oh, I recycle" to cope with our aggressive trash creation.

So as Americans, our value to a good part of the world is creating trash.  Problem is, we are not the only ones anymore. China is catching up to the point that can create their own trash now!  That's why you hear about them saying fuck off to your plastic and other imports. They don't need it. Their people are consuming too, they need not send as much to us….hence not as much backhaul….Now what?  Well first of all it is wildly inefficient to ship trash and trinkets back and forth over an ocean so ending the cycle is a good thing. Maybe we will invent machines that are better at recycling our own trash, maybe find someone else to sell it to...or god forbid invent something else other than plastic.  Plastic is not the solution, it needs a solution, and recycling isn't it.

Enough about plastic let's talk about real recycling, metal recycling.

The Insight

How to shred cars 101

We scrap 14 million cars a year.  Even Henry ford new it was going to be a problem and tried to build a disassembly line for old cars but it was cost prohibitive. "Labor cost to much." is the age old American problem. Cars are the biggest thing we buy. If you consider "things" as the weapons wielded by American consumer cars are one of the most powerful.  They are useful, can be marketed so easily a complete moron can do it, and they require mountains of materials and labor to produce.

The catch of course is that you can't easily throw them away.  Leading up to the mid 60's abandoned cars were a huge problem because the success of the 50's made the labor needed to dismantle cars for scrap to expensive.  So cars sat around in huge junkyards or in some cases front yards. We would compact them, not recycle them. The government wanted to start programs to hide them but it was a private citizen named Sam Proler who figured out a better solution.  Shred them. Shredding cars and running them through a magnet is a fantastic way to get the iron out of them and sell it to China. Attempts to shred cars wasn't new but it was reserved for mammoth machines built to run off old battleship engines.  It wasn't until the invention of "The Insight" that smallers companies could popup and shred cars. "The Insight" was simply a method of feeding cars slowly into swinging hammers to destroy them piece by piece. Even what is left after the magnets is sent off to be separated and sold using foam, including the millions of dollars in space spare change that can be found in them (about $1.68 per car).  Cars are already basically 100% recyclable and can efficiently turned into new cars. Assuming we could create an autonomous fleet of cars and don't have to keep growing the number of cars with the population we could recycle the current fleet of cars for ever.