Does recycling really use less energy and resources than what could be generated by burning the trash?
Some items are easier to recycle than others, other materials are more valuable recycled than burned, still other items aren’t especially valuable, but are plentiful–ie, if you recycle it, tyou get a LOT of product. Aluminium, in the past, has been one of the most desirable products to recycle. I can see that plastics could easily become much more valuable, considering the current price of petroleum. The problem is that recycling technologies at this point, are a balancing act between value of the service and products produced AND costs. With mandatory household and business recycling, so everyone had to do it, you’d have lower recycling costs AND improved technologies, because demand for the services would be high, the price of recycled goods would go down, so demand for those goods would increase. In general, there are reasonably clean technologies and there are dirty technologies for everything. In the long run, reusing most of those resources is FAR better than burning them up (I’
