I’ve met a lot of nice people on the Interchunnel. I’ve actually only met a few of them in person, but that’s the beauty of the thing. It keeps you in touch with the far-flung, even if they were far-flung before you knew them.
It’s really presumptuous of me to say, but the Bird Dog from the excellent Maggie’s Farm is one of my best friends. I doubt he’d say that in return, because he barely knows me and if he knew me better he wouldn’t even like me much; but the beauty of blogging is you can write what you like and then turn this damnable silicon box off and not hear yourself being contradicted. It’s like inscribing your own stone tablets and then breaking them right away. So Bird Dog’s my best friend, and someone tell Tom Brady’s wife to stop calling me, because it ain’t gonna happen. Click.
Bird Dog is profiled on Normblog, which is like an Internet Mount Rushmore, only more crowded and made from chewing gum from under a grade school cafeteria table, not granite. He deserves all such encomiums, and several other words I don’t really understand but can find in the thesaurus. He really is a most excellent fellow.
Very interesting post. I was wondering, though, about the shocking remark about all trash, recycle-binned or not, going into the same landfill. I’m not informed about this — just Googled it, and came up with some sites saying that is a myth; this one, for example: RecycleRaccoon. I’d just like to know the truth. Maybe it’s true in some places, not in others?
Amy’s name sounded familiar, but I could not place it. If you click on her name, she has quite a little opinion empire going that does not appear to have suffered any from my unfamiliarity with it. Amy is pleasant and her question merits an answer. (Walter Olson of Overlawyered has also linked to it today.)
Here’s what I said:
I’ve done more recycling than forty-five Ed Begleys, so I’ll clue you in on a little secret: after you sort through your trash like a raccoon and put it on the curb to try to resurrect Bambi’s mom through clean living, it all gets thrown in a landfill when you’re not looking. It’s a kabuki theater, not a real process.
I see now that I was very inexact in that sentence. “All” recycled stuff is not landfilled, but an enormous portion of it is, and it is “all” thrown in together after they make you sort it out. And of course, it might get incinerated instead of buried, but the point stands. According to the video I’ll post at the end of today’s drivel, the New York Department of Sanitation says 40 percent of what you sort for recycling ends up all dumped together in the landfill. I suspect it’s way more than that now, because in the current economic climate coupled with high gas prices, the price of collecting and hauling all that trash around has skyrocketed, and the price for the raw materials they would yield has plummeted. As I said, metal and a few other things are worth recycling. The rest is nonsense, and not just unproductive, but counterproductive.
It was amusing that Amy’s link identifies themself as Recycle Raccoon, making my comment about picking through your trash like a raccoon all that much more trenchant, if I do say so myself. And then they go right along and re-describe the Kabuki theater of recycling I’d described, and blithely says that since the man in the trash clowncar picking up his recycling doesn’t mix it all together right there on the curb, and doesn’t put it in a big truck marked: Bound For A Big Hole In A Pristine Piping Plover Sanctuary, it must be taken somewhere and turned into something useful, thus saving all sorts of money and harp seals and so forth. Mr. or Ms. Raccoon seemed decidedly disinterested in what happens after their trash gets to the recycling center. Out of sight, and out of your mind.
Once the little trucks are full, they meet in a central location and sort the materials into the larger ‘mother trucks’. One big truck is filled with ONLY garbage and goes to the landfill. The other truck is filled with ONLY recyclables and comes to the MRF (Materials Recycling Facility). This large truck is divided down the middle: one side is filled with paper and the other side is filled with commingled recyclables (plastic #1 & plastic #2 bottles and jugs, aluminum cans, glass jars, and steel or tin cans).
Well, only is written ONLY, so I guess that settles it. What you’re going to get from the recycling cult is right there in the first sentence:
Back when college graduates could still operate an apostrophe, that sentence would have been obvious to anyone as petitio principii : begging the question. That which is to be proved is explicitly assumed to be true already. Little elves don’t come to the MRF at night and knit all that stuff into a daisy chain for Gaia after you leave. It has to go somewhere. And more often than not, unless you pay an enormous premium with your tax dollars for someone to take it off your hands, it will eventually be thrown all in together in a hole in the ground. Either that or the MRF, or any of the other giddy acronyms these facilities are prone to, will be abandoned as uneconomic and will become Superfund cleanup sites. Sorry if telling you that bums you out, but don’t kill me, I’m just the piano player.
You see, when I said I’d recycled more than all those Ed Begleys, I meant it. I do not mean it as an appeal to superior credentials, but I’ve been a Division Manager for a large Environmental and Construction company before. We built landfills occasionally, so I knew for a fact that the recycling maven in the upcoming video was full of unrecycled merde when he says a landfill is just a hole in the ground with a 1/16″ diaper in the bottom, well before Penn and Teller visited one and disproved it. And me and all the dozens of employees that worked for me, including a few environmental scientists, had all sorts of training and the resultant credentials to handle all sorts of waste. I’ve had hardcore RCRA training. I doubt anyone else I’ve mentioned has. And I’ve had profit and loss responsibility for the safe disposal of beaucoup tonnage of wood, glass, metals, plastics, paper, cardboard, soil, contaminated soil, concrete, bituminous concrete, tile, asbestos, lead, waste oil…
I’m sorry, the Internet is going to run out of pixels if I keep up like this. As I said:
Lots of stuff is worth recycling. It’s very simple: if someone will pay you to take it, or at the very least defray the cost of disposal with the value of the material, it’s worth recycling. Almost all metals fall into this category, for instance. No fair cheating with government funds.
