THE LATEST GREENIE NONSENSE: DIAPER RECYCLING

It costs more and uses more resources than dumping them of course. The benefits? Who knows?

While it’s quite an exaggeration to say that every bad idea comes out of California, one unbelievably foolish idea, diaper recycling, has recently been enacted into law in one California city. The Santa Clarita, California municipal government has instituted a mandatory diaper recycling program in which garbage collectors gather bags of discarded diapers and transport them to a recycling plant modeled after a facility in Arnhem, the Netherlands, which has been in operation since 1999.

Knowaste, the industry leader in diaper recycling, successfully lobbied Santa Clarita politicians to have a pilot program and then the current citywide program instituted. In both cases, Knowaste’s lobbying campaign gained it an exclusive contract in which all of the diapers collected in Santa Clarita are processed in Knowaste’s facility. Knowaste had previously expended $282,000 in a failed effort to have mandatory diaper recycling implemented throughout California. When taxes are excluded, lobbying and campaign contributions account for the majority of Knowaste’s expenses.

In a pilot program that began in November, the Santa Clarita government passed an ordinance which compelled residents in preselected areas of the city to place discarded diapers in plastic bags and place them outside for recycling; during the 6 month pilot program, residents in other areas of Santa Clarita did not recycle diapers. In May, when the pilot program was complete, the municipal government implemented the diaper recycling ordinance that is binding on all 143,000 of the city’s residents. During the pilot phase, Knowaste spent $20,000 on propaganda designed to raise popular support for diaper recycling in Santa Clarita.

A municipal press release issued during the pilot phase states that the pilot program was free to the approximately 500 families living in the designated area, but then goes on to explain that it was financed with $500,000 of government money, half of which came from the municipality and half of which is a state grant Gov. Gray Davis included in the 2000-2001 budget. The $250,000 state expenditure came early in the California government’s budget crisis. Because government money ultimately comes from taxpayers, the pilot program participants, along with their fellow Santa Clarita and California taxpayers, really do pay for the program, despite the fact that Santa Clarita’s elected officials are too beholden to Knowaste to allow municipal agencies to openly make this connection. Blue Barrel Recycling also contributed money to the pilot program, but government money played a key role.

The Santa Clarita program cost $1800 per ton of diapers collected and processed, far in excess of Knowaste’s estimate of $60 per ton. $1800 per ton is approximately $.30 per diaper. It costs approximately $28 to discard one ton of trash in a landfill.

The inefficiency of the Santa Clarita program may be extreme, but it is hardly unique. Recycling of office paper and copper goods are less expensive than use of their nonrecycled alternatives, but recycling of other goods is more expensive. Were it not for laws establishing minimum percentages of recycled paper in newspapers, demand for recycled paper would be considerably lower. Aluminum soda can recycling was less expensive than first-use aluminum in the past, but in recent years the costs of factors of production have changed, and this is no longer the case. If the cost of recycling a waste product is more expensive than simply throwing away the waste product and using original raw materials in manufacturing instead of the recycled material, it is an indication that recycling the waste product in question is a waste of resources.

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Climate of panic

By Australian journalist, Andrew Bolt, commenting on the unusually cool summer Australia is having


Hotter, colder, wetter, drier. It's all the same to green scaremongers who use any change in the weather to push their dubious agenda. Man-made global warming is a theory believed so religiously that even snow in February can't kill it. Melbourne last week had its coldest February day on record, and its wettest day, which should surprise those still naive enough to believe our green gurus. After all, it was only last August that Environment Victoria warned global warming would make us not cold and damp, but fried and dried. "Victoria – like the rest of the world – should adapt to global warming," it said, and see "in what ways we can prepare for the inevitability of a hotter, drier state". Ditto the Australian Conservation Foundation, which in January 2003 blamed our drought on "human-induced global warming", and warned: "Victoria will be hotter... Victoria will be drier." No word then about freezing in February or boating over the Kooyong Tennis Club.

But stopping only to pull a parka over their boardshorts, the same green scaremongers rushed out press releases last week claiming global warming was actually making us colder. Honest. Environment Victoria insisted that our "record-breaking freeze and flood is a sign of things to come", and demanded "urgent action if we are to avert climate change". The Australian Conservation Foundation likewise claimed this wild weather was "a taste of tomorrow's world" and demanded we fight "climate change". Wow. Nimble footwork for guys in koala costumes.

Note, in particular, how both groups talked this time not of "global warming", but of "climate change" – which makes their pet theory much easier to sell to shivering sceptics here, or in the deep snows of northern United States, buried last month by massive blizzards. What a great marketing move. With it, global warming morphs into a gimme-cash theory about climate change that can never be proved wrong, come heat or hail, rain or dust. How useful this name-switch has been, particularly given the growing debate over just how much the world is in fact warming, and whether man is really to blame for what seems to be largely natural phenomena.

So Greenpeace no longer uses "global warming" in the headlines of press releases on, er, global warming. For three years its headings have used "climate change" instead, as in: "US just being climate change `moron'." The ACF, so frantic to exploit any freak of nature for propaganda that it even issued a statement headed "Tsunami an environmental warning", has likewise referred only to "climate change" in its press release headlines over the past year. The pro-green Age got the wink. Last year, for the first time, it ran more items on "climate change" than on "global warming". Just in time, given last week's floods washed up yet more signs that predictions of super-heated doom may be overheated themselves.

In 2002, for instance, the federal Health Department published Human Health and Climate Change in Oceania, a typically alarmist "risk assessment" of this deadly global warming. Compiled by researchers from the CSIRO, Australian National University and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, it predicted a very different climate for Melbourne than these floods and freezes we're told are a "taste of tomorrow's world". The report claimed instead that Melbourne would become such a furnace in summer that by 2050 more than 1300 of our elderly would each year drop dead of the pitiless heat. And bye-bye to rain by 2020, according to the weather models the researchers used to compute our heat-stricken fate. "Of the two models used for this study, CSIROMk2 simulates wetter conditions in central Australia and the Top End, but drier conditions elsewhere," their report revealed. Their other model predicted "wetter conditions north of a diagonal line from Broome to Hobart, and much drier conditions in the west". Bad luck for our draining dams, it seemed.

But, as you see, greenhouse theory means always having a bet each way, and so this report also warned there could be more floods in our parched state – but with one exception: "The risk of flood events in parts of south-western Victoria, where drying has also been predicted, may be reduced by -35 per cent." Warrnambool's citizens should demand a recount, after unusually heavy rains in the south-west two weeks ago sent a flash flood through their city.

Of course, one bit of wild weather in our ever-changing climate doesn't disprove the holy theory of global warming. But nor should green groups claim the odd cold snap proves it, either – especially not if it's the polar opposite to what they and their booga-booga theory so stridently predicted just the other day.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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