Many millions of Americans dutifully sort their trash, believing that recycling saves the environment and facilitates sustainability. But what if this greentopian ritual not only doesn’t help the Earth, but actually harms it and the economy to boot?
Recycling most plastic, for example, would be a fool’s errand and therefore isn’t done, as even the environmentalist organization Greenpeace admits. What’s more, much “recycled” plastic has in the past been shipped overseas — and then dumped into the ocean.
Reporting on this recently was famed journalist John Stossel, who conducted his own recycling investigation. His conclusions align with what others have learned, too. To wit:
“Recycling aluminum does save energy,” he says in a video report, but “most of the other stuff is impractical to recycle.”
