[speaker002:] all right Robert uh my dog just went on the floor anyway um what do you do about recycling in your area
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] they separate everything for you
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] place to put stuff
[speaker002:] wow
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] because you know when you have all that amount of stuff pretty soon you have various kinds of vermin running around and
[speaker002:] right
[speaker001:] women seem to have something against having mice running across their feet when they're trying to recycle
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] right
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] um-hum
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] functions that government ought to do I can think of a lot of things that they shouldn't do that they do do
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] right right right
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] right
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] huh
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] wow
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] uh-huh I wonder if uh the government there makes any money off the recycling
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] yeah
[speaker001:] one of the problems with newsprint especially is that virgin newsprint costs about twenty five or thirty percent of what recycled newsprint costs so
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] is is the cost of virgin newsprint is not being accurately accurately reflected because that cost ought to reflect the cost of recycling and
[speaker002:] hum
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] now I'm just guessing but I bet you that that's an accurate guess
[speaker002:] uh-huh hum
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] 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
[speaker002:] uh-huh hum
[speaker001:] hey I bet you didn't think you were going to get a lecture on it
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] well the the um of course most you know you can't recycle oil in the form of gasoline because it's destroyed
[speaker002:] uh-huh
[speaker001:] so there's not a question of recycling there but there is a question of of uh environmental damage
[speaker002:] well I was talking about like motor oil because I had read an article about ten years ago that said
[speaker001:] oh yeah
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] 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
[speaker001:] yeah I don't know when