by Pat Tigges
PNAA Education Foundation
Recycling is now like honoring the flag. If you don’t recycle, you’re embarrassed to tell anyone. But recycling is not always good. Young children do not understand the qualifiers and older students never get the chance to consider them. They learned the commandment in infancy and, in turn, they pester their parents. Take heart parents, your kids, their teachers, and Captain Planet are wrong.
The myth is that recycling paper saves trees. Paper is made from trees and if we made new paper from old paper, fewer trees would be cut down. That sounds reasonable but it’s wrong! Consider this. If everyone quit eating chickens today would there be more chickens a year from now? If everyone decided to save wheat by not eating bread would wheat acreage increase? Of course not. Farmers raise chickens and wheat to make money. If no one buys their product they will grow something else.
The same relationship applies to paper and trees. If we stopped making paper from trees there would be fewer trees. Eighty-seven percent of the trees used for making paper are farmed just like wheat or corn. They are planted for that purpose. So, for every 13 trees “saved” by paper recycling, there will be 87 that never get planted. And in addition to that, recycling paper requires chemical to strip the ink and bleach the residue and these create more pollutants then the chemicals used to process new wood. The waste is also toxic as opposed to the benign waste created by simply throwing the paper away.
But we are running out of places to throw it! Hogwash. We are not running out of landfill space. Resources for the future has proven that if all the waste America generates for the next ten centuries (1000 years) were put in one place, it would require a hole 44 miles on each side and 120 feet deep. This is one-tenth of one percent of the land area of the U.S. We are not running out of space. We are running into NIMBY’s (not in my backyard)
People picture today’s modern landfills as yesterday’s rat infested dumps. They aren’t. Everything from ski mountains, to ball parks, to nature resorts, have been built on top of landfills and the sites are often more natural than nature made them.
Recycling often costs more than it saves. For example cloth diapers may save trees but they also waste energy in both production and washing. Cleaning requires lots of detergents and water. The local sewage plant must increase capacity and chemical use; and so forth.
Pat Tigges is president of the Pacific Northwest Aerial Applicator’s Education Foundation (PNWAAEF)
Reprint permission given by AgAir Update, P.O. Box 850, Perry, GA 31069 - an international agricultural aviation publication.
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