The Thing About Any Good Or Service, Is That…
By Mitch Berg
…if it’s one that anyone wants, people pay you to do it.
For example, the one type of recycling that’s economically viable is recycling metal. There’s a demand – it’s easier and cheaper to melt and re-use metal, especially aluminum, than to mine and refine it from raw ore. So companies pay for metal.
They don’t pay for other things.
Here’s an experiment for you: put a bag of old newspapers and a bag of aluminum cans out in the alley. See which pile disappears within a day, and which one slowly decomposes.
Penn and Teller explained it in an epic episode of “Penn and Teller: Bullshit”, 20 years ago:
When it’s not viable? The government taxes you to prevent you from needing to do it, since nobody but third-world landfills wants the good or service.
Which, mark my words, is coming to Minnesota if there’s another session or two of DFL control.
February 26th, 2024 at 12:15 pm
My only reason for recycling is that the county takes recyclables for free, but I have to pay to take garbage to the dump. Maybe I’ll do something to save the environment by choosing to put plastic, paper, cardboard, and glass in the garbage.
I’ll also be saving bike tires, because most glass is “recycled” by smashing it and putting it into road aggregate. My guess is that glass is far more damaging to tires than standard rock.
February 26th, 2024 at 12:21 pm
I’ve been asking the question for a long time- if recycling is so wonderful, so valuable, why are we paying taxes for it to be collected? Shouldn’t it at the very least be collected for free by Eureka Recycling, since there must be a market for them to sell everything they collect in order to pay for the collection? If it were really valuable, we should be getting a fee for selling it to Eureka Recycling. But, no, we pay for the recycling service through our taxes, and the fees go up occasionally.
I have family that has seen the giant piles of trash that we call “recycling” in Asian countries. It’s mostly plastics and tech trash. I’ve often thought that people realizing this would stop them from extolling the virtues of recycling. I never thought they’d continue to recycle and then pay guilt fees for the privilege of pretending to do something good. But, why should I be surprised?
February 26th, 2024 at 5:34 pm
There’s a Canadian video on YT where some right wing journalist put 25 air tags in “recyclable” materials, and 24 of them ended up in landfills and other places that were not recycling centers. Plus, the Atlantic put out an article several years ago showing that most recycling now goes to landfills (after processing at the recycling center), because our primary market for recyclable materials (Chyyyyyna) dried up after Trump imposed tariffs on them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/
(This is behind a paywall, but if you go into your browser settings and add “www.theatlantic.com” to “sites not allowed to use javascript” it will disable the paywall and you can read the entire article. In Chrome, this is located at chrome://settings/content/javascript)
February 27th, 2024 at 12:08 am
[…] down Shark Tank: Florida Prepared To Send A State Guard Platoon To Texas Border Shot In The Dark: The Thing About Any Good Or Service, also, The Case For Letting The Mainstream Media Burn To The Ground STUMP: Classics on Leadership, […]
February 27th, 2024 at 6:25 am
Bill C,
The tariffs were only part of it.
A friend of mine is a VP of the department at Waste Management that deals with recycling sales. He told me that the ChiComs were buying tons of plastic waste. The bigger part was that the loads were contaminated by things like unwashed peanut butter jars and bottles from cooking oils or other products containing oils.