Is recycling everything good for the earth?

Exerted from: http://www.dailymail.com/Opinion/Editorials/201009280919

Other items she leaves behind. They are not worth recycling.

The government makes no such commonsense judgments. Everything is recyclable to the government. But the way the government recycles is expensive, inefficient and environmentally wasteful, wrote Clemson University economist Daniel Benjamin.

"Extra trucks are required to pick up recyclables and extra gas to fuel those trucks, and extra drivers to operate them," Jacoby wrote. "Collected recyclables have to be sorted, cleaned and stored in facilities that consume still more fuel and manpower.

"Then they have to be transported somewhere for post-consumer processing and manufacturing. Add up all the energy, time, emissions, supplies, water, space and mental and physical labor involved, and mandatory recycling turns out to be largely unsustainable - an environmental burden, not a boon."

And expensive, too.

Curbside recycling costs, on average, 60 percent more per ton than conventional garbage disposal.

New York's Independent Budget Office said it costs $34 to $48 a ton more to recycle material than to send it to landfills or incinerators. And since there is no market for many materials, they wind up being dumped in a landfill anyway.

Recycling materials for which there is some demand makes sense. Otherwise, discarded material is garbage, plain and simple, and should be disposed of as inexpensively as possible

The economist is correct. I asked our garbage hauler why they didn't offer recycling. The answer was simple, they can't afford it. Thus, we only recycle aluminium, paper, and plastic and that is it. That is only because we have ready place to get rid of paper, which is made into cardboard, Plastic which the stores take back, and aluminium which is worth 50 to 60 cents a pound. If an when we can no longer easily get rid of our paper and plastic, we'll quit recycling them.