The important question is whether the impact of recycling the waste you create is a net gain or loss, after you take into account all the work needed to do the recycling. From an energy perspective, most recycling is a massive saver of energy [1], but that doesn't mean it's economical. England, for example, imports a lot of glass, but does very little glass manufacturing. Recycling glass there is probably not a valuable service, but that says nothing about its value where you live (unless you happen to live in England).

Waste stream sorting technology is still developing; I wouldn't be surprised if that reduces costs in the future such that sorting waste in your house isn't worth it-- you'll just dump everything in the bin and let robots pick out the valuable stuff later.

[1]: http://www.economist.com/node/9249262 (Money quote: "Recycling aluminium, for example, can reduce energy consumption by as much as 95%. Savings for other materials are lower but still substantial: about 70% for plastics, 60% for steel, 40% for paper and 30% for glass.")

sort of broad strokes, but jon a global scale, human created by-products are bad. Reducing consumption, re-using, re-cycling, in the true sense are all great things to do - but OPs point, as i read it, is more abou the last part than the rant at the beginning. If we dont want people going after our internet in the long run, we need to make the people who tried to screw it up change their perspective. corporations will not support political support if it obviosly costs them painfully, much worse than whatever money they spent lobbying plus what they thought they were protecting against. politicians can be ousted.

money makes the world go around, and while lobbyits throw. money at politicians for their election campaigns, in the end its the people who elect them who really matter. that money is used to convince people to elect them...... so if enough people start telling their local reps, very clearly, that they are DONE in office unless they change stance on an issue, and also that they will gain a vote if they DO change their stance, money means a lot less. If the majority of your constituents love you, and you are sure of it, you dont need nearly as much capital to stay in office.

the clear message should be "hands off the internet. totally. let it grow. its revolutionary for the human race and in its infancy, and it only works because people agreed to follow a set of standards that allowed it to come into being, it was not planned. it is a collection of networks, and it can, and will, let its users find a way around any censorship. i dont condone piracy, but the internet, and the ease of moving data around are only going to get better and better. hollywood and industries who IP laws to protect them are not inherently bad, they just have a big change in how things work in frint of them. I am sure hollywood can figure out how to continue making movies even though they can be copied globally in seconds.... because people still want new movies. there is still a market. music industry, book industry, same deal.

know when you get tempted to pirate a book? when there is no kindle edition, at the author or publishers choice. i want a digital version. i want instant delivery, and i am willing to pay for that..... its real ly simple.

In tech, we call it premature optimisation.

Suppose recycling used more energy than it saved (which is the case for some materials e.g. low grade plastic waste in places with little plastic manufacturing). Then, even if that waste were most of the waste stream, getting people to recycle would not be essential-- it would actually create more waste, something to avoid.

My claim is that as long as recycling is a net gain, after you count all the costs, it doesn't matter what percentage of the total waste stream it is.

Note that I'm not saying that industry shouldn't also recycle. I suspect that the potential gains there are even larger, but that's not an argument against household recycling, given that the tasks are executed by different people in parallel.

Then you are ignoring the very existence of opportunity cost.

This is why unbiased figures are important. It's all relative. Why should everybody in my country have multiple bins picked up at different dates and have to separate garbage manually only to have a second group of people sort through it, if the overall effect is so tiny?

It's not wrong. There are two different answers: what's best for the individual and what's best for society/collective/etc are not the same thing. This is why legislation and reduction of barriers (like single stream recycling) are necessary.

The same page mentions a higher bound of 20%, but in any case it seems reasonably well established that the vast majority of the waste produced (at least in the US) comes from the manufacturing/industrial process itself, not from households.

A book that goes into quite a bit of detail about this is "Gone tomorrow" by Heather Rogers.

"We estimated residential waste (including waste from apartment houses) to be 55 to 65 percent of total MSW generation. Waste from commercial and institutional locations, such as schools, hospitals, and businesses, amounted to 35 to 45 percent."

http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/msw2009-fs...

See also what screwt writes: the rubble, for example, is not the kind of waste that has an environmental impact of the household waste (e.g. batteries with toxic materials etc). The important thing is environmental impact, not the absolute weight of the waste. I agree however that EPA seems to be too silent about the waste produced by factories.

I think these statistics are somewhat misleading.

Waste from building tends to be rubble and dirt. Some of this can be re-used (eg filler for roads), but also the environmental impact of disposing of dirt is not much.

More importantly, the stats on the link above give waste measured by weight. A skip full of rubble (densely-packed stone) weighs far more than a skip full of general trash (loose-packed plastic bottles). A comparison by volume would be more informative[1].

That doesn't go for all building waste, and I don't know what comprises most industrial waste. All in all, I suspect cutting everyone's household waste to zero would make a significant impact on reducing the volume of waste produced nationwide; I don't know though whether it would make as much as a 50% impact.

[1] Obviously there are difficulties comparing by volume since household waste can be compacted to a great degree - my point is that comparison by weight skews heavily to the side of building waste.

I'm surprised that the construction waste is that high. Apart from that, it seems that manufacturing and construction waste is less dominant over here than it is in the US. Odd! Maybe I'm reading the numbers wrong or they're counting really differently. FWIW, Wikipedia says that the per capita waste amount is about 500 kg, referring to just the category of private households/offices I assume.

Ref: http://www.bmu.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/abfal... (German)

If we're talking about waste produced in the US? Probably not a ton. There is a lot of high-tech manufacturing in the US but it's generally industrial components (airplanes, solar cells) that companies keep around until they no longer work. There's not much in the way of consumer electronics manufactured in the US.

Now if you want to talk worldwide...

Of all the daily garbage we seperate out: paper carton organic stuff (compost) batteries cans Plastic bottle glas

Edit: Most buissnesses do this too.

This argument alone is enough to justify residential recycling programs, they do help the local environment (the environment most would regard as most important to themselves) and waste reduction comes close to paying for itself in saved municipal costs (which would be reflected in local taxes). In places where energy costs are high and land very valuable recycling makes economic sense without any concern for the environment.

What I hate about recycling is that it's so much less effective than the other r's: reducing and reusing. I wish the focus was much more on those two; think of the impact possible if consumers just demanded less packaging, for example.