In this free-for-all-Friday, Trent explains why recycling often causes more harm than good and what we should do instead.
Transcript:
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. That was the song we sang as kids, and it’s a gigantic scam. Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. And today we’re talking about recycling.
Why are we talking about recycling? Particularly in it being kind of a scam and not worthwhile, yet we all still feel guilted into doing it? Well, on Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology on The Counsel of Trent podcast, but on Fridays we talk about whatever I feel like talking about. It can be about anything.
And so today I just want to talk about recycling because it’s something that almost all of us do, right? I’m sure you’ve got your regular trash can the city gave you and you got another can for recycling. In some municipalities, I think they have like three or four different cans you’re supposed to use to even sort your recycling even more.
I remember when I lived in California, we had one can for trash, one can for recycle, and one can for grass clippings and trees and organic products. But there’s more and more they want you to have. And we do it. We recycle. But it turns out most of the things we recycle are not actually recyclable. It’s actually bad for the environment. It doesn’t really help very much. And yet we still do it. Why do we do that? That’s what I want to talk about today here on The Counsel of Trent podcast.
All right, so I recycle for purely selfish reasons. All right, so I recycle for purely selfish reasons. I just need to have another can to get rid of my trash. I mean, I suppose I could ask the city to give me another can. I think I bought an extra can actually when I was in California for the trash that we made because in California our trash truck only came once a week, and that was the worst.
Here in Texas in the neighborhood we live in, there are two trash pickup days, which is actually nice. You have a smaller can, but they come twice. I way prefer that to when I lived in San Diego and there was one big can that you used and only one collection day because, oh man, I remember those days sometimes. ‘Cause if you missed that day, if you forgot to put the trash out that day, having to wait another week to go and get your trash out, oh, it’s just awful.
I remember those days. I’d wake up in the morning and Laura said, “Oh, did you put the trash out?” And I hear that lumbering sound of the trash truck going down the street away from my house, and I’d run out there in my white t-shirt and my boxers pushing the garbage can down the sidewalk like a crazy person, trying to catch up with the garbage truck. “I’ve got it, I got it. Please take my trash. Please take my trash.” So it’s like, oh, you don’t want to miss that.
But yeah, so we have the two days of pickup. Now we have the recycling can. We’ve got the blue recycling can and the regular garbage can. And I use the blue recycle ’cause it’s like, look, I can’t fit everything in my regular garbage can. So I think, okay, what do you put in recycle, right? What can you recycle? Aluminum cans. That’s an easy one. Glass bottles. You don’t use too many of those. But the one that’s always kind of iffy is plastic and cardboard. You throw cardboard in there, Amazon boxes. You think, “Okay, I throw plastic in here. It’s recyclable, right? If it’s got the little symbol on it, it’s something I can recycle.”
Well, it turns out that recycling plastic is pretty much useless. Only about 10% of plastic that goes into recycling programs is actually recycled. Plastic is something that’s really, really difficult to recycle. And plastic companies have known about this since the 1960s and ’70s, but they’re worried about the government passing laws preventing the creation of plastic products as people are worried about plastics ending up in the oceans, plastic waste. So they’re worried, oh no, people are going to start banning plastic, and they have started to do that in certain places, and I cannot stand it when it is banned.
The biggest one for me are plastic straws. That is literally the last straw for me. Losing plastic straws, I think the reason they did that, there’s like this fourth grader who tried to do a science project saying there’s like 50 million, billion plastic straws on the ocean. It turns out that was all incorrect, but people love the news story about this fourth grader who did the plastic straw story, and now all the plastic straws are being, they’re being phased out, but you actually create more waste with the alternatives and the straws that you do use, the degradable ones, those are just the worst. You start drinking them and then four minutes later it starts dissolving in your mouth. It’s like, oh, this is terrible. This is really awful.
People are starting to rebel though. I think McDonald’s recently released a strawless lid and you put your … Starbucks is doing this as well. You’ve got your lid that’s just like a sippy cup for grownups. You don’t get to have your straw. That’s not how it works. If I’m lazy enough to go to McDonald’s to eat lunch, instead of making myself a real lunch as an adult should have, you think that I care. I want to be as lazy as possible. I do not want to have to raise that cup an extra three or four inches to my mouth and sip it like it’s my morning coffee. I don’t want to have to do that. And people are starting to, they’re really mad about seeing that McDonald’s introducing it.
But you see this. So the plastic companies are worried that, oh, they’re going to ban plastics. We got to get people to see plastic is okay. You can buy it because guess what? We can recycle it. So no one’s going to be worried about throwing it in the trash. You throw it in the recycle. But if you throw it in the recycle, it still ends up in the trash anyways, or it ends up being sold to other countries.
