John Tierney is back with a handy reminder that recycling is not only dumb and pointless, it may actually be actively deleterious to the environment:
To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.
Even those statistics might be misleading. New York and other cities instruct people to rinse the bottles before putting them in the recycling bin, but the E.P.A.’s life-cycle calculation doesn’t take that water into account. That single omission can make a big difference, according to Chris Goodall, the author of "How to Live a Low-Carbon Life." Mr. Goodall calculates that if you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere.
Recycling is not about saving the environment so much as saving your soul: It's a way to prove that you are Good and that you Care About Things. It is also idiotic and something you shouldn't waste your time doing.
Don't even get me started on composting.