Is recycling an impactless money-making sham to make people feel better about themselves?

Each one of those plastic bottles I purchase from the store is 5 extra cents until we go to 10 cents next year, so I'm going to bring them all back to the store.
One great thing here is a company called Clynk. They send you specific green bags for your returnables. and personalized sticker for the bags. You just go to the local specific market "Hannaford", for any of you familiar with the Northeast. You just bag em drop em off at the window. they count em and you see the money on your Clynk card. And you can use your card towards grocery purchases.

My wife is good for 4 Budweiser's a night, so she drinks me $1.40 in returns weekly. I'm generally vodka but I mix with Gatorade zero that there is now a 5-cent deposit on so my taste for Vodka is helping the till grow.

 

Texas doesn't have a program like that, but I know it's more common in the northeast. If those bottles are getting reused or even recycled, I think that's great. Bottles are the tip of the iceberg but it is something.

Barely related, but Houston made a change to the waste management system that I think is great. They had been picking up grass clippings, but you had to buy special bags with the City of Houston seal to put them into. Probably they got a little revenue stream from that bag system, like a bag tag, though I don't know specifically. But, the bags were compostable so they were really terrible as bags. They would rip easily and would fall to pieces if you stored them. So, my yard waste would go to a compost bin in the backyard instead, though that never worked too well either -- too much green matter and not enough brown matter. This year, they changed it so that any biodegradeable or compostable bag is acceptable. So, I can buy those big paper bags from home depot. They're big and tough and will even survive in the rain. Now the only problem is that the city still hasn't bothered to pick them up. But if they can figure out how to actually operate that department, it'll be something.

 

We compost, but it is so i can have a good garden, not for the environment.
Most cities up here pick up grass clippings, but my service does not. I go to the transfer station weekly to get rid of my bags. It's free.
Cool thing in my neck of the woods is during fall, we just rake all of our leaf's on to a tarp and load onto the front lawn by the road. The city has a mondo leaf sucker truck that sucks them up. No bagging. thank God. I have 5 maple trees, 4 Blue Spruce and about 10 birch trees on my land,

 

Yeah, the idea of our composting was for the garden, but we just aren't very good at composting. Nor gardening. So, I'm happy for the city to take it and do it at scale.

 

Here in Albany NY, you can get free compost if you load it into your vehicle.
Great idea, but I used some for a low area in my lawn mixed with bagged topsoil, and every type of weed known to man sprouted.

 

This is how they do it in Ireland.
From our trip last month. This is my niece, who had just turned 18. Able to drink legally
Those innocent looking coke bottles are backed up with Jack Daniels. I

 

I always enjoyed the "Bullsh-t" episode on recycling by Penn and Teller.