[Eco] response to Penn & Teller

[Rebecca Stallings]

I have now subscribed to this list using both my wunderland alias and my 
actual address, which should allow me to post to it both from home and 
via Web from work.  Let me try this again:

I watched this program with a very open mind.  But it is chock-full of 
selectively chosen information and deliberate misrepresentation.

All those colored bins they set in front of those people: Why?  Were 
they intending to claim that such fine-grained sorting is necessary? 
Because they never actually made that point.  Instead it appears that 
they did it just to make the people look stupid for BEING WILLING TO DO 
THE RIGHT THING EVEN IF IT'S DIFFICULT, which is in fact admirable.

On the issue of sorting, they make much of the fact that sorting items 
for recycling costs money.  They conveniently ignore the question of 
whether costs can be reduced by having consumers do more of that sorting 
themselves.  Of course they can.  Even more tax money can be saved by 
consumers rinsing containers and removing caps and labels (this is 
required in some programs but not others) and bringing stuff to central 
dropoff points instead of having curbside collection by massive trucks 
idling down every street.  But P&T present it as if there's only ONE way 
to do recycling and the cost is OBVIOUSLY too high.

Money isn't everything.  All the money in the world won't buy more 
petroleum when we've used it all to make plastic. Funny how they NEVER 
address the issue of finite resources. They let people mention it, but 
then the only resource they choose to talk about is trees, which just 
happen to be renewable.  They say that it costs less to make plastic 
from scratch than to recycle it, and only "when that is no longer true" 
will homeless people scavenge for plastic, but they don't admit that 
what will make that no longer true is that we'll RUN OUT of petroleum, 
which by the way has many valuable uses other than making single-use 
bottles for people dumb enough to pay a dollar for a drink of water.

By the way, in other parts of the world people already do scavenge 
plastic bottles.  Check out the article in the December issue of 
Harper's Magazine about the Payatas landfill in the Philippines...and 
see how you feel about landfills after reading that!

P&T rant about government subsidies for recycling but don't mention that 
those are dwarfed by subsidies for extractive industries (petroleum and 
mining) and the lumber industry.

Did you check out this Competitive Enterprise Institute from which they 
got one of their anti-recycling "experts"? http://www.cei.org/  It's one 
of those groups opposed to "the alleged global warming crisis and the 
calls by some environmental groups and politicians for reduced energy 
use."  I can't believe how they cut off in midsentence the guy who was 
explaining how landfill liners are 1/16" thick, in order to cut to the 
CEI priss saying, "They're very safe," with absolutely no supporting 
evidence!

P&T make some valid points about paper recycling being not particularly 
efficient for the amount of energy it uses and waste it creates, and 
about trees being a renewable resource.  [Kudos to Andy for noting that 
hemp is even better.]  But the guy says, "Tree farms wouldn't exist if 
we didn't need virgin pulp."--yeah, or if we hadn't cut down the trees 
that used to be where the tree farms are now!!!  A tree farm is not the 
same as a forest.  The lack of biodiversity and the repeated 
clearcutting make a lousy habitat for animals and make tree farms 
extremely vulnerable to pests and infections, which are sometimes 
prevented by spraying the trees with chemicals.  They say we have more 
trees in America than in 1920; wonder why they picked that point, right 
after the Industrial Revolution, rather than, say, 1492?  They talk 
about how paper recycling pollutes and then claim they've proven that 
it's WORSE than making new paper--oh no, they didn't; they didn't tell 
us how much pollution is produced when making new paper!  That's just 
dishonest.

They sneer about how the jobs created by recycling are yucky jobs. Worse 
than cutting trees?  Worse than drilling for oil?  Worse than MINING? 
Ask the families of all those recently deceased coal miners if they 
would rather their loved ones had worked sorting cans on a conveyer 
belt.  I bet recyclers don't get black lung disease.

Okay, so landfills weren't so huge a crisis as they seemed in the 1980s. 
   That doesn't mean they never will be.  The CEI lackey shows her map 
with the little square "only 35 miles on a side"--well, 35 miles is 
fucking huge, especially if your home was in the middle of it.  Just 
because it's small relative to the whole USA doesn't mean anybody is 
willing to give up his or her land for it.  They conveniently ignore the 
problem of gunk from landfills seeping into our aquifers, which IS 
happening at the rate of several new and different horrors every year.

That statistic about 40% of stuff in recycling bins winding up in the 
trash: How much of that is due to user error? Every time I walk down my 
street on recycling day, I see recycling bags stuffed with things that 
our city's program doesn't recycle.  When those get to the plant, they 
go into the garbage.  That's not the recycling program's fault!

So I've lost a lot of respect for P&T, and I wonder who blew them to get 
this program on the air.

Two comments on Andy's article:

 >So is a vibrant paper-recycling industry really better for the
 >environment than a perpetual need to keep large areas of land wooded

Since when is that the choice??  How about a vibrant recycling industry 
AND real forests allowed to live their normal lives?

 >I have to wonder about other forms of recycling, too. It seems to me
 >that the biggest environmental threat isn't the filling up of
 >landfills, it's those greenhouse gases created by our rampant energy
 >consumption. Therefore, if it uses more energy to wash out, save,
 >process, and reuse a glass jar than it does to make a new one, well,
 >wouldn't we be better off just trashing that glass jar?

Do not confuse the REUSE of a glass jar with the RECYCLING of it. 
Reusing your old jelly jar as a container for leftovers, paperclips, 
bulk raisins, weed, or whatever uses very little energy.  Even recycling 
it saves energy compared to making new glass (according to EPA, and P&T 
didn't claim otherwise about glass), but recycling definitely is more 
wasteful than reusing.

I wish P&T had at least ended their show with suggestions for what we 
can do that WILL help the earth (reducing, reusing, composting, and 
choosing better materials e.g. aluminum can of soda instead of plastic 
bottle of soda) rather than just saying, "Don't recycle." and giving the
impression we should landfill everything instead.
          ---'Becca