In , Richard Nixon flew to Moscow to personally flaunt the possibilities of American consumerism to Nikita Khrushchev, in the infamous Kitchen Debate. As product consumption became increasingly tied to the American Dream, industry seized the ethos of excess to sell more and more stuff for more and more profit.
In , Packard published The Waste Makers , calling attention to a number of waste-making practices by corporations, perhaps most notably the concept of planned obsolescence. Corporate profits soared, and a new industry of disposable products, built on the very concept of waste, fundamentally changed American life and corporate economics. In the s, the counterculture movement challenged a number of prevailing social norms, including the status symbols of owning lots of stuff.
But in addition to the greater cultural battle, corporate executives were also waging a political-economic battle against an early labor-environmentalist movement that threatened to look behind the curtain of the profitable model of postwar consumerism and possibly regulate the ecologically destructive practices that it relied upon.
As early as , as Heather Rogers points out in Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage , nearly twenty years before the first Earth Day, dairy farmers in Vermont noticed their cows choking and dying on glass beer bottles that had been tossed into their grazing fields. Consequently, they organized and passed a state law banning not just the act of tossing the bottles, but the actual sale of such bottles by commercial businesses.
Skip to content Home What are the arguments for and against recycling? Ben Davis May 27, What are the arguments for and against recycling?
What are three examples of recycling? How can recycling reduce pollution? How do you recycle plastic at home? What happens to non recyclable plastic? How do you melt and recycle plastic? Finally, we are told that recycling conserves scarce resources. That statement is true only when the economics of recycling a given material are favorable.
The price mechanism, in the final analysis, is a reflection of the relative scarcity of human and natural resources. If virgin paper is cheaper for a manufacturer to use than recycled paper, it can only mean that the resources required to produce virgin paper are relatively more plentiful than the resources necessary to provide recycled paper.
The environmental lobby ignores that simple but important fact and advocates the same sort of economic central planning which ultimately led to the collapse of Eastern Europe. Fully 87 percent of our paper stock comes from trees that are grown as a crop specifically for paper production.
In fact, to the extent that paper recycling increases, tree planting will decrease as a result of reduced demand for pulp. We are not running out of trees or forests.
In addition to trash simply going to a landfill, recycling adds a few other processes into the loop. There are the recycled goods that get sent to the manufacturers to repurpose.
Then there are the ones that need to go to a new factory all-together. In order to repurpose certain recycled materials, separate manufacturing plants need to be built and used. This would counteract the advantage recycling has of creating less pollution, since more may actually be generated as a result of the additional factory.
Establishing new recycling protocols often involves a high initial cost. There are units that need to be set up, factory upgrades that need to be made, and attaining trucks to haul the recycled material. A recycling program can be a significant investment for an institution or facility to make. Is it worth it to eat the high costs to impact the planet in such a small way over a long period of time? Recycling is most often prevalent in homes, schools, and some office parks.
The kind of recycling that occurs is putting used paper products into blue bins and hauling them away for reuse. This impact is rather small compared to the massive amounts of waste and deforestation taking place on an industrial-type level.
As citizens of the world, it can be frustrating. We try to make an individual, positive contribution, but it fails in comparison to the widespread pollution in effect. You could go to the store, grab a freshly made pair with a brand new sole, or you could find a nice used pair instead.
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