Close your eyes, and think of a bright and pristine, clean and immaculately run recycling center, green'r than a giant's thumb. Now think of a dirty, ugly, rotting landfill, stinking in the mid-day sun. Of these two scenarios, which, do you reckon, is worse for the environment?

In this episode, Ben and Vaden attempt to reduce and refute a few reused canards about recycling and refuse, by rereading Rob Wiblin's excellent piece which addresses the aformentioned question: What you think about landfill and recycling is probably totally wrong. Steel yourselves for this one folks, because you may need to paper over arguments with loved ones, trash old opinions, and shatter previous misconceptions.
Check out more of Rob's writing here.

We discuss

• The origins of recycling and some of the earliest instances
• Energy efficiency of recycling plastics, aluminium, paper, steel, and electronic waste (e-waste)
• Why your peanut butter jars and plastic coffee cups are not recyclable
• Modern landfills and why they're awesome
• How landfills can be used to create energy
• Building stuff on top of landfills
• Why we're not even close to running out of space for landfills
• Economic incentives for recycling vs top-down regulation
• The modern recycling movement and its emergence in the 1990s > - Guiyu, China, where e-waste goes to die.
• That a lot of your "recycling" ends up as garbage in the Philippines

Error Correction

• Vaden misremembered what Smil wrote regarding four categories of recycling (Metals and Aluminum / Plastics / Paper / Electronic Waste ("e-waste")). He incorrectly quoted Smil as saying these four categories were exhaustive, and represented the four major categories recycling into which the majority of recycled material can be bucketed. This is incorrect- what Smil actually wrote was:

I will devote the rest of this section (and of this chapter) to brief appraisals of the recycling efforts for four materials — two key metals (steel and aluminum) and plastics and paper—and of electronic waste, a category of discarded material that would most benefit from much enhanced rates of recycling.
- Making the Modern World: Materials and De-materialization, Smill, p.179

A list of the top 9 recycled materials can be found here: https://www.rd.com/list/most-recyclable-materials/

Sources / Citations

• Share of plastic waste that is recycled, landfilled, incinerated and mismanaged, 2019
• Source for the claim that recycling glass is not energy efficient (and thus not necessarily better for the environment than landfilling):

  Glass bottles can be more pleasant to drink out of, but they also require more energy to manufacture and recycle. Glass bottles consume 170 to 250 percent more energy and emit 200 to 400 percent more carbon than plastic bottles, due mostly to the heat energy required in the manufacturing process. Of course, if the extra energy required by glass were produced from emissions-free sources, it wouldn’t necessarily matter that glass bottles required more energy to make and move. “If the energy is nuclear power or renewables there should be less of an environmental impact,” notes Figgener.
  - Apocalypse Never, Shellenburger, p.66

• Cloth bags need to be reused 173 times to be more eco-friendly than a plastic bag:
• Source for claim that majority of e-waste ends up in China:

  Puckett’s organization partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to put 200 geolocating tracking devices inside old computers, TVs and printers. They dropped them off nationwide at donation centers, recyclers and electronic take-back programs — enterprises that advertise themselves as “green,” “sustainable,” “earth friendly” and “environmentally responsible.” ...
  About a third of the tracked electronics went overseas — some as far as 12,000 miles. That includes six of the 14 tracker-equipped electronics that Puckett’s group dropped off to be recycled in Washington and Oregon.

  The tracked electronics ended up in Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Dominican Republic, Canada and Kenya. Most often, they traveled across the Pacific to rural Hong Kong.