Rereading some articles in The Atlantic by Adam Minter (whose ShanghaiScrap blog is down for maintenance, see opinion pages at Bloomberg), and I was stunned by the negative comments about recycling by "trolls" in the follow up.
There's an overwhelming bias, not just about Asian and African recyclers, but an undercurrent of distrust of American recyclers as well. If an American recycler sells bales of copper wire to China, and if the Chinese are making Christmas lights into slippers (from the insulation) and electric-grade copper, it must be wrong. People comment, knowingly, that it must waste energy (shipping Christmas lights all the way to China), or that the toxics released (by older insulation) make it a better idea to landfill them. Or that the Chinese are taking shortcuts to take the Christmas-tree-light-recycling-jobs away from Americans.
The trollish comments on mainstream articles about recycling are missing the point of recycling.
The world is consuming raw materials.
Raw materials come from one of two places: from waste or from the earth.
Recycling is not a form of "waste disposal", it is a form of urban mining.
There's an overwhelming bias, not just about Asian and African recyclers, but an undercurrent of distrust of American recyclers as well. If an American recycler sells bales of copper wire to China, and if the Chinese are making Christmas lights into slippers (from the insulation) and electric-grade copper, it must be wrong. People comment, knowingly, that it must waste energy (shipping Christmas lights all the way to China), or that the toxics released (by older insulation) make it a better idea to landfill them. Or that the Chinese are taking shortcuts to take the Christmas-tree-light-recycling-jobs away from Americans.
The trollish comments on mainstream articles about recycling are missing the point of recycling.
The world is consuming raw materials.
Raw materials come from one of two places: from waste or from the earth.
Recycling is not a form of "waste disposal", it is a form of urban mining.
