Recycling Ourselves to Extinction

We are a society on the brink of extinction, but then who cares? We won’t be extinct until we use up all the world’s resources. So fun, fun, until then.

Industry makes the junk and then puts the responsibility on us to get rid of it. Recycling is not the answer and never was. But repeating the mantra of recycling has its effect. The Bush administration knows that. It pounded into our heads that our weapons of mass destruction doom a country with weapons of mass destruction. O, by the way how come we aren’t bombing ourselves or at least the people of Pendleton, New York, where Timothy McVeigh, one of the bombers of the Oklahoma Murrah Federal Building lived? Why is Afghanistan and Iraq so special?

I digress. Anyway, recycling is not the answer because it takes energy and transportation to ship and then to remake into another product and more energy to ship. But most of all because most of the stuff out there made of plastic is not recyclable or just not recycled.

Take for instance all those prescriptions bottles, or just recently the 3 million promotional plastic Neosporin travel totes, made in China, of course. These are tiny red plastic containers with a handle to swing around your finger and are being pushed by Johnson & Johnson Corporation to sell an endless supply of Neosporin, the antibiotic ointment. And we won’t even mention the billons of unrecycled plastic water bottles extant in the world.

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