So what happens is a lot of wealthy countries, they don’t want to recycle the material because it’s actually expensive. It says here in a report from S&P Global Plats revealed that recycled plastic costs an extra $72 a tonne compared with newly made plastic. Recycle plastic is just bad. It degrades over time. It’s not as useful. It’s more expensive. It creates waste.
This is similar with a lot of things that are recycled by the way. Paper, you try to recycle paper, good luck with that. To recycle paper, you have to drain the ink from the paper, which creates this kind of toxic sludge that’s even worse for the environment when you should just throw the paper away. It’s biodegradable. It’s paper. It’ll degrade. And you can plant more trees. We’re not running out of trees. In fact, there’s an incentive here for people to create paper products to plant more trees. So it actually works out well for everybody all around.
One of the other problems is that if you look on plastic products and you try to recycle and throw them away, you’ll think that they’re recyclable ’cause it’ll have the arrow symbol, the three arrows, and a number in it. That’s actually not the recycling symbol. The guy who created the recycling symbol, that ended up in the public domain years ago.
So now plastic companies will put resin identifiers on their products that have a number inside of it and the recycling arrows. That doesn’t mean that it’s recyclable. It just tells people what kind of plastic this is, and it turns out, so it’s really hard to recycle plastic. There’s plastics, you have to separate them. Certain colored plastics and types of plastics cannot be recycled together, so they have to be separated. When you try to recycle certain things, you have to clean off the food products from them. It becomes a gigantic mess.
Another thing that happens is plastic bags, they end up grinding and … Not grinding, but they end up clogging up the gears of these recycling machines, and so they always have to be cleaned and taken out. It’s just a mess. And you’ve got seven different types of identifying resin numbers to separate these plastics. It ends up, it’d probably just be easier to throw them all in a landfill. It’ll definitely be cheaper.
You have municipalities that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on plastic to recycle them. They end up not recycling them. If they end up exporting the plastic, a lot of times to recycle the plastic, they’ll just export it to China or Malaysia saying that, “Okay, these countries will buy the recycle waste from us. Then they’ll recycle it. They’ll do something with it.” But if they end up not being able to recycle it, they dump it in a big landfill. You’ve got these mountains of trash in Malaysia that’s actually from the US that they never ended up recycling and they never ended up disposing of properly by the way, because I’m going to talk about this right now.
You can dispose of it properly if you don’t recycle it. But in a lot of these poorer countries, they just dump it in trash mounds rather than proper landfills or it ends up in the ocean. It turns out, by the way, the plastic garbage in the ocean, only like 0.25% of it comes from the United States itself. That actually we would help little sea creatures, help all of them in the ocean, the big garbage patch and all of that. Instead of recycling plastic waste, which ends up having it sent to other countries to be recycled, we just buried it in a landfill here.
But this big campaign to get people to recycle, got people thinking that there is no room. Like, oh, we’re running out of room. There’s no landfills here. And we got to recycle because the trash is just going to end up on the ground at the feet of a sad Native American. If you’re an older viewer, baby boomer, maybe Gen Xer, you might remember that ad from the 1970s with the sad Indian. Let me see if I can find it here and play the clip for you for at least to hear it.
Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t. People start pollution, people can stop it.
So that’s a classic ad. You’ve got the sad Native American, a little tear running down his face, looking at the camera solemnly as the trash is at his feet. And look what’s happening to our beautiful country. We need to recycle instead.
The most hilarious part of that ad, by the way, is that the “Native American” in it is an Italian actor. He went by the name Iron Eyes Cody, but his real name is Espera Oscar de Corti. It says here, he was an American actor of Italian descent who portrayed Native Americans in Hollywood films, famously as Chief Iron Eyes and Bob Hope’s The Paleface in 1948. He also played a Native American shedding a tear about pollution, one of the country’s most well-known public service announcements from the group Keep America Beautiful.
Living in Hollywood, so Iron Eyes Cody, aka De Corti, who’s Italian, he began to insist even in his private life that he was Native American, over time claiming membership in several different tribes. In 1996, Cody’s half sister said that he was of Italian ancestry, but he denied it. After his death, it was revealed that he was of Sicilian parentage and not Native American at all. So I ruined your childhood. How many of those old PSAs were actually completely false? Many of them, I would say, many of them.
Another reason people thought that landfills didn’t have room in them was that back in 1987, you had that story about the trash barge going up and down the East Coast that nobody would take.
We know is particularly fond of taking out the garbage. How about the prospect of not being able to get rid of it at all?
