Urban Jacksonville

I hope your co-worker is mistaken. The fact that we’ve never had recycling in downtown Jax, and now there is a chance we’re going to discontinue it in the other areas of the city is just flat out embarrassing.

I wonder if they are going to discontinue the D.A.R.T. club raids, because hey, the city’s not really making a profit doing that either, right?

So few people take a critical look at these issues. Recycling seems like the morally right thing to do, no matter the economic consequences. But is it?

Consider that most recycling programs depend on government subsidy. There simply isn’t a profit to be found in recycling. Why is this? Simply because it takes more energy to recycle (say) a plastic bottle than it does to create a new bottle. More energy means more cost. (The exceptional case is aluminum, which is why we often see the homeless scavenging for aluminum cans but never for plastic bottles.)

Recycling, for all the spin put on it by misinformed but well-intentioned environmental groups, has a net negative effect on our economy AND our environment. A little critical inquiry should convince anyone of this. Penn and Teller even did a show about it if TV is more your speed than the library.

uh.. charge for bins? or charge for pick-up? i mean what would it take? a couple bucks a month from every participant? seems reasonable…

@Rein, it’s funny that you mention Penn and Teller and critical inquiry in the same paragraph. Here is the video Rein is referring to:

first off it doesn’t make since to take recycling across seas, talk about wasting fuel.
seem like what people are saying is it’s easier to just throw it on the ground.
they are saying they want to quite cause everyone is doing it. sounds to me like it’s working, there was a crisis before we started.
when i recycled at the pearl we recycled 80% of the garbage that would of went into a landfield. i’m sure it was reused.
you also got to think what happens if a bunch of cities stop recycling. then there is a demand and then recycling companies want to recycle again. then there is all this money spent on new bins and awareness, contracts.

Following austinist on twitter. They just got 2 hybrid only enterprise rents a car locations. Hmm. Aren’t we negotiating a billion dollar waste deal right now? Stick it to the vendor. Unless we gave it away already. I feel huge waste corps better capable of making it work than our city gov. We have got to learn how to write contracts that are favorable to all of DUVAL and not just big biz. We need our leadership to be progressive. But who will be shocked if our piece of the bail out goes to roads not rails? Even though no one is buying cars. Earth to Jacksonville. Come in Jacksonville.

I’m not going to believe that video. even in my own home if i don’t reuse my cups and plates in a matter of weeks it will take over my kitchen. trash does add up. the indian in the video to me made since. from what i know about indians they respect their land. if their ancestors could see what we are doing to it they might cry. i don’t see why they laughed about it.
i see two factors, mine drill and to get the resource or pickup and process. everything after that is the same cost.

I agree with the comment about charging a fee for the recycling or for garbage pick-up. This has been done in Europe for years. You purchase the bins from the city. They charge a monthly fee for each trash bin that you have (there’s a greater charge for trash bins than recycle or compost bins), so it forces people to recycle their plastics and glass. It would be a shock at first, but people would ultimately get used to it. We’ve all gotten used to paying the sewer fees JEA charges when you water your lawn. I know I water minimally because of that……

I agree with Janine. It was the same way for me back on Long Island. You pay $ for special green bags for trash, I think they were $1 per bag. All trash had to be put in those bags (except yard waste). You could recycle all you wanted for free – which in turn promoted recycling, and sale of bags generated income for the city.

I can be against recycling without being against protecting the environment. There are far more cost effective ways to do so than recycling. In fact, recycling is one of the least effective options. In many cases it even has a net negative effect.

Dollar for dollar, we would have a far greater impact on the trash in our landfills and the toxins released into our environment by reducing the amount of material used in packaging, for example.

Amazon is already taking significant steps in this direction because not only is it good for the environment, it also reduces their operating costs.

In my opinion, sustainable solutions to our environmental problems cannot depend on government subsidy, they must have a value proposition sufficient to promote adoption in a free market.

@Joey That’s a good example of quote mining. Or should it be called Youtube-mining?

Recycling is a poor solution to pollution problems, both in terms of cost and environmental impact. A far more cost effective means to the same end would be to reduce packaging waste.

Amazon has already taken significant steps to in this direction, even going so far as to use the “Walmart Effect” to lean on merchants to change their behavior. They do this because not only is it environmentally beneficial, it is also cost effective for them.

In my opinion, environmental solutions that depend on government subsidy (like recycling) are not sustainable, especially in this economic climate. We would do far better to focus on solutions that provide a cost incentive that will lead to their adoption in a free market.

Rein Henrichs you are clearly a small picture thinker! Government subsidies, please!!! Wake up, the entire economic system of the US is government subsidized! Maybe instead of whining about government subsidies you should try to look at the big picture and fight for things that actually help our country like recycling. This Penn and Teller video is stupid and says nothing! BIG F’ing deal, it takes more energy to recycle, maybe instead of being haters, they should use their brains to think about ways of producing greener more efficient ways of making energy! I totally agree with John we should have to pay per bag for the amount of garbage we use. This would encourage less waste at the source – our homes!

