Recycle your thinking

The Professor notes that Swedes are now reversing themselves on recycling.
Sorry, but I knew recycling was crap years ago, even before Dr. William Rathje, et al., published Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage in 1992. It’s a waste of money and resources that could be better used for other things. And burning trash can be done cleanly and without need for huge landfills that you can’t do anything with but use for parks for a thousand years.
LATER THOUGHT: Before anyone jumps me about what to do with the ash from incineration, first of all ash takes up a lot less space than the trash it came from, and secondly, I think it can be used for various things. It’s been ten years since I read Rathje’s book so you’ll have to excuse me for not remembering offhand what his solution to that problem was. However, even if you bury it, it takes up a lot less landfill space than unburned (and often uncompacted) trash, and again, you get the benefit of the heat of combustion as mentioned in the article.
I don’t expect to see a renaissance in backyard trash burners and basement incinerators of the type that were commonly used when I was a tad. But a properly-designed mass burner can get things hot enough to totally destroy just about anything cleanly. The black smoke and stink that used to waft through neighborhoods on trash-burning day (and on leaf-burning day, for that matter) are the product of incomplete combustion due to temperatures too low to do a good job of destroying the trash, which is generally not only designed to be a little sterner than waste paper (think the old paper milk cartons), but is wet to boot. Using natural gas for heat and a blower for forced draft to really get the heat up would have solved a multitude of problems. (Of course it probably would have burned down a few houses, but that’s another reason why municipal mass burners are a better idea…:)