UC on No Waste

Under economics, we’ll never get anywhere, while a natural disaster consumes resources and is therefore seen as more desirable than conservation, which doesnt’ rate in an economic model.

Looks ok here (safari) but then again I think I stuffed the youtube embeding initially but it looks like someone has fixed that now

This post has severely ruined the front-page alignment, LOL!!

Oh, and that guy’s comment that “we can’t recycle because we’d have to sort the bottles and crush the cardboard boxes” is ABSURD. The implication is that it is going to cost the business a lot of money to do so, but I highly doubt that. How many hours a week would it take someone to sort the bottles and crush the boxes? 2/5/10? Even 10 hours at $20/hr + other costs, let’s say $30/hr total for the person to do it, and that’s $300/week for a multi-million dollar business. And I doubt it’s a 10 a hour a week job.

It is decisions like that taken for purely economic reasons that exemplify the total absurdity of the economic system. A triple bottom line system would look at that and assess that the $300 spent would be providing employment while saving energy (it takes 40-80% less energy to recycle than to produce a new product, depending on the resource), and then there’s the avoided resource depletion as well. We live in Kafka’s world…

While the ACT does pretty well at recycling, the quantity of garbage to landfill has been pretty stable over the last decade – that is, the increase in the % recycling rate has not actually decreased the absolute quantity of garbage to landfill because the total quantity of garbage has increased significantly. There is a beautiful graph illustrating this from a 2007 report but I can’t find it right now…