OT Re: Information security, recycling and irony

bmcculley at rcn.com bmcculley at rcn.com
Fri Feb 3 23:22:01 EST 2006


---- Original message ----
>From: Travis Roy <travis at scootz.net> 

>Very true, most stuff being sent out to be "recycled" tends 
>to end up in the trash anyway:
>
>http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/topics.do?topic=r
>

Sorry, I don't buy the validity of that urban legend.  I have
relevent firsthand knowledge to the contrary.

Long ago, I grew up in a town that had one of the first glass
bottle recycling programs, in the 1960s.  It started because a
local glass manufacturing plant had an inadequate supply of
scrap glass to start the melt, because of the advent of
non-return soda bottles.  (A small amount of broken glass,
called "cullet", is used to help melt the sand and potash that
make glass).  They were having to dump batches of good glass
just to get the cullet to start other batches, which was very
uneconomical.  So they started recycling.  No "big brother"
gummit conspiracy, just free market economics at work.

More recently, I was appointed to our town's landfill closing
committee when I was budget committee chair, and later dealt
with the transfer station / recycling center when I chaired
the board of selectmen.  I know quite a bit about how the spot
market in recycled materials works, and there is a free market
economy at work that belies the Penn & Teller bullshit claims.  

Also, having dealt with closing our town landfill and later
with a proposal for siting a regional solid waste landfill in
town when I was selectman, I can confidently assert that P &
T's claim that there is plenty of landfill space *IS* bullshit.

It has become all too easy and commonplace for cynicism to
attack popularly accepted beliefs, but sometimes those beliefs
really are true!

I thought this group would be more careful about disseminating
such attitudes though.

-Bruce McCulley



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