A few more recycling facts as stated from the Clean Air Council.
Every year, Americans use approximately 1 billion plastic shopping bags, creating 300,000 tons of landfill waste.
The amount of aluminum currently recycled in one year is enough to rebuild our entire airplane commercial fleet every six months.
Producing one pound of recycled rubber requires only 29 percent as much energy as producing one pound of new rubber.
Because plastic water bottles are shielded from sunlight in landfills, they will not decompose for thousands of years.
Of the 2.25 million tons of electronics (TVs, cell phones, computers, etc.) retired in 2007, 82 percent were discarded, mostly to landfills.
Recycling one million cell phones allows 35,274 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium to be recovered.
It has been estimated that recycling, re-use, and composting create six to 10 times as many jobs as waste incineration and landfills.
Recycling saves three to five times the energy generated by waste-to-energy plants, even without counting the wasted energy in the burned materials.
Making a ton of paper from recycled paper saves up to 17 trees and uses 50 percent less water than does creating paper from virgin pulp.
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The real world costs of recycling just do not result in profitabilty for many of those who do it WITHOUT TAXPAYER SUBSIDIES, otherwise, you would see it across the board. Those areas which are profitable are doing well without government intervention, primarily aluminum, copper, other common metals and the rare metals used in electronics. Without governments getting involved, the free market will tell you which recycling is profitable and which is not.
Of course, the social justice approach coud be injected into the situation, but then you are no longer operating in a free and free market society.