Is recycling bad for the environment?

How is a landfill a good sorce of natural power? Isn't a land fill where they dig a hole and just dump stuff in it then burry it? How old is your son and who did he get that information from? I don't think it could be tue because if it were then recycling would be shut down.

As for the landfill issue: If you have clutter and/or items around your house you dont want to be bothered with selling or taking to the dump - then Freecycle is for you at www.freecycle.org for a Freecycle group in your area. Freecycle is international. Recycle items to avoid overfilling the garbage dumps and make space in your home. One man's trash is another man;s treasure" truely applies here. I have given away so many things that I almost trashed that someone wanted and even came and carted it away. You can put in requests, too, and from there I received a free handicapped electric lift recliner worth over $400.00 someone didnt need anymore! The only requirement is that you cant give away forbidden items like explosives and such and everything must be FREE, you cant barter, exchange or sell. Try it yourself!

Definitely continue to recycle. Part of what your son is saying is true, and in general, nations haven't really got hold of creative ways to recycle goods - at least not enough of them. For instance, we only discovered recently that our City Fathers are sending recycled plastic bottles off to China, where the pollution caused by breaking them down is worse than the plastic bottles in the first place. Obviously a new solution has to be found, rather than saying recycling isn't any good. There are ethical problems to be addressed in the whole recycling issue that haven't been worked on thoroughly yet.

To me recycling is very important. Can you imagine filling more and more landfills with the amount of cans, glass and newspapers I see collected everyday around here. We would run out of space. Just think about it. The recycling trucks operate 5 days a week all year long. You don't want all that stuff going into limited landfill space. But then again, we could turn the Grand Canyon into a landfill. (JUST KIDDING) Lloyd

For items like glass it makes sense to recycle as there is a lot of energy needed to make new glass. Recycling old glass only needs about 20% of the energy needed to make new. As some other have said you need to also consider two other things, that mnay resources are limited (e.g. trees, land and oil) and then there is also the issue of disposal - in the UK we are running out of places to safely bury our rubbish!

I agree with your son, and so does my Bio professor. I was thinking of this the other day :) It is natural to return what we don't use back to the land, and it will eventually dissenigrate (spelling is horrible, I know... too lazy to contact dictionary.com), and return to us once again. However, humans have reached a plateau. We now use things that are not natural. Plastic, works of glass, styrofoam, poisonous chemicals. If we were to return these to the land, it would harm our soil content, and possibly contaminate water, produce, and other goods we receive from the ground. Like the user before me said, we are running out of places to put our rubbish, so landfills are getting closer and closer to home. It's scary to think of how much energy we waste with recycling, but it's also scary to think of eating potatoes that grew nearby grandma's buried cleaning chemicals.

it is still good to recycle based on pros and cons. details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling

Wow, that is deep. A lot of people don't think recycling is good because of these issues and they make a pretty good point in some areas but let's not forget the purpose of recycling, it is not really to preserve the environment but it is to stretch out our resources. If we stopped recycling paper then we have to cut more trees and so on.... Get it?