jimmyhooker

The Recycling Conundrum

A 2000 study by the London-based environmental group Friends of the Earth found that collecting yard waste for recycling (ie, making mulch) emitted 264 more pounds of CO2 than burying it in a landfill. In 2002, two of Sweden’s leading environmental authorities argued that recycling’s benefits were usually undone by the resources required to collect and process it. The promise of environmentalists of a “flourishing recycling market” where reused goods would find ready buyers “was already a dream 40 years ago and is, unfortunately, still a dream,” they conceded. Better, they wrote, that most materials be incinerated at waste-to-energy plants, which is easier to do, and generates electricity, offsetting the need for fossil fuels. “We believe that incineration of household waste including disposable packaging and food waste, with energy recovery, is best for the environment, economy and management of natural resources,” wrote Valfrid Paulsson, former head of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, and Sorren Norby, former president of Keep Sweden Tidy.

The approach is catching on. Britain is building 50 new waste-to-energy incinerators; Denmark’s environmental protection agency recommended in a 2002 report that the country would be best to reroute parts of its recycling program to incinerators instead. With pollutants having been cut dramatically from the process, and a smaller CO2 footprint for power than coal, converting waste-to-energy makes as much sense to Europeans as does growing grain to burn for bio-fuels.

The recycling conundrum: How your blue bin hurts the environment

Waste-to-energy has a smaller environmental footprint than coal?  I did not know that.  This is a pretty interesting article on the subject of recycling and it’s pros/cons.