@kzinn77 It sounds like we are violently agreeing on at least one point.

The government already has enough obligations it can’t meet. It has a disgustingly large debt, a growing deficit and an entitlement system it can’t even begin to afford. We can’t even pay the interest on our debts. We certainly don’t need Yet Another Subsidized Program.

What we need to find are solutions that are viable in a free market, solutions that do *not* depend on government subsidy. These solutions do exist and where they do not, can be found. We should invest our time, money and energy in them.

You do sort of lose the thread a bit when you argue both that we should recycle (even though you then acknowledge that it is not an energy efficient solution) and also that we should instead find greener, more efficient energy solutions than are currently available.

By the way, I didn’t post the video and I don’t claim that it represents my viewpoint in any way (or, for that matter, that of Penn and Teller).

If you want to have a discussion about this, that’s great. Please don’t create strawmen. Also, ad hominem is not a useful form of argument, so no need to attack me or Penn and Teller (who are only tangentially related to the issue anyway).

I will gladly take anyone’s thin, clean cardboard (like cereal boxes), brown paper bags, or glass jars (not bottles yet) with or without lids. I have ways to reuse them for the environment.

@kelly pope that is awesome. how much of this stuff do you need?

Rein, first of all, I take it that you don’t realize that the government already subsidizes our garbage, so I’m not sure why it’s such big deal for it to subsidized a far better solution like recycling!
Hell, lets privatize it! Make people have to pay for their waste and recycling. How’s that for your free market! But to make the argument that somehow, recycling is such a huge additional tax on our economic system that it needs to be eliminated, it just such a stretch. There are a lot of wasteful programs out there that do NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING AT ALL, let’s talk about getting rid of those first!
Obviously my point about energy got lost on you: if we are using to much “bad” energy to make recycling green, why don’t we focus on making/using “green” energy, so that it’s not an issue.
And btw you are the one who cited Penn and Teller as a source: “Penn and Teller even did a show about it if TV is more your speed than the library.” Joey merely posted it!

I’m with Rein on this one, and think far more effort should be put into the reduce & reuse side of things. Big companies should be held accountable for the trash that they produce with their packaging strategies, not the consumers. It wasn’t our choice to wrap our electronics in layers upon layers of plastic, or to get all our soda in plastic bottles which just get tossed aside.

Something further to consider, how much do you really know about the process of recycling, and what sort of waste products are created and just poured back into atmosphere & water system? It’s not like these things are just clean up and put back out to the market, there are chemical processes which have to vent their waste somewhere.

Finally, do you really trust that china is actually doing anything with all that waste we are shipping out? Or even our own government?

In my experience, most people who vehemently support recycling haven’t done a lick of critical thinking about it. In my opinion, that is small minded.

This issue is all over the new LVDJ! Read a paper, or turn on CNN!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/08/recycling-china-us

I agree with kzinn… What isn’t subsidized in government!? Isn’t that the exact reason government handles things like garbage, jails, fire departments, and road building… because there’s no money in it! Providing for a huge population of people is at some point not going to be about profitability and more about just doing what no one else can or will. Take the police for example – they really are wasting a lot of time being NON PROFITABLE aren’t they. Rein, you really do not understand the point of recycling if you think it is not energy efficient”. Of course it cheaper to make a bottle from scratch – raw materials have to be extracted from a strip mine someplace and trucked hundreds of miles to a refining operation, probably only to be trucked somewhere else and be refined again before actually becoming a bottle. Its also cheaper to just funnel all our crap into the St. Johns than pumping it down to the waste treatment facility. Maybe we should nix that little non-profitable program as well. Rein, the point of recycling is that someday, when your kids, their grandkids, or their grandkids want a bottle, there may not be anymore raw materials to refine – its called planning ahead. Why wait until we’ve driven off the cliff to see if our cars can fly!????

http://www.richardtom.com/downsideofrecycling/main.html

The reason China buys our recyclables is they use our mixed waste in packaging for electronics and such. With people spending less money on such products there is obviously less demand for these materials. Our government needs to address the root of the problem first and the recycle market will follow. In the meantime, as individuals, the best we can do is reduce and reuse.

Those of you arguing with Rein: Do you realize that he is still in support of improving the environment? Do you remember that those three arrows are intended to be the three tenets “reduce, reuse, recycle”, and not “recycle, Recycle, RECYCLE”? He is simply stating that focusing efforts to reduce packaging, or reuse it in another way may very well be a better use of everyone’s time, money, and energy.

