The Closest Thing To a Secular Religion

 Except in a very few instances, recycling costs more money and uses more energy than it saves.  Science would indicate that you follow the data, not your intuition:

When recycling programs became common three decades ago, they were sold to taxpayers as a win-win, financially and environmentally: Cities expected to reap budget savings through the sale of recyclable materials, and conscientious taxpayers expected to reduce ecological destruction. Instead, the painful reality for enthusiastic, dutiful recyclers is that most recycling programs don’t make much environmental sense. Often, they don’t make economic sense, either.

The chief buyers of American recyclable materials used to be Asian countries, chiefly China, where wages were low enough to justify labor-intensive recycling operations. But as part of Beijing’s “National Sword” policy, China began banning imports of “foreign trash” in 2017. Other Asian countries also began imposing their own restrictions. Meanwhile, reduced demand sent prices tumbling. The market price for mixed paper, for example, dropped from $160 to $3 per ton from March 2017 to March 2018.

As a result, cities that once collected some revenue for bales of recyclables (though typically not enough to cover the extra costs that recycling introduces into a municipal budget) must now pay to get rid of them. In many cases, they simply send them to landfills.

What about water bottles.  Recycling water bottles is good, right? 

Of course, progressive mayors with ambitious climate goals want to signal their commitment to the environment—a laudable goal. But the environmental benefits associated with recycling are largely confined to metal, cardboard, and certain kinds of paper. Recycling other materials makes little if any difference in carbon emissions. For instance, the greenhouse benefits from recycling a plastic bottle are so miniscule that even just rinsing the bottle in water heated by coal-powered electricity yields a net increase in carbon emissions.

Shazbat!  Maybe there would be a net decrease in carbon emissions if our power plants were nuclear-powered, but alas....

And then there's this:

Meanwhile, recycling has its own environmental drawbacks, like the burning of fossil fuels in the trucks and ships carrying recyclables (especially on international trips). Many western recyclables have ended up polluting the seas, because these materials were sent to Asian, Latin American, and African waste-processing facilities that allowed plastics to leak into rivers—a phenomenon that is responsible for virtually all the consumer plastics that wind up in the oceans.

It's one of those ideas that sounds good, but the devil is in the details.  It's time to let it go.