all right Robert
uh my dog just went on the floor anyway um what do you do about recycling in your area
well as a matter of fact uh it's it's funny that i chose this subject because uh uh the city of Raleigh about six weeks ago has just uh put in a city wide recycling
uh regime in which uh bottles and newspapers are recycled and a truck comes around uh once every couple of weeks and they separate your bottles for you and your newspapers and uh and they
give you little uh or actually fairly large green plastic uh containers to put out curbside and all that so i think this is a real sign of progress here in the city of Raleigh
they separate everything for you
they do all you have to do is you put all your glass in the bottom of this thing followed by your plastic followed by the newspapers and when they come around to pick it up they do all the separation so you only have one
uh-huh
place to put stuff
wow
so they've made it uh they've made it convenient it used to be if you wanted to recycle you had to drive to a uh
a central location in the city and then do all the separation yourself and a lot of people didn't do it just because the recycling location was so unpleasant
yeah
because you know when you have all that amount of stuff pretty soon you have various kinds of vermin running around and
right
women seem to have something against having mice running across their feet when they're trying to recycle
yeah
that sounds like it's uh a really a
what you have to do basically you have to make it as easy and convenient for people as possible and
right
unfortunately while the responsibility should be on the consumer it will be placed on the cities now
because you know of the convenience factor i try to get as i try to save aluminum cans and uh plastic and all that and whether i get much for it or not doesn't really bother me but uh
you know i live in Sherman Texas which is probably a small town of about i don't know twenty twenty five thousand and they have sites around in the community the the grocery stores are really helping out a lot
um-hum
they allow you they've got fenced in areas on their properties and
and you go and uh drop off all your goods there but like you said you have to separate them
and uh
i don't know if it's really i don't think it's that bad cleanliness wise
because it's there on the store's property and it's on a it's on concrete it's on you know asphalt and there's huge trash bins but there may be some unsightly creatures running around
yeah
i wonder what happens if somebody just misses with a bottle and it hits the asphalt i would think you'd just end up with a lot of broken glass unless you swept up everyday
yeah yeah i
i don't drop mine off there i take mine in to a uh
a uh a big metal recycling place that takes about everything and they pay you for it so i've never taken mine to the to grocery stores and dropped off but
yeah
yeah but uh it it it sounds let's see you you may you said one thing that uh uh you know just for the the sake of argument here um
that that i'd like to bring up and that is whether it's the function of government to do the recycling rather than the individual consumer and i guess my opinion would be that that's maybe one of the few
uh-huh
functions that government ought to do i can think of a lot of things that they shouldn't do that they do do
uh-huh
but uh it seems like recycling is something that uh that the government ought to do and that everybody ought to pay for because i think in the long run
it's one of those things that's that's of universal benefit to every citizen in the country
uh-huh
well all i was saying was that to get it done it would have to take
the the convenience and and the burden would have to be placed
on someone other than the consumer because the consumer just won't do it so if if government should do it you know somebody's got to do it and if if anybody it should be the government
right
right right
but you know ultimately it should be the responsibility of the consumer but that just won't happen it's unrealistic so uh
you know in the ideal society everyone would uh buy all unrecyclable all recyclable stuff and everything would get recycled and we wouldn't have any problem but uh uh that's
right
not feasible so uh yeah the government should probably step in and uh take a little more charge and what's really good is um
uh that the government there in Raleigh i mean they've you know they provide the bags didn't you say that
they provide well they provide these big plastic uh boxes actually they're a good size box maybe uh eighteen uh inches by uh thirty inches in size and uh you know maybe fifteen inches deep
yeah
a good sturdy plastic box and it's got uh some uh uh bungy cord uh kind of arrangement so when you put your newspapers on the top they don't blow away in the wind if it's windy and uh
uh-huh
and then they they apparently built these rather uh
uh fancy trucks that come around and have and have the various bins for the recyclable various colored glasses and a bin for the plastic and a place for the newspaper and they're kind of these high
huh
sort of uh high tech uh uh uh trash collector trucks they're big things too they must be as long as at least as long as a school bus
wow
and uh i'm sure it's costing the city of Raleigh money but of course
i mean that comes out of the taxes and
so the people are ultimately paying for it and i think that people ought to ultimately pay for the convenience of having newspapers and bottles and and plastics and all that
uh-huh i wonder if uh the government there makes any money off the recycling
well i think that they that they do attempt to uh
that that that they they sell the the glass and the newspaper my understanding is that they don't meet expenses with it but that they offset a lot of expenses
yeah
one of the problems with newsprint especially is that virgin newsprint costs about twenty five or thirty percent of what recycled newsprint costs so
uh-huh
a newspaper company is not is not going to buy recycled newsprint when virgin newsprint is available at a third of the cost and i think one of the problems there is that
uh-huh
is is the cost of virgin newsprint is not being accurately accurately reflected because that cost ought to reflect the cost of recycling
and
hum
and what the government needs to do really in a good capitalist society i mean capitalism thrives on there being a fair price for a product and
and that price ought to has to include uh the cost of its disposal and it also has to include the cost of of any damage it inflicts on the environment
and that's really where we as a capitalist society have gone have gone awry we have not
really assigned costs appropriately for example the real cost of a barrel of oil if you take into account pollution and all of the other side effects is probably a hundred dollars a barrel
uh-huh
now i'm just guessing but i bet you that that's an accurate guess
uh-huh
hum
and
but we're we're paying twenty so the the cost is wrong on that thing and somewhere along the line you have to pay the piper that's what Adam Smith was saying hundreds of years ago as far as capitalism is concerned if you don't charge the right
prices you're going to eventually that price is going to make itself felt but the way to make the system work is to is to put the price on the commodity and have the people who use the commodity pay that price
uh-huh
and the role of government in a capitalist society is to see that that happens and the way government uh does that is through taxation
so with newsprint for example the government should tax virgin newsprint to the point where
its uh its price is pretty much the same as recycled news print and earmark that money for the recycling of newsprint you see what i mean
so that the people who use the newsprint are ultimately paying for the entire product not only for its production but for its disposal
uh-huh
hum
hey i bet you didn't think you were going to get a lecture on it
no i didn't figure i'd get a lecture but yeah i never thought of that that's you know i didn't know there was such a price difference there what about oil recycling oil
well the the um of course most you know you can't recycle oil in the form of gasoline because it's destroyed
uh-huh
so there's not a question of recycling there but there is a question of of uh environmental damage
well i was talking about like motor oil because i had read an article about ten years ago that said
oh yeah
it costs so much less to just clean up the motor oil that's that's used in the engine and run it through a few different processes than
uh-huh
you know it's it's more economical to actually do that and i was just wondering if it's just slow because it's messy or because there aren't the facilities available to recycle the oil i was wondering if you knew anything about that
yeah i don't know when
