Interesting video. They do concede that aluminum recycling is worthwhile.
What's also interesting is that Penn rails against the government a lot in the episode (Penn's obviously libertarian), but thankfully due to government regulations, landfills are well-engineered to be safe for the environment. And landfill safety is one of the points that Penn uses to refute one of recycling's benefits.
Also, they say that a square landfill that's 35 miles on a side could hold all of America's garbage for the next 1000 years. I know they're not serious about it, but realistically you cannot have a central place to hold all the garbage since you have to ship the garbage to that one place (thus wasting energy, manpower, etc). So we still have to make do with landfills all over America and the problems of finding places to put new landfills still exist.
On the other hand, there are plenty of places that do ship their garbage ridiculous distances. I have no citations, but I think you could find examples with Google. I seem to recall a few instances involving France and Siberia (separately, I think).
Like all things the answer is not black and white. The most important thing people should do solve the environmental issues related to consumption is to consume less or pre-cycle. It's true we shouldn't be recycling plastic bottles, in fact we shouldn't be using them at all.
Similarly we shouldn't be using recycled paper we should stop using paper.
The line "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is ordered by importance and effectiveness.
3 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 17.5 ms ] threadWhat's also interesting is that Penn rails against the government a lot in the episode (Penn's obviously libertarian), but thankfully due to government regulations, landfills are well-engineered to be safe for the environment. And landfill safety is one of the points that Penn uses to refute one of recycling's benefits.
Also, they say that a square landfill that's 35 miles on a side could hold all of America's garbage for the next 1000 years. I know they're not serious about it, but realistically you cannot have a central place to hold all the garbage since you have to ship the garbage to that one place (thus wasting energy, manpower, etc). So we still have to make do with landfills all over America and the problems of finding places to put new landfills still exist.
Similarly we shouldn't be using recycled paper we should stop using paper.
The line "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" is ordered by importance and effectiveness.