Recycling: another idea that isn’t going quite as planned

I never thought that recycling was a good idea. The cost of recycling, the energy used to recycle, always seemed to me to result in a net negative for the environment. But it sounded good and people fell for it.  

Now the Chinese have decided to stop buying our trash.

“Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits,” wrote John Tierney in a must-read 2015 op-ed for The New York Times