If it is actually recycled, it is not sitting on top of the ground or buried. That is the stuff that is not recycled, whether is was supposed to be or not.
OK. That is true.
But the people involved shouldn't be saying that it's "recycled" when it's not.
Absolutely correct. Hope I am not wasting time, energy and money separating my trash and dropping off electronic at best buy for recycling.
Anything that has metal in it is likely to be recycled. Metal has always been recycled, ever since people started using it thousands of yeas ago. For example, it takes 20 times as much energy to extract uranium from raw ore, as it does to recycle aluminum. For anything with metal, I think we can be pretty certain that the recycling is real, and that it is happening.
Now with things like plastic, paper, and glass, recycling may, or may not, save resources. In some cases, it may even use more resources than it saves. There are so many different variables going on with these things.
I very much support the use of tree farms as a renewable and sustainable way of getting high quality, virgin paper. Given that trees are renewable, the idea that recycling paper somehow "saves" trees is not something that I agree with.
And I don't for one minute buy the claim by doomsayers that we are running out of resources. Scarcity leads to higher prices. Higher prices lead to conservation, substitution, innovation, and searches for new supplies.
Gold is great for certain electrical uses. But gold is scare, so its prices is high. So we use copper instead.
Aluminum used to be so rare that it was considered a precious metal. When they built the Washington monument, the top of it had a small piece of aluminum that weighed a few dozen pounds. At the time, this was the biggest piece of refined aluminum that had ever existed, and it was considered to be quite an achievement. But later, someone invented a way to mass produce aluminum at a very low cost. Today, aluminum is so abundant and cheap that we throw aluminum foil in the garbage. (Bigger pieces do get recycled.)
Today, the world has more people than ever before. And at the same time, the average person eats more calories of food, has more square footage of housing, owns more clothing, gets more medical care, uses more energy, and owns more material possessions, than at any other time in the history of the world.
The world's supply of resources is getting bigger, not smaller.
The most important resource that we have is information. And once a new technology has been invented, it can never be uninvented. The multi-trillion dollar silicon revolution is based on taking worthless sand (or other similar rocks) and using technology to turn it into something very valuable. I support using technology to give every person on earth a first world standard of living.
Israel desalinizes water for less than 1/5 penny per gallon.
Source:
Over and drought: Why the end of Israel's water shortage is a secret
And yet in poor countries all over the world, there are huge numbers of people who do not have access to clean water.
But this is a choice that those countries made. For example, South Africa has a shortage of clean water because it chose to reject Israel's offer of help to build desalination plants.
Source:
South African stupidity
It is possible to use technology to give every person on earth a first world standard of living. But it is a choice of whether or not to actually use that technology. People who choose to not build desalination plants are complete hypocrites if they complain about not having enough clean water.
