On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 12:20 PM, dooger watts <mikem...@efn.org> wrote: > Paul your note really struck a chord in me. Wondering what your connection > was a few decades ago. Garbagio's? > Naw, I'm a transplanted fifth-generation Idahoan. My stint was with the Lewiston, Idaho Recycling Center in its early days.
> What I'm talking about is socialism--but surely it was half-assed socialism > to mandate that private sector businesses offer "free" recycling without > also calculating--and making some accommodation--for the impact of such a > supply flood on the market place. > > Jimmy Carter was the last President who gave any serious consideration to > recycling by giving tax incentives to businesses who engaged in it--and of > course all of that went away under ronnie ray gun. I am behind the times, but as I recall it was the Carter Administration that got a bill through Congress giving recycled paper a 5% bidding advantage in federal paper procurement. That made the paper recycling business boom for awhile, particularly for office grade paper. Ever since, though > recycling becomes more and more a matter of course and not of choice, its > credibility as a viable business model loses ground every day. Thanks in no small part to the timber industry now clear-cutting Canadian government forest lands with government subsidies and the continuing harvest of increasingly juvenile trees in the U.S. It's hard to view the size of log that rolls down the highway these days as a "log." The U.S. timber industry can't break out of liquidation mode while competing with cheap Canadian timber. It's still demand-side economics rather than supply-side, still rape and run. Still the "we can't afford not to destroy the planet" economics. So perhaps not so surprising that recycled paper prices are plunging. > Point of this tirade is to echo Paul's sentiment: all hail those who > struggle to keep recycling viable. Yup. Now if we could just ban the marketing of timber that was clear-cut ... I don't know if you've flown recently between Alaska and the lower 48 on a clear day, but what's being done to the B.C. forests should be a Class A Felony. Gigantic clear-cuts right down to the shoreline. It's mining, not forestry. Best regards, Paul -- Universal Interoperability Council <http:www.universal-interop-council.org> _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list euglug@euglug.org http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
