The fraction of the total waste stream that you can affect is irrelevant when deciding whether to recycle. Any single industrial waste creator could make the same argument-- my company only creates 0.001% of the waste stream, so it doesn't matter what I do. This has to be wrong, because we know that the total outcome is nothing other than the aggregated behaviors of all of us, and the total outcome matters.
The important question is whether the impact of recycling the waste you create is a net gain or loss, after you take into account all the work needed to do the recycling. From an energy perspective, most recycling is a massive saver of energy [1], but that doesn't mean it's economical. England, for example, imports a lot of glass, but does very little glass manufacturing. Recycling glass there is probably not a valuable service, but that says nothing about its value where you live (unless you happen to live in England).
Waste stream sorting technology is still developing; I wouldn't be surprised if that reduces costs in the future such that sorting waste in your house isn't worth it-- you'll just dump everything in the bin and let robots pick out the valuable stuff later.
[1]: http://www.economist.com/node/9249262 (Money quote: "Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass.")
this is a good example of the tragedy of the commons, if i am not mistaken.
Why should one person save when it doesnt make ameasurable difference, the probblem, the tragedy being that everone thinks this way and the effect compunds.
sort of broad strokes, but jon a global scale, human created by-products are bad. Reducing consumption, re-using, re-cycling, in the true sense are all great things to do - but OPs point, as i read it, is more abou the last part than the rant at the beginning. If we dont want people going after our internet in the long run, we need to make the people who tried to screw it up change their perspective. corporations will not support political support if it obviosly costs them painfully, much worse than whatever money they spent lobbying plus what they thought they were protecting against.
politicians can be ousted.
money makes the world go around, and while lobbyits throw. money at politicians for their election campaigns, in the end its the people who elect them who really matter. that money is used to convince people to elect them......
so if enough people start telling their local reps, very clearly, that they are DONE in office unless they change stance on an issue, and also that they will gain a vote if they DO change their stance, money means a lot less. If the majority of your constituents love you, and you are sure of it, you dont need nearly as much capital to stay in office.
the clear message should be "hands off the internet. totally. let it grow. its revolutionary for the human race and in its infancy, and it only works because people agreed to follow a set of standards that allowed it to come into being, it was not planned. it is a collection of networks, and it can, and will, let its users find a way around any censorship. i dont condone piracy, but the internet, and the ease of moving data around are only going to get better and better. hollywood and industries who IP laws to protect them are not inherently bad, they just have a big change in how things work in frint of them. I am sure hollywood can figure out how to continue making movies even though they can be copied globally in seconds.... because people still want new movies. there is still a market. music industry, book industry, same deal.
know when you get tempted to pirate a book? when there is no kindle edition, at the author or publishers choice. i want a digital version. i want instant delivery, and i am willing to pay for that..... its real ly simple.
Knowing the percentage of waste that is house hold waste is extremely important. If it's 50%, then getting people to recycle is essential. If it's 3%, maybe there are better things we can be concentrating on to reduce the overall amount of waste.
As long as the household percentage is nonzero, I'm afraid I disagree.
Suppose recycling used more energy than it saved (which is the case for some materials e.g. low grade plastic waste in places with little plastic manufacturing). Then, even if that waste were most of the waste stream, getting people to recycle would not be essential-- it would actually create more waste, something to avoid.
My claim is that as long as recycling is a net gain, after you count all the costs, it doesn't matter what percentage of the total waste stream it is.
Note that I'm not saying that industry shouldn't also recycle. I suspect that the potential gains there are even larger, but that's not an argument against household recycling, given that the tasks are executed by different people in parallel.
> My claim is that as long as recycling is a net gain, after you count all the costs, it doesn't matter what percentage of the total waste stream it is.
Then you are ignoring the very existence of opportunity cost.
Your argument only holds if the "effort" of recycling displaces effort/attention better directed toward other things. Some people might think that recycling absolves them from other environmentally irresponsible behavior, but I don't think that the effort to increase recycling is really an optimization problem since it doesn't really introduce meaningful costs into most everyday lives.
And the parent comments argument only holds if the effort of recycling at home is less than the benefit gained from doing it.
This is why unbiased figures are important. It's all relative. Why should everybody in my country have multiple bins picked up at different dates and have to separate garbage manually only to have a second group of people sort through it, if the overall effect is so tiny?
> The fraction of the total waste stream that you can affect is irrelevant when deciding whether to recycle. Any single industrial waste creator could make the same argument-- my company only creates 0.001% of the waste stream, so it doesn't matter what I do. This has to be wrong, because we know that the total outcome is nothing other than the aggregated behaviors of all of us, and the total outcome matters.
It's not wrong. There are two different answers: what's best for the individual and what's best for society/collective/etc are not the same thing. This is why legislation and reduction of barriers (like single stream recycling) are necessary.
Agreed. I'm assuming that even though individuals might all like to live in a society that is unfairly biased in their favor, we have no way of creating that. The next best option is a fair society, where, as you say, legislation and reduction of barriers attempt to align the interests of the individual with the interests of society.
The important question is whether the impact of recycling the waste you create is a net gain or loss, after you take into account all the work needed to do the recycling. From an energy perspective, most recycling is a massive saver of energy [1], but that doesn't mean it's economical. England, for example, imports a lot of glass, but does very little glass manufacturing. Recycling glass there is probably not a valuable service, but that says nothing about its value where you live (unless you happen to live in England).
Waste stream sorting technology is still developing; I wouldn't be surprised if that reduces costs in the future such that sorting waste in your house isn't worth it-- you'll just dump everything in the bin and let robots pick out the valuable stuff later.
[1]: http://www.economist.com/node/9249262 (Money quote: "Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass.")