I’ll give you an experiment you can try at home, whether you’re a raccoon or not. Strip the aluminum siding off your house, or the copper wiring, or steal a few manhole covers, or rip out all your copper plumbing, or cut all the steel fenders off your Prius. Go to the Yellow Pages and find a scrapyard and go there. They will weigh those items on a big scale for you. You don’t even have to get out of your now fenderless vehicle. They’ll weigh your vehicle coming in and out and calculate the difference. They will count money in your hand, because that stuff is worth money.
Now bundle up your newspapers from the last thirty years, or all your milk jugs, or all your coffee grinds, or whatever floats your boat. Now I want you to start driving from recycling center to recycling center, paper mill to paper mill — all those places you currently imagine are just dying to get your assorted sorted stuff — and try to find someone that won’t charge you to accept it.
No matter how many years it takes, call me from whatever landfill you’re at when you finally give up and pay to dump it. And then take my advice and simply stop wasting stuff, including time and money — especially other people’s time and money.
Anyway, Penn and Teller actually have a much more amusing (if more strident than I like) take on the question. They’re prone to some salty language, so be warned:
Time for New Year’s Retrospectives, I see. I’m fresh out of top tens. Too much like work. I’ll ramble instead. If there was no Internets, I’d have to stand on the overpass and yell at cars.
Is Sippican Cottage the most malformed inchoate collection of essays and assorted dross on the Intertunnel? It just might be. I make no apologies. There’s no one to apologize to but myself, anyway, I guess.
I’m grateful for the people that come here and read and comment and what have you. I’ve made very many friends that I’ve never, or rarely, met. I’d mention a bunch of them, but they are so numerous I’m afraid I’d forget just as many and so my shout out would be a disappointment. I’m pretty terrible about reciprocating links and answering all my email, too. I try to pay attention, but I’ve got so many faults that San Andreas is my patron saint.
I’ve had a difficult year. Let’s leave it at that. I don’t write about it much. Thanks to everyone that bought furniture and banged on the Amazon links and sent me emails and just plain showed up.
One of my Interwebby correspondents is Casey Klahn. He’s a marvelous artist, and has a good and decent demeanor on the Interchunnel, which is fairly rare. I like to read his website because it’s an entry into a world I don’t inhabit. Faraway lands, fragrant with the spices of Araby…
No, that’s not right. Linseed oil, maybe.
Anyhow, Casey’s not nearly as lazy as I am, and he’s chosen his Top Ten Artist Blog Posts of the year. He’s confused the purple bruises on my thumbs for Phthalo Blue pigment, and lumped me in with people who appear to have some sort of discernible talent. He’s even given me a medal, which I will wear proudly with my speedo, cowboy boots, and of course, a fez.
Runescape. It’s the largest free MMORPG — an acronym for: Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. My older son gave it a whirl when he was in grammar school, but he got bored with it almost immediately. Not everyone does; according to Wikipedia, Runescape has ten million active accounts a month. I’m pretty sure New York City doesn’t.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube like this one. It’s the virtual equivalent of The New Yankee Workshop. Hmm. It’s the virtual virtual equivalent of a construction tutorial. There is no person, and he’s not making anything, to sell to other not-people, to get not-money.
These are strange and new concepts, and must be dealt with. It’s not as easy as saying it’s foolish and a waste of time, which is certainly the default position when you first see it.
My little son spent the most of his free time yesterday making structures out of Lincoln Logs. He populated them with little people, and put a plot to their interactions, then got his mother’s cellphone, recorded a video of the proceedings on the cameraphone, which he narrated. Then he erased it and started over. When I was young I did much the same thing, just without any hope of digital video — or even a phone that wasn’t screwed to the wall, with a curlicue tether, and a bell like a four alarm fire instead of a little song that plays. There is some sort of common urge there, that is being fed.
I actually…
How do I put this? See, this is the sort of thing that must be confronted, and sorted out. I actually actually stand in a little room and Use A Nail to make furniture. I don’t have an amulet, and the dungeon door market is a little slow just now, but still. I show others how to do the things I do now and again, too, sorta kinda like the video. I can’t imagine everyone runs out and builds a deck after I post twenty pictures about doing it, so perhaps you looked at it solely for amusement. The shadow world and the “real” one can appear somewhat the same.
There is a possibility that it’s me living in the shadow world, not the people making virtual tables for imaginary friends. I doubt it, but the concept must at least be considered. I could make real tables in my real workshop and if no one buys them, it would be me living in a fantasy world, while the Runescape authors are sleeping on a bed of Benjamins. And no one is making a thousand virtual tables on a screen for nothing, I imagine. You can buy virtual goods with real money, and people do.
But I spot the danger right away, and I wonder if others do. What are we training our children to do? How does the little man on the screen capitalize and run his little business? Watch the comment box.
You ring the bell. The servant is on the way. The servant goes to the bank. The servant goes to the bank. The servant goes to the bank Butler: Your goods, sir…
A little later:
The servant has returned with logs. You accept the logs.
There is a whole world being presented here. Something that has captivated many minds. We live in a world where many things are virtual and value is placed on them in ways that are not transparent. Expectations about the way life is — or should be — receive a kind of nebulous reinforcement, drilled by repetition. Opportunities to create a virtual system are considered the pinnacle of human achievement now. Opportunities to “game” those systems, as the author of the tutorial is demonstrating, are considered much more achievable than creating a system, and so are in the second tier of accomplishment. Simple participation in the system assures just enough status to keep people wandering around in it, and so there’s a big bottom on our ecosystem food pyramid, though when all is said and done, it is all nothing.
I just described Runescape — and the career trajectory of the Treasury Secretary, Subprime Mortgage finance, Credit Default Swaps, Carbon Trading Credits, Amway, 95% of all Venture Capital expenditures, the Stimulus Package, and the entire Blogosphere, — this little virtual world I contribute pixels to.
There are no servants. People will tell you that there are, to make you one.
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