Hello all.

It's been a really long time since I have been here--it would take a particularly old soul to remember me, but that is of little importance to my post.

I have recently heard that recycling paper and cardboard is more wasteful than just throwing them away. I would like to know more about this, because I want to be a responsible...um...stuff...user.

Any help? I like recycling, but if it's doing more harm than good then I would really rather just swallow my pride and chunk it in the trash can...

Thanks!
~Sarah

Hello again Sarah

*feels old*

You could be right. But only from an energy point of view. It probably does take more energy to recycle paper than it does to chop down a tree, mash it up and squeeze it out into sheets. But the difference is that recycling it doesn't involve cutting down a tree.

Given the rate at which we have been decimating the forests of the world, that could be a very good idea.

Of course, post-peak-oil, the cost of energy may well outweight the scarcity of trees and mean that recycling falls by the wayside. My gut feeling at the moment is that it's still a good thing to do. But I've no evidence either way, and I'm about to tuck into some wicked ninja sausages and mash, so I'm not going to start researching it either. You could do worse than Wikipedia'ing 'recyling'.

I don't remember you, but welcome back. I'm not sure what the best thing to do is, but I recycle aluminum cans and old newspapers. I don't know about paper and cardboard, but recycling metal is a good idea because the supply is eventually going to run out. Good luck with the research.

Hi again Sarah, nice to see you back here again!

We recycle about 75% or more of our weekly rubbish, leaving out only items that are combination materials (metal/plastic/card). I don't recycle those because I figure that the energy use to seperate the materials would be higher than the environmental gains. I think that Jon's right about the energy costs. In terms of energy I have heard it's easier to chop down a tree, but currently we have more energy than trees, so I think recycling is still the right way to go.

Even better, avoid buying items with crap-loads of unneccesary packaging. For instance, picking veg from a big box in the supermarket and re-using the bag you put it in as a bin liner or something, instead of buying shrink-wrapped vegetables in polystyrene trays. Same goes for ready-meals. You can avoid having to dispose of the packaging at all, if you buy the ingredients and cook it yourself (it'll be better for you too).

It's best to avoid buying things that include bits that need to be disposed of. If you can't avoid that, try to reuse the bits you want to get rid of. If you can't manage that, then recycle.

Thing is there are only so many pen holders made of pringle cartons you need. And sometimes ready meals are convenient. It may take more energy to recycle than to cut down more trees/dig the side out of a mountain but those resources are finite and we need to conserve them, while it's perfectly possible to run recycling plants on renewable sources of energy such as geothermic or wind, and I think some recycling plants convert the energy used into electricity.

Of course, but then you could simply not eat pringles in the first place. And a cheese toastie is more convenient if you ask me - takes about 3 minutes to prepare and toast, takes little time to cool down, it's cheaper, and you'll use less energy toasting it than you will nuking a ready meal for 20 minutes.

Recycling plants can be run from renewable sources of energy, but I doubt that the majority of them are.

Finally, how exactly can energy that's been used to recycle whatever material then be converted into electricity? It may have been 3 years since I studied physics, but you can't magically make electricity from some heated material without absorbing some of that heat energy away from the purpose it was originally intended for, making it pretty pointless, really. Anyone is quite welcome to prove me wrong.

OK, so I'm speculating - feel free to call BS on me....

but...

I think that what MG means is that recycling plants tend to produce heat as a by-product of the recycling process. That heat can be used to heat water to drive a steam turbine, and generate electricity rather than simply venting it out of a chimney in the atmosphere. There's a name for it - can't remember it - all I can think of is waste-heat extraction or something. Hmm.

Incidentally, this from the Wikipedia article on recycling (linky here)

If the item is flammable you can burn it, use the heat from that to heat water and run your turbines in stations. If you can't burn it, you can't really turn it into electricity.

Depends what you consider bad to whether you should recycle or not. If you recycle then you need to input energy input the reshaping of material. If you don't recycle it, you have to dump it somewhere.
Problem is though.. that the process of recycling for each is very different.. with paper for instance, the recycling of that causes less trees to be cut down. The actual energy cost of pulping paper to be reused isn't actually that much either.

