I found myself wondering this as I got annoyed at the plastics industry and their stupid propaganda, as I do everytime I go to recycle something. But anyway, I had been thinking I’d heard something about people going to ‘mine’ landfills for metal because people weren’t recycling and it’s ‘bad for the environment’ and 'filling up ‘landfills’
Bitch Please. I can see the dollar symbols on your pupils from here.
So it made me think, paper and the such breaks down quickly. Food too. The huge drives for community composting efforts and cardboard drives for schools etc - It’s really all a matter of the fact we can re-use it all easily. Metal is worth money, used again and again, as it was straight from the earth. Just that plastic. Which is all but unrecyclable, save some clear/semi-clear containers.
But without the cardboard, my bin is pretty empty. It’s like recycling exists just to pretend plastic can be.
Edit - I should add in my area if the recycling the plant receives is tainted in anyway they just toss it. The whole load. So unrecyclable plastic? Dirty? Wrong material? Gone.
You’re seriously underestimating how many trees there are. The only reason we’re losing forest is because of grazing land. That’s clearcutting, where you remove the tree and just destroy it or just burn the whole forest. As a vegetarian I’m obviously not here to defend grazing land, but if you look only at wood and paper production, we absolutely can replace the trees we use with enough time for them to regrow completely.
Doing so devastates ecosystems by turning them into monocultures, but you’re only talking about the replacement rate of trees. We don’t have to worry about the replacement rate of trees, we have to worry about greed for land and environmental impact.
You cannot make paper out of all wood.
Additionally, the process to remove lignin, a binding protein, from wood in order to make paper is extraordinarily environmentally destructive. Paper mills do not smell good and are toxic waste sites for a reason
Yes, I know all that. The argument I was replying to was that you run out of trees if you use them to make paper without recycling. That argument is false. You’re arguing with points I didn’t make.
I figured you’d extrapolate and consider the damage caused by needing so many trees every year, not just the simple math of needing too many trees.
and i figured you’d read what i actually wrote instead of arguing with someone who didn’t exist
That was my take away with what they were saying in a broad sense - making more and more and more paper is unsustainable not matter what. Reforestation is still hard on the creatures dependent on the original environment…monoculture destroys economies (only for poor people, obviously) - in the end, no matter what, creating new paper products on a whim is selfish, greedy and avoidable