Hi Usedcarguy.
Thanks for the very nice reply. I appreciate level headed arguments. You are a rare one indeed.
I will debate you and try to italicize my points within your argument.
Usedcarguy comments in regular font, CYDJs in italics:
What's sad is that people would resort to virtue signaling because they don't like the economic decisions of others.
I appreciate your use of virtue signaling. In this case, I believe you have misused it. I am not trying to show others that I am a good person. When it comes to saving humans and possibly other similar life forms (which is what we are talking about, the planet will be just fine with or without us) I don't really believe what people think about me is important. I am pointing out that the argument you are making is based on a me attitude and not caring about the future. Not that I am good because you are bad. What you could say about me is I was being opinionated, naïve, preachy, etc. But virtue signaling would be off target.
The cost of recycling is not worth the benefit.
Do you really believe this in all cases, or are you generalizing? There are many circumstances where it works well. 69% of steel is recycled nowadays. 65% of Aluminum is as well. It appears that in both cases the cost of producing new metals is SIGNIFICANTLY less expensive to recycle than to extract and the industries would take more if they could get it.
In many cities where mandatory recycling takes place, the trash is mixed and taken to the landfills anyway because it is not cost effective to recycle.
If people cared enough about what recycling means to saving the people (not the planet) we would figure out better ways of sorting and re-using the materials. It starts with individuals. They can't just say, see I didn't do anything and it didn't work, so I was right.
To say such people don't care about the planet is a crock.
The fact is that the separation of the materials is most easily and effectively done at the point of use and disposal. how much harder is it to separate 3 or 4 bins instead of throwing it all in one container. If we could learn to separate, the economics of the whole system becomes much more feasible. What we are talking about here is a basic lack of caring by people who don't want to believe in something that could be beneficial to future generations. It is an inconvenience and we can't be bothered with it until we are about to be wiped out.
Most of that stuff came from the ground, and much of it is renewable.
I will agree that stuff came from the ground. Metal ore, fossil fuels for the plastics, trees for the paper based products, some other plants for other things sometimes like inks. That is great. The plants and trees are renewable. The rest isn't. It is finite. At some point, if we keep going like we are now, we're going to have to mine our dumps for metals. why not keep them out of there in the first place? It will cost a LOT to mine all of our dumps, let alone all the deconstruction and reconstruction costs of the piles and the methane mitigation that will need to be done. I don't suspect this will be an easy or cheap task.
If a raw materials ever becomes scarce enough to justify recycling, recycling will occur. An extreme example of this is catalytic converters...for which recycling value is to the point where people are stealing functioning ones from others.
Scarcity is a point, but not the only one here. If people recycled more cans of all types and materials, more of the supply of the metals we use would come from recycling which takes less energy and personpower, causes less pollution and disrupts the planet far less than extraction. Leaving out the benefits to the people (once again, the planet will be fine with or without us,) it is less expensive to recycle metals than making virgin materials. Its economically feasible already. There is no reason to say that stealing items that have precious metals and hocking them is the threshold we need to cross to have people sort their cans from the rest of their trash.
There was a common theme for the frugality of those who experienced the Great Depression. Most in many facets of their lives in the subsequent years following tripped over dollars to pick up nickels. It resulted in a net lower standard of living than they would have otherwise had. Wasting resources (time and money) that could otherwise be spent elsewhere in order to make those whose life's problems reside at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy is just that...a waste of resources.
I know a few people who came out of the great depression or were reared by those that experienced it full force who did pretty darn well for themselves. They still tended to care for their land, were conservationists and tried to do what they could to make the planet a better place. Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is not something new. It is what our grandparents and their grandparents practiced mainly due to the scarcity of goods. Everything did not come easy, fast and cheap to them, so they lived with less and without, so much waste and many times, with a closer connection to the land even if they didn't own a large chunk of it. We, as a society, have decided it is better to rip through all the crap we can buy and quickly throw it away, rather than design things to last and care for them. And when we are done with the items, we definitely don't want to be bothered with doing what is right by our future generations and recycle what can be recycled to save resources for them.
Throw everything in the landfill. And if the day ever comes where raw materials become scarce enough to make recycling economically profitable, the materials for recycling will already be there.
OK, to sum this all up, what you are saying is:
1) We have pretty much unlimited resources, (which, by definition, is not possible).
2) IF we ever need those resources again (which some generation will) we should spend 10X - 100X the money we would have otherwise, RE-EXTRACTING them from a man made pile of junk and then recompacting the remnants into another man made pile of junk.
3) That leaving natural land and sea alone and free from the scars of extraction, which is one side benefit of recycling, is not something positive for the people of the planet or their progeny.
I am interested in your argument on those points (or any of the others I have raised.). I appreciate your willingness to express your views. It is obvious that I disagree with many of your assertions, but I respect you and your willingness to express them.