The Color for Today is Green

I am not against recycling. I am against the notion that if we fail to recycle we will be hip deep in our own refuse and the world will die because of it. But recycling is a good idea if it helps keep the environment clean and reduces costs and wastes.

The company I work for recycles (more so now than in the past; it was discovered that for a while the cleaning company dumped the "recyclable" paper in with the regular trash). We get these quarterly reports that span our three local sites. This quarter we recycled pounds of trash which resulted in savings of a number of trees, gallons of water, kilowatt hours of electricity, and cubic feet of landfill. The totals;

Trash	Trees	Water	Electricty	Landfill
14,439	122.7	50,538	30,323	23.12

So what does this mean? Did somebody, based on our saving call the lumber industry and tell them to hold off cutting down 122.7 trees? Where did the water savings come in? And the electricity? The only on I can see where they might have an actual clue is landfill space but the volume they reported is just a percentage of the total trash recorded. Did they actually measure the volume of the trash before recycling to determine actual savings?

I think that this "report" is some sort of "feel good mechanism" to make people think that they are making an impact on the environment by recycling. A big ego stroke for the enviroweenies to justify their green agenda. I don't believe the numbers. But I am not so narrow minded that I won't listen to anyone who has a good explanation for these numbers and what they represent in the real world. Anyone? Bueller?