Thursday, January 26, 2006

The Church of Recycling

If you think the whole Intelligent Design thing is about following irrational dogma, check out James Thayer’s article about the church of recycling. He notes that Seattle’s sanitation workers have been given police powers to enforce the once voluntary but now mandatory recycling program.

I live in a city with curbside recycling. I have wheeled my often-full recycling bin to the curb every other week for years while my heart has filled with environmentally friendly warm fuzzies.

Thayer killed all of my little warm fuzzies by putting evidence in front of my face that shows that there is no rational basis for our municipal recycling programs. It appears that all of them are more expensive than traditional methods of waste disposal and none of them is necessary. Nor are they truly environmentally friendly.

One quoted expert says recycling is an environmentalist “sacred cow,” while another calls it an “irrational religion” in which “perfervid faith compensates for lack of factual support.” The only things of value these programs apparently provide are warm fuzzies – but they come at a cost.

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