Plastic's cost has a higher energy cost associated with it... however you need additional oil to make plastics. According to Waste online, 8% of all the world's oil goes into plastic producation. It also claims other advantages are:

Onto your metals that's a little more complex again.. since different metals require different recovery process'. Mercyfully, for the sake of this conversation they do all have furnaces. They also all have to go through a metal sorting process (sorting copper from iron, and so on). Once the metals are sorted so your sure the product you have is only one metal.. then the manafacturing process is pretty much the same as standard manafacture and so the energy cost is the same asstandard manafacturing. The extra energy cost part is normally attributed with the sorting of the metals.. especially of alloys (mixed metals) that have to be additionally broken down and seperated most of the time (unless a use can be found for them as they are.)
However bare in mind that in the case of newly mined ore.. that has to go through the mining stage, ore transportation, smelting, and multiple levels of refining before it will even look like a metal. I haven't been able to track down which one is more energy costing, whether it's metal recovery from recycling, or metal mining. The only thing seems to be that recycling costs way more financially speaking. That's partially because we've been mining so much for so long, and have so many mines worldwide, the individual cost of achieving a kilogram of mined iron,compared to a kilogram of retrieved iron is in favour of mining. But energy wise... it's hard to say.
The only thing we are aware of, is that unlike plastic and paper mining, you can reuse metal forever. No matter how many times you melt down metal and reform it, you will not degrade the metal elements themselves. Since the amount of metal ore in mines on the planet is finite. If we want people in m the far future to still have metal, setting up the infrastructure of recycling now, rather than leaving it in their hands would be a nice gesture.

Seems to me that recycling just about everything is a good idea, then. Styrofoam is cursedly not biodegradable, but I melted some with nail polish once at a friend's party. Paper cups are better, but Styrofaom is too popular right now. Blasted evil stuff is the work of some wretched little marketing gnome.

Really? Where do you live? I haven't seen styrofoam packaging in aaaages here for pretty much anything. Anything I can think of that would've had styrofoam containers when I was a kid now use paper or plastic.

The only thing I can think of it being used for now are those little packing peanuts...and even those are getting phased out in favor of bubble wrap or those bigger plastic bags filled with air. I plan on using both of those for packing things up for my move across the sea rather than the styrofoam...though it'll be difficult to resist popping the bubble wrap The only time I use the styrofoam packing peanuts is when someone else has sent me a package with them and I want to get rid of the crazy things!

I'm in America and styrofoam is everywhere, unfortunately. School lunch trays, fast food drink cups some places, packaging during shipping, cushioning in boxes of fragile things, and most cheap picnic cups are styrofoam. The nice ones are plastic, but the styrofoam ones are cheaper at my supermarket and thus more popular.

hi srar_of_lei and candice

Oh, right. I'm in the US as well, but I'd forgotten about stuff you buy yourself from the store. Probably because I never buy disposable dishes. If I'm going on a picnic or something I tend to just take cheap reusable plastic ones.

One thing I really dislike is the amount of disposable cleaning products in the US. Do people really need a paper towel pre-loaded with cleaner to do their dusting? Can they not just put some cleaner on a cloth towel? And that stupid Swiffer thing...how wasteful. I understand wanting the convenience of it, but they could do the exact same thing with cloth and just was the silly thing. There's disposable everything now...even toilet brushes. It's just needlessly wasteful, in my opinion.

candice, I cannot believe you just ignored little_twit. He just said "Hi" to you.



I think that's probably a result of our increasing laziness. One can't deny they are damn useful, though.

Cand ignored little_twit because saying hi with no real content is spamming unless you're in a Daft thread.
We are far too wasteful with our materials. Everything has to be packaged so securely that you'll break bones trying to open it. Waste of plastic if you ask me.

Erm, thanks for the info, Captain Obvious.

IMO, recycling will never take off totally. I believe there is a finite number of times that some items can be recycled, then we require more of the materials. Where I live, the means of recycling just aren't available. Sure, the town council collects items for recycling in the nearby town, but out in the sticks, they don't bother. If people want to recycle, they often have to travel into town and take their rubbish to the tip, which is massively inconvenient.

At last you seem to be showing flashes of your old self. If you're going to act like an overemotional and sensitive child, I'll point out the obvious. It's moderately amusing, and the sweet sarcasm is getting tiresome. Pointing out the obvious might even piss you off enough to get you to stop acting all sugar-coated and nice.

So! Recycling. Let's talk about that, eh?

