The recycling dilemma-
I thought I'd already posted this, but I think the reality is that I've been muddling about the subject so long it just seemed that I must have written the thought already. I was an early adopter of recycling. Living in Portland makes it easy, since recycling infrastructure exists to support the effort. If you can take the garbage out, it's not much harder to take the garbage and the "curby" of paper, plastic, metal, and glass out at the same time. At some point in those early years, I was washing out a plastic butter or cottage cheese tube with hot soapy water to put it in the recycling and thought "Which takes more energy, producing a new plastic cottage cheese container or using hot water and soap to clean it out to recycle it?" I realized I didn't know the answer and I had not heard anyone even discuss the question. The question arises in many versions. If you switch from regular incandescent bulbs to the new CFC bulbs, you will save electricity over time and use fewer bulbs for the same amount of light. However, if we add in the energy production costs of the CFC bulb and the long term disposal costs to address the mercury they contain, what's the net gain? I asked this question recently to a representative of Oregon Energy and, after some research, got an answer that the net energy equation still tipped to the positive. I think that we honestly don't know which way the equation tips in many instances. If we fuel our cars with corn-based ethanol but have to use fossil fuel to produce the fertilizer for the corn to grow, then it's not sufficient to simply count the "clean" quotient of the ethanol in the tank in looking at the equation.
Perhaps this is too arcane a question for most of us. Perhaps it would be an achievement just to get the majority of people to take the recycling out of the garbage and put it in a separate container, something the majority still doesn't do. The recent admonitions that Al Gore would have more credibility when lecturing on the world climate crisis if his home weren't sucking energy at the same rate as a small town in Arkansas. I agree that Gore lacks cred when he doesn't walk his talk. I think we'd all have more cred if we could 'think more clearly' about analyzing the real impacts of what we do. Difficult as that may be.
Perhaps this is too arcane a question for most of us. Perhaps it would be an achievement just to get the majority of people to take the recycling out of the garbage and put it in a separate container, something the majority still doesn't do. The recent admonitions that Al Gore would have more credibility when lecturing on the world climate crisis if his home weren't sucking energy at the same rate as a small town in Arkansas. I agree that Gore lacks cred when he doesn't walk his talk. I think we'd all have more cred if we could 'think more clearly' about analyzing the real impacts of what we do. Difficult as that may be.
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