Gary Hirshberg in The Huffington Post - "How to Recycle Less and Do More"

Exerpts -

"Recycling is almost universally regarded as a virtue. I beg to differ. The act of recycling actually means that we have failed to reduce or reuse."

While (attempting to) recycle, "we have to spend enormous amounts of energy and money carting away all of [our] waste to someplace else, where it will be made into something different — a process that releases still more CO2 into the atmosphere.

What is more, recycling affects only a fraction of solid waste. At best, 5 percent of plastic gets recycled. We do better with aluminum cans, but the recycle rate is still only about 45% percent."

------

I've highlighted those statements because they show that most of the process of 'recycling' actually is just another form of waste. Recycling isn't actually benign. Yet many people seem to think that through either magic or through some non-existant form of high-technology we are able to recycle without using up resources or generating pollution.

In other words, recycling isn't just overrated --
a lot of what we refer to as "recycling" isn't actually recycling!

Is some of this 'recycling' counter-productive? I don't think that anyone could conclusively answer that question, but it's clear that a lot of recycling isn’t good enough!

From the standpoint of energy & carbon concerns alone, those issues are important. Many people don't realize how wasteful (so-called) recycling is. There are more efficient ways to use energy, and better ways to reduce CO2 emissions.
And when other ecological degradation (e.g. mineral depletion) and resource issues are taken into account, this wastefulness is more important still.

Toban Black
(http://tobanblack.net/blog/)