Humans produce garbage and have always had to grapple with disposing of it. However, it’s only in modern times that Americans are guilted into disposing of it in the most expensive, least effective way ever devised—and John Stossel has the video to prove it.

In ancient times, people either tossed waste (leaving wonderful archeological sites behind) or they recycled. This recycling, however, was an organic process driven entirely by people’s needs. When you slaughtered a horse that was no longer useful for labor or transport, at least you could recycle the hooves at a glue factory. However, if recycling wasn’t feasible, the ancients had no problem with waste.

For example, Native American tribes would engage in “buffalo jumps,” which would see them drive whole herds of panicked buffalo off of cliffs because it was safer and easier than killing the few animals the tribe actually needed (and yes, the tribe did use every part of those few animals). The rest of the herd died in agony and rotted into dust and bones.

Image by AI.

Even when I was growing up, there was organic, need-driven recycling. On garbage night, my dad would place the week’s newspapers on the curb in a neat bundle. During the night, freelance scavengers would gather up all those bundles and take them to a processing plant, where they’d be paid a bit of money. It was a win-win. However, what San Francisco did was announce that it wanted to take the papers to the recycling plant—a service that taxpayers would have to fund—and it used the criminal justice system to crack down on the freelance recyclers.

Given how I grew up, you can imagine that I viewed with a jaundiced eye the recycling mania that swept America. I always understood that the free market, not the government, was the most cost-effective way to deal with garbage that could be recycled. The mania, though, was real, with people zealously placing endless cans on the curb.

Just how ridiculous and how woke-driven recycling was became clear to me a few years ago. I’d moved into a new community that was making a big push about having residents put out their blue recycling bins. Since I knew that other countries, especially China, were rejecting America’s recycling waste, I wrote to my local representative to ask what was being done with the contents of those blue bins. After all, we residents were paying for an extra garbage truck to go around every week collecting the bins’ contents.

My representative’s reply managed to shock even me. He explained that we had a whole new recycling center to sort things. But that at least half of the things sorted ended up in the garbage. (Given his vagueness, I suspect it was a lot more than half.)

He then explained that what really drove the issue was that residents liked it because they had “the sense of our doing our best for the environment.” Two years later, the new recycling center was no longer new, but the situation was otherwise unchanged: at least half of what it handled ended up in the dump. And another year after that, well, yes, most of the blue cans’ contents ended up in the trash heap.

But it turns out my rep was right: When I revealed these facts to our community via a widely read community Facebook page, nothing changed. They still robotically put out two garbage cans, one green and one blue, and all headed for the same destination: the trash heap.

And here’s the real kicker. As John Stossel exposes in his most recent anti-recycling video, “recycled” material isn’t even being put in clean, well-maintained landfills that, once covered over, can be used as green space or playgrounds. Instead, they’re turning into rotting mountains in Third World countries that eventually burn or toss them into the ocean.

This ineffectual obsession with recycling to save the environment has taken us a long way from the 1960s and 1970s when we learned not to dump our trash all over the place or pollute our rivers so badly that they burn, both of which were very good things to learn. Now, we ship useless garbage to poor countries rather than disposing of it properly ourselves, all while armored in the insufferably faux-virtuous carapace of being green.