I think some folks are letting their emotions about the ‘good v. evil’ value of recycling get in the way of sound judgment. One reason that some people look down their noses at us “tree-huggers” is because our methods are not financially sensible (at best) in many cases. The path to increased adoption is not to increase the volume of your arguments (sound or substance), but to create a method that is financially sensible.

From kzinn: “Hell, lets privatize it! Make people have to pay for their waste and recycling. How’s that for your free market!” — That is sort of the idea behind the words “free market”. Innovation in reduction, reuse, and recycling isn’t going to come from government subsidized programs, in any case.

Rein you are spot on. This is the problem with special interest liberal groups. They do what makes them feel good. If the end results are costly or does not make sense who cares because I feel good.

Recycling is not a magic panacea. The process is not: Gather recyclable materials; ???; Profit! Recycling is expensive and the process produces significant waste compared to what is reclaimed.

If “privatization” is to work, there has to be a cost incentive to the private businesses. There is no cost incentive to recycle except that which is provided by government subsidy. Simply stated, recycling does not make money: it *costs* money.

A recycling tax (or its equivalent) has not been sufficient to replace government subsidy and a recycling fee will not likely provide sufficient revenue to fund “privatized” recycling.

There seems to be the implicit assumption here that our options consist of recycling and nothing. Fortunately this is not the case. There are other, more viable solutions that we can and should be focusing on. Every dollar spent on an ineffective, inefficient, costly solution is a dollar wasted.

There furthermore seems to be the belief that it is somehow morally irresponsible not to recycle. What is morally responsible is to find and implement the most efficient and effective solutions for the environmental (and other) problems that we face. If recycling is not that solution (as it does not appear to be) then we should not cling to it in false hope. It would be morally irresponsible to do so.

Let’s spend our valuable resources (time, money, energy, etc) wisely, by finding and promoting sustainable solutions that reduce our current consumption and reuse where possible. That’s where the money is and that is where you’ll find a sustainable way to improve our environment.

kzinn, not sure what point you are trying to prove with that link, other than that china does actually do something with the recycling, which wasn’t my actual point. In fact, your article only seems to support the fact that recycling as it exists today is not a sustainable process.

Look, you people obviously just don’t get it! I think Hank states it beautifully and if you can’t understand that, then there really isn’t a point.

Didn’t COJ just implement a new garbage pick-up fee of around $40 annually in 2008? Where is that money going??? We can’t afford to just keep throwing stuff into landfills – in the long run, that will cost us the most….

Does any one know about the fate of the 700 million dollar waste mgt contract?

Looks to be back in commitee
http://citycirc.coj.net/coj/COJBillList.asp?Bill=2008-0538

Going back to Joey’s original post, I’m embarassed and outraged that Jacksonville would think about this for one second. I’m also outraged by it. And I agree with all 5 reasons Joey gave against this, because I do believe that recycling is important. (I’m the kind of person who regularly raids the kitchen trash at work to bring home water bottles and coke cans just so they will be recycled.)

I also believe that the “reduce & reuse” part of the eco-friendly equation really needs to take a more prominent role. I think most Americans look at recycling as the one holy solution, but it isn’t. I’ve taken to washing out plastic sandwich bags to reuse them instead of throwing them away. And I buy plastic storage containers that I can reuse so the plastic bags are hardly pulled out of the box. It’s all part of a big picture, just leaning on one element isn’t going to put a dent in this problem.

That being said though, I’m hoping that President Obama will take a hard look at this recycling situation. I’m hoping that part of his stimulus plan will include reclamation factories to open up in the U.S., rather than in China. I think that is a big part of the problem, not to mention all the fuel spent on shipping the materials back and forth across the Pacific Ocean. I believe there is a demand for the recycled products, and I believe that with that, more jobs will be created. Here is a story I heard on Marketplace not too long ago:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/01/06/plastic_containers/

I’m not doubly outraged, btw, just distracted by work so much that I can’t properly edit.

@ tom p–

To be honest, I don’t know. I’m forming some plans with some friends for something in the Mandarin area, a way to bring back Mandarin’s agricultural history to the forefront. The cardboard would most likely be used to make seed starters (one Wheat Thins-size box can give you 4 seed starters without wasting a scrap of cardboard), the brown paper can be used to reinforce them (papier maché-style with wheat paste), and the jars would be used to store seeds or anything else (like milkweed fluff removed from the seeds) we might use or make.

But I regret to say that I won’t be in Duval until mid-May because I go to school in Illinois. I don’t think I can persuade my friends to take on the stuff. I don’t know if there’s a way you can hold on to these things until mid-May…

I just moved back here to find…no recycling in a major metropolitan area? Is this a joke? Stop with the political arguments and lets get some bins and containers out there. Fact is – every little bit helps. I am simply embarrassed for Jacksonville.

yup…not good. did you see what Philly is doing now?

check it:
http://blog.nest-living.com/post/114869593/people-wandering-the-streets-of-philadelphia-may