“Q: Curt: Does Recycling then cause more damage than it prevents?”– I don’t thi

–“Q: Curt: Does Recycling then cause more damage than it prevents?”–
I don’t think I would make that case, I think instead we should grasp that:
1. Recycling metal is a good thing. Same for hazardous liquids. Glass maybe. Paper is a wash because recycling it is more harmful than the savings gained. The worst part is all the false promise, the hypocrisy of it, the wasted time and effort by the population. So transfer stations where we take our trash, separate some metals, maybe glass make sense but otherwise the rest of it doesn’t. (If we manage to solve the energy production problem, it might become economically viable for an industry to evolve that will reclaim the material in ‘dumps’ if there is any value there. However, the planet is pretty good at recycling, and dumps are a tiny portion of the territory, and if leaching is prevented they’re safe.
2. The government, the activists (a secular religion really), and those invested in the system will refuse to correct course because of the vested interests whether psychological, social, political, or material
3. Every single progressive movement such as saving household electricity (meaningless, since almost all energy consumption is by industry and office buildings), or no fault divorce (made it worse), or even the great society movement and the civil rights era imitating the soviets ( ended integration and slowed minority achievement ), or bussing and forced integration (didn’t work, caused separation by income instead, dumbed down our education system) or urban planning, design, and investment (always failed), or even ending slavery in the south (it’s utility was ended by industrialization in thirty years and we killed 1/2 a million people, and empowered this (evil) federal government because of it.
4. In general you seek to punish the bad, and the good will emerge, but you cannot outwit the bad so to speak with attempts to directly produce the good. This is one of the lessons I try to teach and It’s futile because of the ‘busybodies’ that our ancestors warned us about: people who cannot achieve on their own so seek to use the money and force of government to do so, which in turn attracts bureaucracy and parasites on the goverment trough through contractors and such.

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