California has exploited the “positive emotions associated with recycling” with a policy hammer to pressure compliance, as if it were an absolute good with no downside.
Joel Islas of OC Recycling Center dumps plastic bottles collected by a Recycle From Home van, background, into a dumpster during the ribbon cutting ceremony for the reopening of the OC Recycling Center at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa on Wednesday, Feb.
19, 2025. Californians have been conditioned to consider recycling to be an unchallengeable proposition. It’s a moral imperative. Those who don’t cling to the faith are heretics. Yet fewer are practicing what they preach.In 2024, 10.2 million tons, or 13%, was exported overseas, with another 1% going to Mexico. This is significant: Much of this state’s waste is sent to countries where stewardship of the garbage stream is far too casual. Rather than recycled, it’s often lost into the environment. “A new report issued by the state’s waste agency shows plastic yogurt containers, shampoo bottles and restaurant takeout trays are being recycled at rates only in the single digits,” Should Californians be angry at themselves? Upset with their neighbors who aren’t as diligent as they are? Maybe even report them to authorities?.” Governments in the waste disposal business, he says, “incur significant costs, over and above what they would have to pay in the absence of recycling.” They have to pay workers, and buy equipment, to separate “additional refuse collection ” and also pay “firms to accept recyclables.” Recycling plastic had become so uneconomical that recycling chain rePlanet shut down all 284 of its California sites in 2019. Evergreen Recycling announced a year ago that it was closing part of its Riverside center due to “ One of the stated goals of recycling is to limit the volume of garbage in landfills. But this misses an important point: Modern landfills aren’t the filthy city dumps of previous generations..” They “are well-engineered and managed facilities for the disposal of solid waste … located, designed, operated and monitored” to ensure they don’t spoil the environment.fit on one-tenth of 1% percent of the land available for grazing ,” says author and journalist John Tierney, who, as a New York Times Magazine science columnist became rather infamous in 1996 for having the temerity to point out that “ There’s no reason to write off this acreage as being “lost forever,” either, writes Tierney, because, once filled to capacity, sanitary landfills are repurposed, “typically covered with grass and converted to parkland.”Leaving waste in landfills is also cheaper. The landfill fee for municipal solid waste in Orange County, for instance, is onlyWhile it doesn’t fit the narrative, recycling has its own untold dirty story. An overlooked source of the microplastics that have been accumulating in the environment and in our bodies is the shredding step of the plastic recycling process, says And it’s not usual for recyclable material to be shipped over hundreds or even thousands of miles before it reaches its fate, which is often in a landfill — or the ocean., as if it were an absolute good with no downside. This needs to change, both for practical reasons and the mental health of the millions for whom recycling is a matter of righteousness. Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute and co-author of “Owners of Brentwood home where Marilyn Monroe died sue LA, mayorLancaster parents get life in prison for the murders of their 2 children, found decapitatedPatient with measles visits Sherman Oaks restaurant After housing nearly 300 people, Los Angeles officials to expand San Fernando Valley’s RV-to-Home project citywideTwo 2,200-year-old mummies get CT scans at USC. Here’s what researchers found out
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