recycle!!

[handy]

https://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/recycle3.htm


SHODDY, MUNGO, AND NOILS

No, it is not a law firm like Gonif, Ganzer, Fresser, and Schnorer. These words hearken from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and earlier. Honest weavers created quality woolens. Nefarious weavers extended their stockpiles of first class wool with shredded rags and fibers too short to be spun by themselves. Shredding for reuse worn wool fabricated into cloth and used into uselessness completes its fibers' microstructural ruin. Each filament's rough and scaly cortex is stripped to leave only its smooth skinny core. We know how waxy to touch and clammy to skin cloth so derived can be - like a 100% polyester or nylon shirt. It is also weak, and rapidly deteriorates further. Cloth containing such remade wool is mungo (shredded tightly woven rags) or shoddy (shredded loosely woven rags). We know what the adjective "shoddy" means. It means "recycled."
Noils are short fibers carded out during fleece processing. They readily shed or pull out if added to cloth. The textile seems to evaporate with time. Progress has steadily removed noils from civilization, awarding us sustained wealth, comfort, and security greater than that of our forebears. Now, like an unscrupulous weaver who will not be held accountable to the passing trade, we are regressing to a shoddy life defined by Official propriety. Politicians and their toady social engineers wearing only the finest virgin woolens tell us it is for our own good, and theirs.

Recycle! Cellulose fiber is degraded and shortened by reuse just as is wool. Hand-thrown hemp paper, scion of the longest cellulose fibers in the plant kingdom, is the stuff of international treaties. Treated kindly but unexceptionally it will endure hundreds of years. Linen paper, also derived from luxuriously long fibers, is the stuff of US money. It is remarkably survivable and a joy to touch. Common fine stationery originates in cotton fiber. It sings to a well-crafted pen. Today newsprint is in large part mechanically pulped sawdust plus recycled wastepaper. It will survive less than one hour in unfiltered sunlight before it turns yellow and brittle. Shoddy has its proper place, like coal in furnaces, dependent upon technology to unendingly drag us out of its sucking mire.

How many times can shoddy orbit the use/reuse cycle before it crumbles in our hands? How far can cellulose fiber, polyester, and polyethylene degrade before they are useless, even as filler? Are you empowered by being given a piece of somebody else's pre- chewed gum? Do you benefit yourself and planet Earth by buying it at a premium price and being told how good it is? Oh, you virtuous gum rechewer!

Recycle! The price of newsprint fully doubled during 1994-5 despite (because of) a river deep and wide of (subsidized and mandated) recycled paper. It rose $(US)143.85/metric ton to $743.85/ton - a 24% increase - between 01 May and 01 September 1995, yet the recycle value of newsprint is perhaps $5.00/ton in an era of 3% annual economic inflation. If we do not recycle paper for newsprint, the price of newsprint will drop. If paper is inexpensive, there will be few profits to be had clearcutting forests for wood pulp. Clearcutting is the forceful pretext for Environmentalism - save our forests! Without Environmentalism, there is little incentive for the exorbitant and unproductive discipline of recycling. Recycling gorges on the public purse and spits back garbage. Recycling foments logical, material, and financial predicaments. Only more recycling can solve them. Let us engage in publicly-funded studies to prove it. We will need a brobdingnagian lot of them, because we seek to demonstrate 2-1=5 for sufficiently large values of 2.

What other civilizations turned inward upon themselves to abandon aggressive appetites and proffered luxuries in favor of wallowing in their wastes? The Greenhouse Effect inspires political barks for a Carbon Tax on Everything and global energy cutbacks as average planetary temperatures drop during the debate. (Science 268(5211) 710 (1995): Temperatures in central England over the past 335 years show a trend of zero increase.) The Ozone Hole rationalized ecological replacement of safe freons (expired 17-year patent protection) for new, hazardous hydrochlorofluorocarbons (100% incidence of tumors in exposed rodents, and lousy mechanical and thermodynamic properties). Official Antarctic ozone may hit 0%! When it does, how much further will it decrease if we return to safe and effective freon technology?

Government vehicles, whether limousines or trucks and buses, are not subject to the emissions standards plaguing private vehicles and impoverishing their owners. What bureaucrat would be stupid enough to cut his own throat, or spare ours? Per chance shoddy, mungo and noils really are like the law firm of Gonif, Ganzer, Fresser, and Schnorer. Translate from the Yiddish, and see if you agree.

[Braggi]

... The price of newsprint fully doubled during 1994-5 despite (because of) a river deep and wide of (subsidized and mandated) recycled paper. It rose $(US)143.85/metric ton to $743.85/ton - a 24% increase - between 01 May and 01 September 1995, yet the recycle value of newsprint is perhaps $5.00/ton in an era of 3% annual economic inflation. ...

So ... this is all pretty clear, I suppose. Just love statistics.

So the complaint of the author is that recycling is cost inefective? I think we can all agree on that. But then, the main purpose of recycling paper and plastic is to get them off the roadsides and other public and private areas they trashed up in a major way before mandated recycling came along. That's a massive public benefit that's pretty hard to calculate. However, glass and aluminum recycling are extremely cost effective and I note the author doesn't address that.

Newsprint has always used a percentage of recycled content, cardboard more and egg cartons are usually 100% recycled content. There are pretty terrific uses for a certain amount of recycled paper. "Paper adobe" and "papercrete" are great building materials and almost totally ignored by the building industry. Too bad. Putting recycled content into bright white office paper is just about completely stupid because of all the toxic bleaching needed and the high amounts of energy required to make it.

So use the recycled content that makes sense. Agreed. But saying that all recycling is stupid is just ... stupid.

-Jeff