It is pretty hard for you not to recycle. If I just throw my trash away, it goes to place where it is sorted and some is "recycled". They do of course have special places where the special among us can feel like they belong to a cause and put it in a place where it says recycle on it and they can pat themselves on the back and say they saved the planet today and aren't those Republicans evil.
What is the price of non-recycled plastic bottles and bags? Sequestration of carbon in landfills.
Not doing any damage. The dump will do some amount of recycling anyway. It is generally a money loser to run a recycling program, as you are sending out additional trucks, while the materials recycled do not collect very much money.
A lot of recycling is a sham. Although not 100%, it is good to understand an opposing view:
We are returning to the earth what we took from it, recycling or not.
Difficult to quantify (actually I'm lazy to goggle it up) but with an estimated so-and-so non-biodegradable garbage generated by each individual daily, the overall amount of garbage needed to be disposed of is great. It is placed in sanitary landfills, and more sanitary landfills will have to be established in the years to come.
The principles of waste management such as Reuse, Recycle, Reduce can help limit the negative impact of waste generation by the consuming public. As to recycling, it requires cooperation by everyone. Segregate those aluminum cans,plastics,some bottles, etc. that can be recycled;they can be sold.
