Do you recycle?
For sure, absolutely.
Absolutely everything I possibly can.
For decades we’ve been told
Recycle America.
Don’t just throw it all away.
Because recycling will save the planet.
You're saving the earth!
And that’s what people believe.
We have to do it for the kids,
for the next generation.
This will all be back on the shelf
as a cracker or cereal box in about 4-5 weeks.
This recycling company is run by Lynn Hoffman.
If we're not using recycled paper and cardboard
we’re cutting down more trees.
Recycling paper and cardboard does save trees.
Recycling aluminum does save energy.
But most of the other stuff is impractical to recycle.
That’s right.
This is material that came into the recycling facility
from people’s recycling carts,
but is going to leave as trash.
Huge amounts of what people send to her
recycling plant will never be recycled.
The worst is plastic which for years
has been marked with a recycling symbol.
We see stuff like this all the time,
recycling arrows on it, please recycle.
It’s not recyclable.
Even worse, plastic bags
clog the recycling machines.
We have to climb in for a couple hours every day
and cut them out with the box cutter.
But people think most of our plastic is recycled.
Yeah, I do think so.
Is it not, you gonna tell me it's not?
That's the trick?
The reality is that
The amount of plastic actually recycled is around 5%.
Wow. I figured there was something coming,
but I'm, I'm, I'm shocked right now.
I didn't know.
It’s sad.
[Cans tossed]
All my life, I’ve heard about how important it is to recycle.
It’s not.
Science writer John Tierney debunked
recycling claims years ago.
His New York Times Magazine story
“Recycling is Garbage”
set a record for Times hate time mail.
And yet
What you said is still true?
It's even more true today.
In fact, the economics have just gotten worse.
Now my city would save more than
$300 million a year if it just stopped recycling.
Recycling is an industry that is using
increasingly expensive labor
to produce materials that are worth less and less.
Because it’s not worth recycling here,
much is shipped overseas to countries like Malaysia
where it’s just piled up.
A vast field of plastic. Two stories high.
Some of it from America.
See if we can look on the back here.
Marysville, Ohio.
Look! Walmart bag.
That pollutes even more
and what they don’t burn,
they sometimes dump in the ocean.
One garbage truck of plastic
is dumped in the sea every minute.
Barely any of that plastic comes from American shores so
[Dolphin noise]
If you care about saving Flipper,
you should put your plastic bottle in the garbage.
[Truck running over garbage]
The garbage?
But then it would go to a landfill.
And aren’t we running out of space for landfills?
I’m sure we are.
People believe that because
for years the media said
We’ve about run out of places
to throwaway our throwaways.
They think that because years ago
there was so much publicity about this barge.
A symbol of this country’s growing problems with trash.
The barge travelled thousands of miles
looking for a place to dump its load.
But it wasn’t because there wasn’t room.
States turned this barge away because
alarmist media scared people
about what it contained.
There could be infection waste.
Dripping brown ooze of possibly infectious material.
We don’t know what kind of tropical vermin is in that garbage.
But the EPA later found it was normal garbage.
And landfills had plenty of room for that.
Today they have more space than we’ll ever need.
If you think of the United States as a football field,
all the garbage that we will generate
in the next 1000 years
would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one inch line.
Really!?
Oh, that's surprising.
On top of that,
today’s landfills are not the polluters they once were.
Some sensible regulations make sure they don’t pollute.
Eventually landfills are turned into
ski hills, parks and golf courses.
[Clink]
Putting garbage here is much cheaper than recycling,
so why do towns keep pushing recycling?
They do it because people demand it.
It's a sacrament of the green religion.
I rinse my cans,
I take my labels off if there's
plastic on, that's something that's paper.
I take the plastic piece off of it.
That's fine if they wanna do it voluntarily,
but we shouldn't mandate that.
It's not my religion.
I don't wanna perform that sacrament.
I don’t want to either.
It’s time consuming and complicated.
My city orders us,
follow all these rules.
And that’s one of the reasons recycling fails
is because it’s so complicated
people never learn the rules
and why should they be spending their free time
learning these rules?
Worse, lots of what we do is pointless.
If you rinse a plastic bottle in hot water,
the net result is more carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere than if you threw it in the garbage.
Even Greenpeace said,
most plastic simply cannot be recycled.
So what’s Greenpeace’s solution?
Let's stop producing it.
You’re saying, don’t use plastic at all.
Ban plastic.
I think that's where we're headed.
No more plastic?
But plastic often creates less emissions than alternatives.
Environmental groups rarely mention that,
or how they misled us about recycling for years.
It’s appalling that after telling people
for three decades to recycle,
they don’t even apologize for all the time
and money that they wasted,
instead they have an even worse proposal
that will make life even worse and even more expensive.
One time-consuming dream of theirs is a
“circular economy” where everything is reused.
If you're running out a laundry detergent,
you could take your jug back to the store
and fill it up instead of buying another one.
That’s really the goal.
But people don't want to,
you're, you're, you're asking them to do things
they don't wanna do.
People also don't want insurance rates going up
because of catastrophic weather.
Catastrophic weather increases
because someone doesn’t recycle?
Sure because of climate change.
Give me a break,
recycling is no climate savior.
[Truck sound]
When Los Angeles mandated recycling
they added 400 polluting garbage trucks.
But environmentalists still demand
we pick through our trash,
switch from plastic to paper bags that rip.
California even banned
small plastic shampoo bottles.
These little things here.
Why do you want to make life more difficult for travelers?
Some of these rules are just so
arbitrary and silly.
It's simply a way, I think,
for greens and for some politicians
to pretend that they're saving the planet.
To feel good.
It feels like they're doing something.
Right. And I think they get a charge
out of telling people what to do.
[Truck running over garbage]
[Swoosh]
I will never tell you what to do.
But if you want to, please, subscribe
and hit the notification bell
to make sure you get our next video.