My generation became invested in Recycling before the "Mobro Barge" and garbage crisis (closing of small unlined landfills under RCRA).
The energy, carbon, environmental harm, habitat depletion, species loss, toxics, everything in mining and petroleum pumping, was the reason to recycle. We made a calculated bargain to put recycling into the waste management business, to benefit from rising landfill costs, but I have argued we lost our way.
Mining and forestry build roads into forests, which expose humanity to #bushmeat trade (illegal poaching). That brings endangered-species-platter to so-called "wet markets", which brings us HIV, AIDS, and Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) through chimp and pangolin and bat hunting.
FOOTPRINT: We pierce habitats because we don't recycle enough, and we need the supply of virgin raw materials.
FINGERPRINT: We obsess over our recycling - the costs, the quality, the access - losing site of the fact that recycling has always paid for itself if the cost of mining, forestry, and oil drilling have to pay for themselves as well.
Here's a reminder of our #owngoal, a Midgely-esque policy still championed as environmentally sustainable, which failed to do the math. ROHS, or leadfree solder.
Tin mining in SE Asia was practically extinct by 1980 (a high school friend's dad in Arkansas had lost his job because "bi-metal cans" demanded so little tin by then). We environmentalists re-opened this mining business because we were more obsessed with the quality of our waste than the recycled content and repairability of our electronic devices.
