I had a teacher once who told me (and described it well) how recycling acctually hurts the environment...True?

Answer 1

As I do not know what aspects of recycling your teacher discussed, I am not able to answer your question.

How does recycling hurt the environment? well, you have to drive to the recycling center (this creates emissions). Depending on what the recycling center recycles, there could be a release of chemicals to the environment (such as soil and groundwater).

Recycling centers may have to have air permits, runoff permits, and other permits which measure the constituents that are emitted from the facility. Depending on the extent of engineering controls at the facility, and the management's commitment to control runoff/emissions, there could be an adverse impact to the environment as a result of the operations of the recycling center.

If this is what your teacher was discussing, then I would have to agree with him/her.

Answer 2

Teachers need to be careful telling students things like this. I am very glad YOU are asking for second opinions on this matter.

Some recycling, like aluminum, and many other metals is EXTREMELY good for the environment. Recycled aluminum takes 80% of the energy it takes to mine new aluminum...and best of all, there was no new mining to harm the environment!

Then you get into grey areas, like plastics. Take milk jugs and soda bottles for example. Because plastic has such a low melting point, they cannot be melted down, and made sterile. So they have to be remade into something other than food containers, like park benches, and fleece sweaters. So a lot of energy was used all the way around, first to make the milk jug, then to recycle, transport, and remake it into something else, plus the transporting of that new plastic thing. On the other hand, it means that much less plastic going to landfills, and being dumped into our oceans. Either way, it's probably a wash, concidering the pollution and fossil fuels that will be used to recycle it. Best thing? Try not to buy items in plastic, period. That does a lot to save the environment.

Paper...cost is more to recycle the stuff, than take it to landfills. Also not good for the environment the way the plants work that recycle the stuff. So, better to toss it away, or even better yet, start a worm bin, in your own house, and feed the paper (especially newspaper) to the worms. They will consume a great deal of it, and you get a lovely byproduct for your garden.

There's almost always a way to think outside the box, and come up with something creative to do.

Also you need to think about this (because I'm guessing you are a teenager)...technologies improve all the time. What was once not cost efficent, nor environmentally friendly may become quiet a good technology in the future.

Please do not decide because paper is not cost efficent, nor environmentally friendly to recycle that it will not at some point in your life become the best way to do things. Remain flexable, and open minded. Keep checking up on technologies yourself...what is true today, may not be true tomorrow.

~Garnet
Homesteading/Farming over 20 years

Answer 3

Keeping in mind that teachers are, essentially, human beings with their own opinions, personalities, and ideas, I still have to disagree. Well, maybe agree in a technical sense. Recycling, as well as almost all other actions, hurts the environment. However, the real question should be, does it hurt the environment more than dumping into landfills or depleting non-renewable resources? What the size of your "carbon footprint" is should be the true measure of how or if recycling hurts the environment. Keep FreeCycling!

Answer 4

Sorting and putting things in the recycle bin doesn't mean much if the other end of the system doesn't work right. The distribution of the recycled materials needs to be efficient or its just another waste of money.
Feeling like it's OK to use things like paper plates all the time because you recycle them is bad too.
I think the perfect scenario would be to recycle and work on being able to cut down the amount you need to recycle by buying and using durable things that aren't use once and throw away.

Answer 5

So, assuming that the teacher was talking about the processes used to reclaim various materials...

It still leaves the question...where are we going to put all this throw away crap?

Yes, all angles must be examined if we are to continue to improve. But...this idea that it's better for society, the environment, and Al Gore to toss something rather than reclaim it, well...I think it's a political ploy.

How foolish a society to blindly follow the political pundits on either side of this issue rather than looking into things themselves.

Fellow Conservatives: Ronald Reagan will not turn over in his grave if you reduce, reuse and recycle. It's actually a very *ahem* CONSERVATIVE thing to do...

Answer 6

I think it's good to try and use things that can be used over and won't need to be recycled. Like when I go to the grocery store, instead of using plasic bags, I have a expandable cloth back I bring with me.

Also, use paper instead of plastic. It uses to much fuel to make a plastic bag, so there is no need in recycling them.

Answer 7

And I had a teacher who would explain in *depth* how turtles were invertebrates because their backbones were attached to their shells. I had another teacher who spent half a semester teaching a biology class genetics and statistics and both his genetics and his statistics were pitifully inaccurate.

