No, Recycling Will Not Save the Environment

For decades, we’ve been told: recycle!

“If we’re not using recycled paper, we’re cutting down more trees!” says Lynn Hoffman, co-president of Eureka Recycling.

Recycling paper (or cardboard) does save trees. Recycling aluminum does save energy. But that’s about it.

The ugly truth is that many “recyclables” sent to recycling plants are never recycled. The worst is plastic.

Even Greenpeace now says, “Plastic recycling is a dead-end street.”

Hoffman often trucks it to a landfill.

Years ago, science writer John Tierney wrote a New York Times magazine story, “Recycling Is Garbage.” It set a Times record for hate mail.

But what he wrote was true.

“It’s even more true today,” says Tierney in my new video. “Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less.”

It would be smarter to just dump our garbage in landfills.

People think landfills are horrible polluters. But they’re not. Regulations (occasionally, government regulations are actually useful) make sure today’s landfills have protective barriers so they don’t leak.

Eventually, landfills are turned into good things: ski hills, parks, and golf courses.

But aren’t we running out of landfill space? For years, alarmist media said we were. But that’s not true.

In 1987, media gave lots of publicity to a garbage barge that traveled thousands of miles trying and failing to find a place to dump its load.

But that barge wasn’t rejected because there was a lack of room. States turned the barge away after hysterical media suggested it contained “infectious waste.” The Environmental Prote