Lots of stuff is worth recycling. It’s very simple: if someone will pay you to take it, or at the very least defray the cost of disposal with the value of the material, it’s worth recycling. Almost all metals fall into this category, for instance. No fair cheating with government funds.
I’ll give you an experiment you can try at home, whether you’re a raccoon or not. Strip the aluminum siding off your house, or the copper wiring, or steal a few manhole covers, or rip out all your copper plumbing, or cut all the steel fenders off your Prius. Go to the Yellow Pages and find a scrapyard and go there. They will weigh those items on a big scale for you. You don’t even have to get out of your now fenderless vehicle. They’ll weigh your vehicle coming in and out and calculate the difference. They will count money in your hand, because that stuff is worth money.
Step 2 is to repeat the experiment with plastic milk jugs and old newspapers and compare the results of the two experiments.
Hat tip to somebody. Ever open a ton of tabs and then forget where you found something?
And thanks to Sippican for this Penn and Teller “Bullshit” episode on recycling.
P.S. I’m surprised Penn and Tell showed Iron Eyes Cody, the Indian who was in all of those anti-littering ads in the Seventies, without mention that he wasn’t an Indian. Snopes and Wikipedia agree that he was an Italian whose real name was Espera DeCorti.
RSS Posts Feed
