One of my earliest memories of my own skepticism was when a high school classmate told our biology teacher that she had seen a sea otter using a glass coke bottle as a fishing tool (a common behavior for sea otters though they usually use rocks). She worried the otter would hurt itself when the glass inevitably broke. But, I thought, aren't shells sharp when they break? Otters spend their lives eating shellfish and crabs which are too rough for me to handle without gloves and a knife. Nothing stays sharp very long in that environment anyway. And glass is basically melted sand. It may look like litter but it's not fundamentally out of place in the environment as essentially it is a fragile and short lived type of rock. After that I quickly learned that most environmental initiatives are quite fake, used for social control and profiteering. I had forgotten about recycling. The only way to reduce harm to the environment is to reduce consumption of all types, but there is no profit in that and people like to consume.
-Lynn
Some NYT articles on the uselessness of recycling:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/climate/nyt-climate-newsletter-recycling.html
Lynn, I never thought of recycling as real. This came from an interview with Tom Snyder on the Late Show, a serious discussion platform of a by-gone era that at least pretended to discuss reality.
I noted in Maryland that different municipalities had different rules for sorting recyclables. My mother for instance, insists on washing every container and even letting it drain, getting quite upset when I leave beer suds in a bottle. You see, Mom cares about the smartly dressed ladies in aprons who must sort all of this junk so that it can be remade after its kind. As a grocer who processed inventory for 38 years, I was never able to figure out an efficient way of processing unsalable goods and neither did the wholesalers, who all have different half-baked policies. In the end, to have me cleaning out out-of-date yogurt containers that can never be sold makes no sense when I could be stocking fresh yogurt and rotating already shelved product to make sure this does not happen.
I actually had a dream last night that I go sucked back into the grocery business and found a pallet of dried split peas that went out of date in 1967 and was hatching alien insects…
Back in the 1980s, Snyder, was unable to find any proof that recycled stuff got recycled.
Since travelling extensively I have noticed extreme differences in recycling processes by state. For instance, in Utah, you cannot recycle glass, which is a major eastern concern, I am told, because convicts sort the recycle bins and they are not trusted with sharp objects—just like your otters.
It is obvious from the attached article that recycling is a scam and that most of the stuff goes into a landfill. As I took the train from Portland to this brothel in Californica, I noticed the many homeless camps and that they are primarily constructed of plastic and that their waste is almost entirely plastic. Perhaps we should outsource recycling to this burgeoning population?
Then it occurred to me, as I rolled the recycle bins—heroically filled with beer cans by my host and I—down to the road, that from a grocer’s point of view, recycling makes sense.
-1. By splitting pickups between two different crews, picking up trash on one hand and recycles on the other, using separate trucks, recycling means that twice as many trucks are built and run and that more petrol is used, and the only reason for our civilization is petrol burning, so that is a net gain for the oil man and his brother-in-law who sold the extra truck. Also, this takes peak work pressure off the trash truck crews and spreads it out, like going from one delivery a week to two, which really increases efficiency and spreads work stress out.
-2. Every household in the nation becomes obsessed with following arbitrary rules of waste processing, that, upon examination, will be found to be baseless. This makes the ape cattle more agreeable to cultic induction via the media and highly vulnerable to gaslighting. It’s like having your fighter play ping pong to get better at boxing or play tennis to get better at stick-fighting, or training Pavlov’s dogs to rush under a roaring tractor engine for their food so that they could later be fitted with anti-tank mines strapped to their backs and sent after German panzers. It is not specific, but works.
-3. Finally, when the Scientists of Sirius, final give up on controlling us through Phillip K. Dick’s extended acid trip and they come down here to take possession of the planet, what are they going to do with those hundreds of millions of wheeled plastic buckets supposedly invented to solve the problem of hundreds of billions of unsealed plastic bottles? That was one hell of a scam—selling all those wheeled buckets.