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  1. #101
    Join Date
    Oct 2008
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    valley of the heart's delight
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    2,474
    Quote Originally Posted by rideit View Post
    Somewhere, an Indian is crying.
    I'm proposing we put it in the trash, not litter it.

  2. #102
    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Location
    Shuswap Highlands
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    4,345

    So I just responded to a neighborhood email re: recycling

    I wonder if the god of Abraham had similar musings about its creations.

  3. #103
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    Seattle
    Posts
    27,308
    Quote Originally Posted by LongShortLong View Post
    If it takes more resources to recycle than resources to make fresh, recycling is a losing proposition.
    It depends on what you mean by resources. If it's energy then you're probably right. If it's money, not necessarily. Some things are worth paying for.

  4. #104
    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Location
    Shuswap Highlands
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    4,345
    Most of our modern conveniences do not fully account for the cost of their production. Mines externalize the cost of extraction, focusing on deposits in locations that have cheap labour and very lax environmental regs. Manufacturing largely occurs under the same externalized conditions - low wages and lax environmental regs. That’s the front end.

    Now the back end - landfills themselves are not always placed in the best, most secure site under tight controls - they usually end up where to the local population can be ignored, and where an entity has access to cheap land to rent at a premium. And thats’s in North America, and even then lots of garbage never makes it to the landfill due to the costs of transport and tippage - remember the garbage scows of NE US that had no home so they just accidentally dumped in the ocean? Now much of the world does not manage their trash in a western acceptable way at all - it is truly treated as litter. And guess where we ship much of our garbage if we can - those same depressed economies without the safeguards we have here.

    I suspect if you apply your ‘economics’ accounting for all those externalized costs that are not born by the western consumer or producer, you might find the end result a little different than you present.

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