ghini | (no subject)

I watched an interesting episode of Penn & Tellers show "Bullshit" on recycling. They spent a lot of time talking about a paper (summed up here) called "The Eight Myths of Recycling " which explains how the recycling movement has a ton of bad ideas behind it. Some points I found very interesting:

The amount of new growth that occurs each year in forests is more than 20 times the number of trees consumed by the world each year for wood and paper.

In virtually all cases, recycling materials requires more energy and produces more pollution than acquiring new materials and manufacturing with them.

There is exactly one material that is more profitable and environmentally friendly to recycle: aluminum. That's why a homeless guy will pick up aluminum cans and won't take plastic, newspapers, etc.

The recycling industry is supported by an estimated $8 billion in government subsidies.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's just a data point, but worth noting ... my neighborhood was built after an old-growth - well, middle-aged-growth; nothing much east of the Mississippi is old growth, really - forest was leveled. Somehow, though, I have both pine trees and oak trees sprouting wild in my back yard - as well as maples, tulip poplars, sweet gums, birch and others I can't identify. Pulpwood forests are all pine because paper companies want it to be. Wild forests are primarily pine early on because pines are essentially weeds. But they're less resistant to fire, ice, and disease and within one human generation a fallow field will return to a decent hardwood forest.

Jim