Yes, it may well be true that you had a teacher like that. They're out there and getting *paid* to foster misinformation and ignorance.

To the extent that some recycling may encourage waste, it may be considered harmful.

Answer 8

"Recycling" is such a broad term. Many industries recycle their waste (such as extra plastic or cardboard or paper), which then is used in creating new paper, plastic, etc.
A plastic milk jug has a "life" of 200-500 years. Does it make sense to chop it and reuse it instead of filling our landfills?
Not if you are driving one milk jug 20 miles to a recycling center, but that is not the case for most of us with curbside pickup. Reusing resources does have its cost and materials, but NOT recycling has its cost, too.
If a landfill (city dump, in bygone times) fills, then we have to buy more cheap land... guess where? MUCH farther away... Now all your garbage trucks are driving many more miles to dump "real garbage", using more resources to do so.
This is a complicated issue... what we can all do is think of this when you purchase something... is this something I will want for years? Do I really need it? Where did it come from? Where will it be in a year?
Most of us eat bananas, but they ALL come from South or Central America, but boat, trains, trucks, etc... wouldn't eating locally save tons of gas, oil, and emissions?
Using a worm bin to compost your fruit/veggie scraps saves tons of garbage a year from being hauled away and dumped.
Then, think about the toxic components of many products... these HAVE to be recycled, or they cause disastrous results for the area of land they are dumped into. So, even if the recycling takes more resources than you obtain from them, you still must do it to keep the toxic componetns out of the environment (computers, cell phones, TVs, betteries and more fall into this category).
Golly, we could write many books here on different results for all of our waste. What we can do is think about what we are buying, think about where you can donate items when you are done, but there is still "life" left in the item, (yeah, Freecycle!), and then really think about how best to dispose of the item...
Good luck on your research!
And, one last note:
"Trust, but Verify"
You may trust your teacher to pass on information that he/she thinks is accurate, but then verify, with your own research, what all the facts are (look at different resources online or in your local library...).
Keep asking questions! Then look for answers.

Answer 9

The energy to recycle isn't made in clean fashion. So by using dirty power you get dirty recycling.

Go to www.uspto.gov and enter patent number 5,430,333.

There you will see pollution free electric power able to be built to be more than 1000 times that of our largest Nuclear Reactor!

Plant Vogtle, our last Nuclear Reactor makes only 930 megawatts.

The first generation “baby” power plants from this new technology makes 1000 megawatts.

Vogtle cost $10 billion, 30 years ago.

These new power plants cost $2.5 billion in today’s money.

Vogtle is about to be retired, as are all our other Nuclear plants.

All the fueled power plants only have about a 30 life span.

The power plant design you will see at patent office site live well 100 years.

They burn NO fuel what so ever!

It costs more to demolish a Nuclear plant than to build one new!

The spent Nuclear fuel has a 25,000 year storage problem with no solution yet, and a tremendous cost that defies accurate estimation due to the very long time frame.

Nuclear power has been estimated to cost more $50.00 per kilowatt hour when the demolition and storage costs are applied.

Guess who gets to foot that bill, the tax payer!

Being fuel-less the design you see at the patent office has a cost of about 3 cents per kilowatt hour.

Coal fired power plants make 8 lbs of air pollution to run 100 watt light bulb for an hour.

There are NO cost estimations for the clean up of all that pollution.

We keep seeing in the news about coal miners dieing in cave-ins.

With the high cost of electric power being hidden for so long by our politicians using their abysmally poor judgment to allow this to happen in the first place. Then compounding the problem with their constant lying about it to all of us, and the problem now coming to light despite their best efforts to lie and hide it. We are now stuck with the costs of their abysmally poor judgment after their being “paid” by big power to lie to us about the scope of this problem for decades.

Call all your elected official state, local, and federal. Tell them you want the pollution free electric power you saw at the patent office web site! Tell them to get off their assets and get moving on making pollution free and cheaper electric power happen ASAP!

Or swallow their lies so more until our nation is so polluted our children die younger than ever before. Cancer is running rampant everywhere, it comes from all the pollution our elected officials are allowing to be spewed into “our” environment every day. It time to put pollution into it’s proper place, “THE PAST”!

We now have the technology, we can build it, it’s 100% clean, and the electric power is cheaper than ANY fueled power plant.

Show this to your teacher, blow him totally out of the water.

Clean power makes recycling clean.

Answer 10

No I don't think it would hurt to recycle? False