The barge has quickly become a symbol of this country’s growing problems with trash.
The nation’s crisis in disposing of solid waste.
Over half the cities in the US will exhaust their current landfills by 1990.
It’s like, oh no, we’ve got no room for trash. Even this barge, it has this trash in it. America has so much trash, you have to put it out of the ocean and nobody’s willing to take it.
That had nothing to do with space and landfills. It dealt with a rumor that the barge had biohazardous waste on it, which turned out to not be the case.
So the story of that barge owes the Mobro 4000, which sounds like a new vacuum cleaner, the Mobro 4000 owned by Mobro Marine Incorporated in 1986 was hauling a load of trash along the East Coast of North America from New York City to Belize and back until a way was found to dispose of the garbage.
It turned out that New York had reached its particular landfill capacity and they agreed to ship its garbage to Morehead City in North Carolina where it would be converted to methane.
Here’s the thing, if you have a good landfill and you fill it up properly and seal it, you can actually, new landfill technology, you can protect the groundwater, you can line the landfill, you can fill it with trash. Once it reaches its capacity, then you can pave it over. You can put a park over it. You can actually take the trash that’s underneath it and the methane gas that seeps from it, you can generate electricity from it through, or you can turn it into methane to use for different products, things like that.
So this barge was sent down to North Carolina, turned into methane, about 3000 tons of it. While it was in transit, a rumor was spread that 16 bundles of trash that contained hospital gowns, syringes, and diapers, there was a contaminant within it. And so it got news attention, and because of this rumor that there was some kind of biohazardous contaminant in the barge, North Carolina refused to accept it. It went to Louisiana. They declined it. Went down to Mexico, Belize. Nobody actually even wanted this thing.
Eventually, the whole drama ended in July. It started in March that the trash was eventually permitted by the federal government to be incinerated in Brooklyn, and the contaminant fears were completely overblown.
It says here that it was cited by environmentalists as emblematic of a solid waste disposal crisis in the US due to a shortage of landfill space. Almost 3000 municipal landfills had closed between 1982 and 1987, triggered national public discussion about waste disposal, and was a factor in increasing recycling rates in the late ’80s and the ’90s.
But here’s the thing, we have plenty of room for landfills. There are municipal landfills that do fill up. But when a landfill fills up, you just cap it off and then you can get another landfill.
I was reading an article recently about how big of a space you would need for all of the trash that the United States creates in what, like a hundred years or something like that. And the article said The great pyramid in Egypt is 756 feet by 756 feet, 481 feet tall. It’s a really, really big thing it says, one of the biggest things ever built by man. If you took all the trash that the United States would generate in a hundred years and pile it up in the shape of the great pyramid, it would be about 32 times bigger. The base of this trash pyramid would be 4.5 by 4.5 miles, and the pyramid would rise almost three miles high.
Now, that would be an impressive thing to see a three-mile-high trash pyramid. Now it makes you think, like you think of this three-mile-high trash pyramid. We’re going to be covered in trash. 4.5 by 4.5 miles. That’s big. That’s about what, 18 square miles, something like that.
The continental United States is 3 million square miles in size, and you have parts of the country, like in the middle third of the country like that area in western Texas, Eastern New Mexico, parts of Wyoming, Colorado. If you look on a map, you know what I’m talking about. This is the dead zone of the country. Something like 2% of the population lives in something that makes up one fifth or one six of the size of the contiguous United States. There is nothing out there.
When I drive with Laura, when we drive to go to New Mexico or Phoenix to see our relatives once we pass Midland, Texas, until you get to El Paso, Texas, there is just nothing. You’re just driving out there. And I remember, actually, we actually had car trouble and I was worried the battery clamp on our car came off. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it came off and it was sparking inside of the engine block and my car would flicker on and off. I’m like, “What is happening?”
So we managed to pull off at the one tiny little town in the middle of nowhere there. Thankfully, I was able to figure out is the battery clamp and I got it out. But I always have this fear when I’m driving through that part of Texas. I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want to break down because there’s nothing out here.”
So if we need a place to dispose the trash, instead of recycling it through dubious processes where it ends up in other countries, in bad landfills, or it ends up in the ocean or nothing happens to it, just throw it in a landfill and you can do that in a safe and environmental way. That was it. That was just all my rant on recycling today.
Should you recycle? I’m not telling you not to recycle. Do whatever you want, but don’t feel guilted as if you’re a bad person if you don’t throw plastic in the recycle bin, because odds are, if you throw it in the trash or the recycle bin, it’s going to end up in the same place. We just don’t want to let our lives be ruled by misinformation. All right? So thank you guys very much and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.
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