Freepers vs. Recycling

anon1's eagle eye found this one.

I don't know if all recycling is energy efficient, or if it's more a long-standing political fad. Neither do Freepers, and they're amusingly split on the issue. There's those who refuse out of spite, those waiting for the Almighty Market to give them money to do it, and those who do it but post on Free Republic how they totally don't like it.

ClearCase_guy is totally not smug:

Liberalism is an IQ test. The smug people are the dumb people.

Daffynition is one of many, many Freepers to raise this objection, but cite not sources:

It irks, that one has to rinse the recyclables...has anyone calculated the water it wastes? .....especially if you use hot water?

driftless2 wants everyone to listen to his LIBERAL geography prof:

More than twenty years ago one of my LIBERAL geography profs. did a study on recycling and concluded it cost more in money and was more polluting than just throwing everything in the garbage.

Steely Tom doesn't like to do anything that wasn't done like 40 years ago:

I have to wash the garbage I put in the recycling bin so we don’t have flies in the garage.

My parents never washed the garbage. I know this because I used to empty the wastebaskets every day and take the garbage out every week.

Diana in Wisconsin works hard to lower her footprint. And also seems to live in a place inhabited by Jawas or something...

I will ALWAYS compost veggie scraps and garden waste and will burn what I can - but I might not always ‘recycle’ as I should. I will crush cans and save aluminum for cash, but it’s not an obsession by any means.

However, he makes a good point that those stuck in Liberal Cities or, ‘In Town’ as we call them, have to have a place to keep their recyclables until pick-up day which can be messy and stinky in the heat of summer.

I live in the boonies and have NEVER had a problem getting rid of anything; I haul it to the ‘curb’ and it’s gone in sixty seconds. ;)

I ‘release’ it back into The Universe and if someone else wants to profit from it, so much the better. :)

Yeah, I'm not even going to look it up; I'm not buying this story by whinecountry:

Here in Calif. they outlawed plastic bags for groceries and urged everyone to use the cloth bags to “save the environment.” We know a guy who works in a landfill and guess what. People are throwing away the cloth bags — which take up far more space in the landfill and much longer to deteriorate than the plastics.

thirst4truth smugly tells of how she owned her public school system once:

25 years ago when my oldest son was in grade school, I caught him looking through the various "recycling" bags under the kitchen sink. "What are you doing?" I asked. "My teacher asked us to find out if our parents are recycling and report back." "What?" I took all the bags, plastic, glass, paper and put them all in one bag and handed it to him to take out to the garbage can, and told him, "Now go tell your teacher that I do NOT recycle, what is she going to do about it?"

Never recycled another piece of garbage again, happy about it too.

thirst4truth is pretty sure that one heroic act of dickery is what made her son eschew recycling:

He is 34 now, has a family and is not recycling, he still remembers what I did that day.

newfreep somehow ties recycling to being anti-Christian:

The same with “climate change,” it’s a religion and will make us poorer and lead to tyranny.

Leftism is an amalgamation of religious cults that is the “Bi-Polar” opposite of the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian morals that America was founded upon.

Haiku Guy knows what recycling leads to:

Recycling is practice for knuckling under to tyranny.

huldah1776 took all the wrong lessons from his social psychology class:

The recycling campaign is used as a prime example on how to coerce and motivate the public in my social psych text. Live and learn!

toothfairy86 is just not getting into the spiteful spirit of things:

I still live in a small city that was a major glass producer in the 1900’s. As a child, we used to play in the alleyways and dig up pieces of colored glass that was mixed in through the gravel. Now, our city is a democratic run, drug riddled, cesspool. We pay for garbage bags, and they pick up recycling twice a month...glass, cans, and newspapers. We used to be allowed to burn our waste paper, but the city took a pile of money from the EPA to make it illegal.

I always felt that most recycling was counter intuitive. You waste a lot of water to wash out cans and glass jars. If you really care about the environment, quit drinking out of plastic bottles and get a water filter. Make coffee in a coffee pot, instead of K-cups. Buy food or products with less packaging. Buy quality products, so that you aren’t constantly buying new stuff that breaks quickly. Conservatism is all about being good stewards of your environment.

Market robot kosciusko51 does nothing unless there's profit in it:

My daughters ask me why we don’t recycle. I told them there is no money in it. If there was, someone would pay me to recycle.

Hot Tabasco is okay with anything wherein he gets paid:

I think recycling is a waste of time. However, I AM in favor of deposits on bottles and cans and would like to see the same on plastic water bottles too........

lacrew blew a coworker's mind by demanding to be paid to recycle:

I once tried to explain this to a liberal who wanted me to recycle paper at the office. I explained that, if nobody wanted to pay me for used paper, at BEST recycling was a break even as far as energy is concerned....but more likely used more. In a free market, cost of just about anything is directly related to the energy needed to make and ship it. If new paper costs less, it must have a lower ‘carbon footprint’.

She shrugged it off.

Norseman is totally the only person who understands the superlative correctness of the market:

I got in an argument with a liberal about 20 years ago over recycling. He ended up saying to me “So, what you’re saying is that you only recycle what you get paid to recycle?” I said “Yes.”

Basic economics and liberalism are not easily joined.

Mastador1 recycled until he saw some poor people found his discarded cans useful, and FUCK THEM:

I have found that separating the recyclables ended helping only the thieves that came and took the valuable items from the cans the night before and sometimes right in front of the collection truck. When I saw that the city had no intention of upholding a law that was supposed to help keep costs down through revenue I said screw it.