John Stossel on the Recycling Scam

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John Stossel is back to ruin your preconceived notions of things with some very inconvenient truths. In this case, these truths are going to be very inconvenient to the environmentalist crowd who thinks recycling is actually benefiting us as much as they think. 

For years, we’ve been told that recycling is the best way to keep the planet healthy and reduce pollution. Even as a child, I can remember that being impressed upon me in school, with more than one guest presentation, including songs, being taught to us to get it firmly in our heads that we need to recycle. To this day, I still feel guilt when I don’t put a little blue bag of plastics out during trash day. 

But lo and behold, what Captain Planet was trying to teach me back in the 90s is just like many other things that were forced on me as a kid. It’s propaganda for things that actually don’t matter. 

Stossel’s latest video on the “religion of recycling” actually makes it clear that we’re not saving the planet at all, and even environmentalist groups confess this when asked frankly. 

Does recycling work? Sure! On aluminum, cardboard, and glass… but that’s about it. Everything else we’re “recycling,” especially plastics, isn’t actually being recycled in ways that are saving the planet. In fact, every time plastic is recycled, it becomes less and less usable. 

“Recycling is an industry that uses increasingly expensive labor to produce materials that are worth less and less,” says John Tierney, author of the New York Times Magazine story “Recycling Is Garbage.” 

Stossel points out that landfills actually are the better alternative and environmentally safer, thanks to measures taken to make sure they don’t leak. Eventually, they’re turned into things like ski hills, parks, and golf courses. For instance, Mountain View Shoreline Park in California and Freshkills Park in New York City were both landfills that were capped and transformed into parks. 

This makes the idea that we’re running out of space to dump our garbage more sensationalist nonsense than fact. 

“If you think of the United States as a football field,” says Tierney, “all the garbage that we will generate in the next 1,000 years would fit inside a tiny fraction of the one-inch line.”

Moreover, if we stopped recycling plastic, the savings we’d have would blow your mind. Stossel says that in his own town, $340 million would be saved a year if the recycling stopped. 

Even Greenpeace admits recycling isn’t actually doing what people think it is, as Stossel points out in his video. 

“It’s appalling that after telling people for three decades to recycle, they don’t even apologize for all the time and money that they wasted,” said Tierney. “Instead, they have a proposal (banning plastic) that will make life even worse.”

So why does it continue despite experts admitting the recycling they’re demanding is doing more harm than good? It’s because the propaganda worked. People have it fixed in their minds that recycling is everything we’ve been taught, and that every time we do recycle, we’re saving the planet. The people keep it going in their ignorance, and environmental groups and politicians continue to take advantage of that in order to make it seem like they’re the good guys. 

As usual, you should definitely watch Stossel’s video yourself. His ability to break down things we “know” are true and exposing the reality behind it is fantastic.