Explain to me, if the world is going on about recycling and how it’s good for the environment
Why is it that nobody is doing it? I’ve been told that recycling helps to save costs and money so shouldnt everyone be recycling?
In: Earth Science
let’s say you’re the government. You have lots of things you want to buy – you want some more guns, you want to cut taxes to the rich, you want to fund your healthcare system, you want to give yourself a raise. You need money to buy these things. Now eventually you come to the problem of waste disposal. You’ve got a lot of rubbish and you need to deal with it. You could recycle it, but that would cost a lot of money – you couldn’t just dig a big hole in the ground, you’d have to hire a load of people to sort it, you’d have to pay for furnaces n’ shit to melt it down into usable forms. You could then sell the product to companies who want to make stuff sure, but it’s cheaper for them to buy the non-recycled product because that product is cheaper to produce, so you can’t sell your recycled materials at the price you’d need to sell them for recycling to break even. So, given that recycling will cost you money, do you spend your money on recycling, something most people don’t even really care about, or do you spend it on that shiny new drone you’ve been wanting?
Recycling does help to save money in the long run, but only with international cooperation. We don’t have international cooperation and we won’t until it’s already far too late, so each government has no choice but to operate on its own individual interests and maximise the efficiency of its cash flow. That means not spending money on stuff that isn’t going to get them re-elected, and recycling is not one of those things because most people don’t give enough of a shit about it.
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