Absolutely. My preference at the rare times I buy a ready meal of some sort is to get things in the old fashioned foil trays. Those things are tough enough to be used several times when cooking things yourself, and even when they're thoroughly beaten out of shape they can still be used when you need to put something or other in a solvent bath which would eat away a plastic container in no time e.g. soaking paint brushes in thinners. Then, eventually, you can send the thing off to its recycled fate.



I rarely see polystyrene packing peanuts these days. Far more often now I'll see the ones which are made from corn starch. Not only are they made from a renewable source, and biodegradable, you can actually eat them.



Yet people make their weekly pilgrimages to the supermarket. How many supermarket car parks do you see these days without a bottle bank, can bank, etc.?
One supermarket near me actually has a new type of recycling bank which you dump all of your recyclables in, and it pre-sorts them internally. Simplicity itself to use!

The energy costs of recycling / reprocessing of waste are also liable to change as new or modified technologies are found.

Unfortunately those aren't as common in the US yet. I don't see why not, though. They work just as well, with the added bonus of actually being biodegradable.


Exactly. It's not inconvenient unless you're so incredibly lazy...which...I guess people tend to be judging by all the cleaning products mentioned earlier Here most people recycle cans and bottles at least, because you have to pay a 5 cent deposit when you buy them. You get the deposit back when they're recycled. It seems to work as incentive to get people to do it.

I think that part of the question is what saves the environment more, recycling, or using less fossil fuels. If we recycled all of our materials, but it required so much energy that the skys were turned black, then it would be more worth it to not recycle. I don't know that there is a good way to measure the exact impact on the earth in a mathematical way, but I think that on the whole, it is worth it to recycle. Of course, the best kind of recycling is finding new uses for old things. My mother and I used to drive around on days when people put out their garbage, looking for good free stuff. A lot of our good furniture was gathered that way, along with a computer.

I was talking to my biology and chemistry teachers about the recycling of paper, and whether it was best for the environment to let it break down and rot away and use more trees, or if it was better to recycle it. And they came up with this arguement-
Trees use up alot of CO2 when they grow, but hardly any when they are fully grown. It uses up quite a bit of energy to recycle paper, not to mention the chemicals needed to bleach it and re-dye it.
So, by their reasoning, it was better to make new paper from trees grown in well mananged forests (as the young trees will use up more CO2 than the older trees) and it would use less energy to process it than recycled paper.

Something about their arguement doesn't quite add up to me, but I can see where they are coming from.

Sorry to spam the thread with arguing earlier. I'll be good now.
Most of the styrofoam I see is in disposable trays, plates, and cups as well as dense blocks of it in boxes of fragile things. I haven't seen any corn starch packing peanuts around here, but it could just be that they're not popular in America yet. I'd like to see them, though. They seem very practical, and being edible adds another level of usefulness. There are bins for plastic bags, newspapers, and aluminum cans around my area, but not so many places for regular paper or plastic.
The argument about CO2 makes some sense, but even pine trees, which grow very quickly, take about 40 years (if I remember correctly) to reach maturity. Even with large forests, it takes a lot of trees to supply all the paper that we use. Well-managed forests may be useful, but it seems that recycling paper is still a good idea. I've seen some paper around that is recycled with very little bleach so that it's sort of pale yellow. Perhaps it's not the best for official documents, but it makes good notebook paper for school and scratch work. You can read whatever's written on it quite easily and it conserves bleach and dye.

I seem to recall seeing something about household bins that did this that had been invented. Sorted things into one of four minibins inside. Never actually seen one in a shop or anything, so I have no idea whether they're commerically available anywhere or not.

It would be nice if they were. Lots of people don't recycle because they're too lazy to sort things or there's no good recycling center near them. That sorting device could sove half the problem if it becomes more widely and inexpensively available.

There's no excuse for not recycling, at least near me. You don't have to take it anywhere, as there's a truck that picks them up for you once a month. And you don't even need to sort cans plastics and glass, you just put them all into a bin and wheel it to the end of the curb once a month.

But part of the point of this thread was that recycling isn't necessarily better for the environment. However, there are no simple ways to calculate the direct and indirect impact on the environment.

Calculating what will happen to the overall environment over time. Think about the butterfly effect. So many things happen every day to change what's happening. One type of recycling may be better for the environment while another has a negative net effect, but given so many factors it's hard to figure out which causes match up to which effects. I think that recycling as much as you can is a good thing in general, but it's also important to try to use easily biodegradable stuff as much as possible to begin with.