Why Recycling Is a Complete Waste of Time and Effort

According to this half-hour video documentary, from: Penn & Teller

my own take on the issue:

Advocates of 'sustainable development' believe modern production methods excessively use up limited natural resources, leading to resource depletion, as well as to environmental degradation (from waste byproducts of the production process and from the eventual discarding as waste of the end-product consumer goods).

The way to avoid these devasting outcomes, therefore, is to ration the use of natural resources, so that their use does not exceed the rate at which they can be replaced, and also, where possible, to re-use resources by means of recycling, which latter both promotes sustainability and improves environmental quality by reducing waste disposal.

Sounds all very reasonable - but in fact nothing could be more counter-productive, because the surest way to ensure an abundance of future resources is, paradoxically, for virtually no restraints to be imposed upon present resource use.

This is because there is practically no limit to the number of potential ways in which currently unused matter (of which there will never be in short supply) can be transformed by means of new technologies so as to create new useful resources -

and the primary spur to this process of renewal is: business enterprise, which creates an incentive for profit-seeking producers to:

a) use existing resources more efficiently, by for example developing new means of extracting natural resources which it is presently not cost-effective to extract, which in effect increases the world's stock of natural resources, as something only technically becomes a resource once it can actually be used toward some end,

b) transform various kinds of matter into purpose-fit synthetic alternatives to existing resources (which will also be typically less-polluting than the cruder natural kind), a process which promises a potentially unlimited supply of new resources.

The former is the reason why renowned environmentalist doom-monger of the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich, who had predicted that our natural resouces were rapidly running out, lost a famous bet he made with the free-market economist Julian Simons, who predicted that not only would these resources not run out but that they would become more abundant. (see: Overpopulation.com)

The latter is the reason why it wouldn't matter anyway if existing resources eventually ran out - because they will be replaced by new (and typically more efficient) resources..