You won't believe this but actually (akschually!), quite a lot of recycling is stupid.

I recently finished an ice cream in Copenhagen and found myself stumped at the trash bins, wrapper in hand. Denmark sorts its garbage into 10 official categories, so that throwing something away becomes a small bureaucratic exam. The bins embody an idea that has gone too far: that more recycling is always better.

Recycling, Bjorn recounts, stems from the retarded 1970s mania of running out of resources... and all it achieved was entirely the wrong thing: "the biggest item households recycle is paper, and we aren’t running out of trees."

The case for recycling then shifted to protecting the environment. That argument has some merit. Recycling plastic can save oil. But heavy glass has to be collected, trucked, cleaned and remelted. Almost anything can be recycled if you throw enough money and energy at it. But are the benefits worth the cost?

Also, we don't need moral suasion or government programs to make it happen. Good old-fashioned profit motive will do it for us:

Valuable materials were long recycled without government programs to make it happen. A century ago, scrap supplied about 30% of America’s copper, close to the 32% recycled globally today. Iron, steel and construction debris are recycled because businesses find it profitable.

"governments have increasingly pushed citizens to recycle paper, glass and plastics worth less than the cost of collecting and processing them"

Ah, asshats:

Governments in Europe and North America now chase suspiciously round numbers. The European Union sets mandates for 90%, 85%, 80%, 75%, 70%, 65%, 60%, 55% and 50%, covering everything from beverage containers and packaging materials to municipal rubbish

oh lol, it's our plastic dumps in the oceans!

For decades, rich countries collected low-value plastic and shipped more than a quarter of it to China and other poorer countries that promised to recycle it. Much of it was never recycled. One U.S. study found that about one-fourth of exported plastic scrap was unusable, and half of that was badly managed.

"perhaps 5% to 10% of land-based plastic entering the ocean came from plastic that wealthy countries had virtuously collected for recycling."

oops. Fuck the boomers. (or maybe the millenials, I don't know)

You don't even have to separate organics or paper, which we Nordics do to our delight (but for a household makes some sort of sense, since it doesn't stink down the rest of the trash!)

Actually: the update here is: burn the rest, run a bitcoin miner with the fumes (blah-blah-blah, call Daniel Batten); proooofit.

ALSO: the opportunity cost of actually doing the sorting:

Official accounts ignore a cost every household pays: the time spent sorting. Peer-reviewed studies from Sweden and Finland find it takes 26 to 29 minutes a week per person.

"Recycle what is worth recycling. Then throw away the idea that more recycling is always better."

Archived via Bjorn's twitter: https://t.co/pm0VFnUEmK